Normalized Happiness

I like cats

nobody@vox.com(djchall) — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 14:04:40 -0700

Did you know that?

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Oh that Trizzle

nobody@vox.com(djchall) — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 11:41:11 -0700

This morning Trizzle went out as he normally does for a day of doing whatever it is that he does. However, about an hour later I heard him meowing and meowing outside, with great urgency. I went down to the front door and found why he was so eager for my attention--he had caught a small bird and wanted me to admire it. It was about half-eaten and as I stood over him, praising his hunting skills, he proceeded to eat the rest of it, whole (no feathers or even bones were left, oddly. In fact, I'm not even sure that it was a bird--in the brief time I was able to see it before Trizzle started consuming it again, I saw an insectoid wing, so it may have in fact been a giant moth or something; not that I've ever seen a moth in California that big, only in the 'Stryliarian outback. So for all I know Trizzle just consumed an endangered or even nondescript (althogh nowadays people use this word to mean uninteresting or unremarkable in appearance, I'm using it in the Stephen Maturin sense of a species unknown to science) species.

After that he came in and wanted more food and comforting. I picked him up and discovered that he had also somehow contrived to get himself completely soaking wet on the hottest day of the year (so far.)

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Vox Hunt: Is For The Birds

nobody@vox.com(djchall) — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 15:04:15 -0700

Show us some birds.

Perfect timing, Vox Hunt, to highlight my mom's post from last weekend:

http://djchallmom.vox.com/library/post/working-in-a-tree-house.html

I saw the birds, too, when I was working in there on Saturday. They really seemed to think something good was inside the house. They didn't drunk on berries or disoriented, since they were crashing into the window; fortunately. Trizzay was extremely interested in the silly behavior of the sky food and let me know in no uncertain terms that he should be allowed egress to them, but I didn't, since I was afraid that in his enthusiasm to catch them he would fall, which from mom's office is a three story drop. He's not quite as skillful or as coordinated as his sister Elektra. whom I wouldn't have been concerned about in that situation.

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Trizzle Project update: user cloud

nobody@vox.com(djchall) — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 23:56:18 -0800

Tonight I updated the Trizzle Project yet again, this time adding a user cloud page, which shows all of the Trizzle users who have rated at least one song, album or artist in the TrizzBase, and sizes their username according to how many ratings they've done--larger equaling more, of course.

Trizzle User Cloud

I managed to implement this feature in one day--specced it during lunch, and implemented during the ride home on Caltrain, then while waiting for my pizza to be cooked at Applewood Pizza in Menlo Park. It shows that the Trizzle codebase is getting fairly mature that I can implement a feature like this in one day, since I have so much infrastructure code available for doing things like setting up an object cloud.

This is the kind of feature that could become problematic if people started mindlessly rating things they didn't know anything about, just to make their username get bigger, but for now I think it's a neat feature. I'd just like some of the usernames that don't belong to me to get a bit bigger.

I also cleaned up the profile page a bit, getting rid of the wonky css table in favor of just doing something really simple. Let's face it, css is not my strong point. Next thing on the agenda is to add a tag cloud, recent reviews and recent ratinggs lists to the profile page.

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Trizzle Project update: featured songs are back

nobody@vox.com(djchall) — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 22:54:03 -0800

This morning I finally updated the production site with the new code that I've been working for the past month. As a result, the Trizzle Project now sports some new features, including:

You can now review, rate and tag artists and albums as well as songs.
Trizzle search has been enhanced--it's now faster, thanks to the mysql 5 view, and will handle multi-word search strings better–ie, if you search for "zep dog" Trizzle will now return Led Zeppelin's song "Black Dog" whereas before it would not.
The recent reviews page now shows recent reivews of songs, artists and albums.
Feeds! You're probably sick of hearing about them by now, but in case you're not, there is now a feed of the most recent reviews to be entered into Trizzle.

Now that the site has been upgraded, I felt it was time to put some more compelling content on it. This evening I finally added more featured songs to Trizzle, after many months of their being absent. Since there was such a long hiatus, I added more than usual, fifteen in all, including new songs by the Arcade Fire, Modest Mouse, the Kings of Leon, Of Montrel, Beirut and more.

Not only that, but every featured song has a high-quality un-DRMed mp3 so you can listen to the whole song (no 30 second samples on Trizzle!) and even add it to your media player of choice (but i f you do and you like the song enough to listen to it more than few times, please do buy a copy of the song from the ITMS or better yet the entire album.)

Click the link below to see what's featured on Trizzle this month:

Trizzle featured songs

Trizzle Featured Songs–Feb. 2007

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Trizzle Project update: feeds now on staging

nobody@vox.com(djchall) — Sun, 18 Feb 2007 23:22:46 -0800

The recent reviews feed is now on the Trizzle staging site so you can try it out if you like. You can either go to the recent reviews page:

http://trizzle.fozboot.com/beta/trizzle/musicam/recent-reviews.php

and you should see a feed icon automatically appear. Or you can go the feed directly at:

http://trizzle.fozboot.com/beta/trizzle/feeds/reviews-feed.php

I've only looked at the feed in Safari and NetNewsWire, so I would be interested to see if it works in other clients.

In other news, I figured out the mysql 5 issue, so I should be able to move all of the new code to the production site tomorrow.

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Trizzle Project update: more fun with feeds

nobody@vox.com(djchall) — Sun, 18 Feb 2007 18:31:39 -0800

I spent more time on feeds today. I didn't really intend to spend my whole weekend on this, but once I get really into something like this, it's hard to stop. As you can see, I solved at least two of the issues I noted in my last post: action links and better entry titles.

Trizzle-feed4

The third thing I wanted to add, showing the tags that the user added in that reviewing event, turns out to be very difficult with the Trizzle schema in its current state. There isn't really anyway to relate an object's tags to a specific reviewing event. What I can do is just show all of the tags that a user has applied to an object (artist, album or song.) Perhaps that will have to do.

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Trizzle Project code-a-thon continues

nobody@vox.com(djchall) — Sun, 18 Feb 2007 12:28:23 -0800

I solved the feed time issue this morning, and also fixed the links. So the feed is at least usable enough for an alpha release. I really want to put this on the production site so other people can try it out, but to do that I have to figure out the mysql 5.0 giznank.

Trizzle-feed3

The feed is by no means, done by any means. I can already see the need for the following improvements:

Something that serves as a call to action for the user. Obviously they can click the entry link to see the review, but there should also be something that invites them to review the artist, album or song, as well.
The feed entry should show the tags (linked of courses) that the user applied during that reviewing event.
There needs, either in the feed entry title or body, more metadata given because while for artists it's pretty clear what's going on, saying "fozboot reviewed the song Neighorhood #2 (Laika)" may not mean much to anyone who isn't an Arcade Fire fan.

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Trizzle Project update: feed, improved

nobody@vox.com(djchall) — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 23:03:43 -0800

As you can see, I imprroved the entry titles, and am now usin the actual date review instead of the hard-coded date from the example script. I'm not sure what timezone my feed thinks it's in–it seems to be about eight hours behind PST, and I don't even know if that's possible. If you go that many time zones east, you cross the international dateline, and it's then tomorrow (the 18th.)

Trizzle-feed2

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Trizzle Project update: first stab at feeds

nobody@vox.com(djchall) — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 22:02:32 -0800

It's not very pretty, and all of the dates say Cinco de Mayo, 2002, but it is a feed. I'm trying out a php class I downloaded tonight called RSS Writer, by Manuel Lemos. So far it's working well, but I do need to figure out what to do with the dates. I guess I should just put the date of the review in there.

Trizzle-update

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