Did a little bit of prettification the other day.  added graphics for the ratings on individual album pages.

Given, not every album is rated.  I’d like to make it so that users can rank albums, too, rather than just admins…  We’ll need to implement some sort of registration system, first.  (hopefully coming before next December.

Hey, finally made it so that anyone can leave opinions, remarks, what have you on individual album pages.  It’s just a home-brewed system that I may need to take down if there is abuse.  But check it aht while it’s open for anyone to use!

example page: http://music.ahsodes.com/album.php?album_id=1578

heh…

Hey, it’s been a while since I last published…  but, we just revamped Mens Journal and launched it last week.  Nothing fancy functionality-wise but it has some interesting articles…  check it out…

I recently discovered all of the web services that Last.fm provides at their audioscrobbler site… There certainly is a lot of good information there so I just linked a couple of pages up with it.

On the homepage, I am pulling in my most recently listened to tracks and 50 most listened to artists. It’s not 100% accurate because it only keeps track of my digital music (ipod and computer – nothing from my stereo) which means that it’s cutting out all of the vinyl, cassettes (yes, I still listen to cassettes sometimes), and cds that I listen to but it’s relatively accurate.

I’m now pulling some audioscrobbler data into the artist detail page so now list a lot more of the artist’s recordings, related artists, and tags that are associated with the artist on last.fm. There are surely going to be problems with artist name not matching exactly what last.fm has in their db but I can work on that later.

I was planning on bringing album info into the individual album details pages but forgot that I had been getting album info by album id (mine) and the scrobbler service uses album name. I’m going to have to plan how I’m going to get the two datasources to mesh before I can use that feed.

Well, finally… after three months of stressing-out and working super late nights, the new webmonkey has launched! I was mostly leading the on the front-end work, but towards the end, I did get to work a little on the back-end: (spring config additions and minor server configuration issues).

It is pretty cool, though. So many different technologies were used: JSP, JSTL, PHP, Resin, Sitemesh, Mediawiki, Wordpress, Quercus, and a bunch more… (including my bread-and-buttah: XHTML, CSS, Javascript, XML) And some of them were integrated and/or used in new ways (at least for me)… For instance, we already used Sitemesh on Wired, but really just for decorators (page templates, essentially). For webmonkey, not only are there decorators but many of the page layouts are controlled via xml files that determine which page components go where AND aren’t build dependant, which must make Editorial and Business happy . This was especially important because Editorial wanted to be able to control all page content using the wiki but some parts of the page really need to have the additional stability and capability existent in the java layer.

And that’s just one cool thing about the new WM…  new Design – very cool…  Built on mediawiki, thus much more open to discussion – very cool…  Tagging enabled, which makes it easier to search for different things in different ways – trés chic…  ooh la la…

Paul (the tech lead) wanted to write a blog entry about everything that the team accomplished (and went through… ) to launch this project but because we all have so many other things going on right now, might not get a chance to work on anything too soon… Hopefully some of the knowledge gained from the development of this site will turn into a new WM article or two in the near future.

But worry not… There are quite a few top-notch talents writing new content for the site , and a lot of its best content was migrated to the wiki, AND the site is now a wiki so ANYone can write interesting material, so I’m sure that there’ll be no shortage of great, developer-bred material for some time to come…

(And the people say, “Long live Webmonkius Extrordinarius!!!”… Amen…)

Made a favorite artists page. Only uses the number of albums I have of each artist so isn’t completely accurate (many artists are missed).

Added a new page to allow browsing by musical genre (really by tag). Not quite completed but will update you when it’s completely functional. Right now, it just serves to show what the available tags are but hopefully I’ll have some time this week to finish the browse functionality…

Today, I added a bunch of new music my music database and added some functionality to the left and right rails on music.ahsodes.com. The layout is a little bit off but it was a bit of a conceptual design/development process when I did it last year. I never had time to fix it and have since expanded my vision of what the site can become… I need to return to some of my earlier brainstorming sessions and get back to work on it. Hopefully soon…