12 posts tagged “web20”

A new music search service with tags has announced itself, Qloud (pronounced "cloud".)

Qloud-home-page

Thanks to a three-day weekend with no plans, the Trizzle Project now has login and registration functionality. I know this isn't exactly ground-breaking, but I'm sort of excited that I finally stopped procrastinating and got this done. The only complex part of implementing login and registration was dealing with the existing user data that the system had already generated when people came to the site. This means that if you visited the Trizzle site already, when you register, it will pre-fill the screenname field with the auto-generated value Trizzle was using when you posted a song review. You can, of course, change the screenname to whatever you want it to be.

Next on the agenda are some features that will give users more reasons to register. The most important thing is the ability to "friend" (isn't it amazing that after five hundred years in the English language, only now has friend become a verb?) other users so a user can easily see what songs his or her friends are loving (or hating) enough to review on Trizzle.

While procrastinating on implementing a proper login feature, I redesigned the Trizzle Project home page-rewriting the text and adding two features:

• a summary list of the current month's featured songs; and
  
• a mini tag cloud showing the "hot tags" for that month-ie, the most used tags during the previous 14 days.
  

Trizzle-home-page

I also fixed an embarassing bug in the view playlist page, that meant artist names, album and song titles weren't showing up on the playlist. Amazingly enough, the song links still did. Anyway, it's now fixed, so the creator of "stunt list", if you are reading this, you can now actually see your playlist in all its glory.

Trizzle-featured-songs

I created an important page today, one which shows songs selected by the Trizzle editorial board (ie, me, right now, but I hope to rope some friends into giving me their recommendations) called, with my usual flair for nomenclature, the Featured Songs page. At some point I hope to be able to hire Lexicon to come up with cool names for all of these things. Soon, a condensed version of this page will be featured on the Trizzle home page, which is badly in need of a redesign.

Although this page takes away somewhat from the algorithmic nature of the Trizzle Project, I think it will be good, especially at the beginning when Trizzle doesn't really have a critical user mass, to have some starting point for exploration, that gives a sense that the site is engaged with what's happening in music right now. I think listing a selection of the most popular and/or intriguing songs of the moment maximizes the chance that people will be motivated to start rating, reviewing and tagging, which is the biggest challenge for getting a site like this going-getting people to participate.

If anyone in the Comet community has any recommendations for songs that should be featured on Trizzle, please put them in a comment to this post and I will get them on Trizzle as soon as possible.

The Trizzle Project just got a whole lot more useful today as I finally finished some long-awaited upgrades to the view song page. In addition to "blurbs" (reviews) and basic info about the song, the view song page now shows the tag cloud for the song and also supplies links to the iTunes Music Store, Amazon.com and Google.

Here's some sample songs to demonstrate the new features:

Tell Me When To Go (E-40)
Dani California (Red Hot Chili Peppers)
Utrecht 1981 - Pocket Calculator (Kraftwerk)

Plus a screenshot:

Trizzle-view-song

I just updated the Trizzle project with a major new feature: the Recent Song Reviews page. This is a major step for making Trizzle a more interesting place to be, since it gives you a snapshot view of what songs have recently been rated and reviewed by the Trizzle community. I'm fairly happy with the formatting right now, but of course it's likely to change in the coming weeks.

Trizzle-recent-songs

The recent song reviews page also serves as a nice inspiration for the user to rate a song themselves, through the use of a the "rate this song" link on the right. I even used a exclamation mark to get the user excited.

I find this part of user interface design quite challening--enticing the user, trying to draw them in. It's a hard problem-easy to make something functional that gives information, harder to make the ui really inspire the user to make the leap from passive consumer of information to active participant. I think it will be a big challenge for Comet as well.

Trizzle-logo

Sort of a .01 update to the release of last night. I cleaned up song editing, so the screen where users tag, rate and "blurb" songs now looks like the rest of the pages on the Trizzle site.

I also made a web 2.0 compliant logo, complete with eye-friendly sans serif font and "alpha' indicator, just like Comet, which you can see above. Song links on the view playlist and search page now go to the song rating/tagging page, instead of the ITMS.

Next on the agenda: a recent ratings and taggings page that shows the most recent reviewing of songs by Trizzle users.

I rolled out an update to the Trizzle website last night. Probably not a very smart idea, since I had no idea which database tables needed to be added to the fozboot.com schema, and I was really tired when I did it. Not to mention the data already in the TrizzaBase needed to be mangled because of the big change I made to how songs, artists and albums are related. I think I fixed everything but I'm sure there's some breakage somewhere.

You can now tag, rate and blurb songs using the Trizzle Songbird extension working prototype, but it's really kludgey. Today I've been working on a better approach, which I may post to fozboot.com later this evening.

Wedding Crashers - Uncorked (Unrated Widescreen Edition)

I worked on Trizzle while watching this movie. I found it to be a pleasant surprise-although reviews were just middling, I thought it was very funny, especially during the middle section on the island with Christopher Walken's crazy family.

The part at the end moving towards the inevitable heartwarming baring of the soul dragged, though. Just once I'd like to see a movie like this take more chances at the end-end up with everyone alone, or dead, or just have a completely absurd non-ending. End with the characters not having learned anything at all, the way it would be in real life.

Damn, but you know what.. Jane Seymour is still hot. Live and Let Die came out, what, thirty-three years ago? Definitely in my top five Bond girls of all time list.

I've been fleshing out Trizzle with more pages for browsing the Trizzle database (the "Trizzbase.") Most of the pages are simple CRUD implementations-no further AJAX coolness to reveal, I'm afraid-but the pages are necessary, both for the user and also for my own debugging.

• The view tag page now shows albums and playlists that have been associated with that tag in addition to artists. (example: nodepression)
  
• The recent playlists page shows, not unsurprisingly, recent playlists entered into Trizzle.
• I've started implementing lazy registration. When you first hit a Trizzle page a user ID is created and stored in both the database, and also a cookie. This means that playlists created in the system will be associated with the user, even if the ui doesn't necessarily reveal that.

I'm working right now architecting an integrated search/browse page that will provide a single ui for searching and browsing playlists, artists, albums, songs and tags. However, I've learned enough about AJAX to know that a page like this needs to have some planning happen before actual coding, lest things spiral out of control very quickly.

I rolled out a new version of the Trizzle site today, including enhanced navigation (and by ehanced I mean now there is some) and improved view tag page.

Here's Trizzle's obligatory Web 2.0 site tag cloud

And a sample view tag page, this one for the tag hairmetal

Coming up next: navigation and additional features for the PlaylistFormatter feature.