Posts filed under: Coding
Audio Module released
At Bryght, I have the enviable job of customizing Drupal for use on recording artists and record label web sites. One of the first things I wanted to do was to beef up audio support in Drupal, and so last week I was able to release the first version of the audio module. It can read and write ID3 tag information, can stream and download audio, and generates proper podcast-safe RSS enclosures. I am still working on adding support for iTunes RSS extensions, and cleaning up the code a bit, but it is working well on my site. Hopefully it will help others out there as well!
User Feedback For Web Applications
Everyone always agrees that user feedback is a good thing, but in a “Ship the product!” kind of world, it’s often left by the way side. Not so for the Robot Co-op. 43 Things, as well as 43 places have user feedback features built right into the application in an intuitive and attractive way.
It seems to work too! On his blog, Josh points to user suggestions and ideas that have already been implemented.
The effects of this are quite neat. I feel a “collective ownership” over the application that I otherwise would not have. It makes it seem as though the Robot Co-op are simply custodians of the interesting world they have created, and the community has the power to make decisions and shape the application.
Who thought user feedback could be so fun? Groundbreaking stuff…
Blink Sale
I love the new basecamp-ish look of the blinksale accounting program. As a freelancer, I am horrible at keeping my billing straight, and this online application looks like a fantastic solution. The invoices are sharp and stylish, the interface is filled with AJAX goodness, iCal and RSS integration; What’s not to like?!
It seems like there are now a number of web applications whose feature set and usability levels rival (and surpass) those of their desktop competitors. I actually prefer the Gmail interface to that of many desktop email clients, and from my brief look at blinksale, it seems to be easier to use then many desktop accounting programs. Exciting times for web development!
Update:
So I have tried to automate my billing with blinksale this month, and have been unsuccessful. There was no place for me to enter my GST number, or any other additional fields that I required. Maybe I have to upgrade to the non-free account to accomplish this, but at this point I have lost my enthusiasm. Sigh… Back to Excel templates.
The Hype Machine
The Hype Machine is a nice MP3 blog aggregator. You have the option of listening to music using the nifty XSPF flash player or streaming to iTunes or winamp.
I like the ‘popular’ link that shows you the trendy tunes that everyone is posting about, but it would be cool to display additional stats (like how many blogs are posting about each song). I would also like to see a breakdown of each song, followed by a list of who is talking about it.
But all in all, a cool idea!
DrupalART website launched
DrupalART has been recently launched. What are they about?
DrupalART is a site dedicated to helping people build and develop Drupal sites for artists and musicians. The goals are to show (through examples) various ways Drupal can be used to build artist websites, and build documentation aimed at newbies trying to use Drupal for their art or music website.
To start with, Farsheed has put up a good tutorial on how to podcast with Drupal. This site looks like it will be a great resource for artists and musicians.
CC Mixter: Download, Sample, Remix, Publish
I really like the concept of CC Mixter. The idea is that you can download an audio track, remix it, sample it (or otherwise mangle it), and then put it back up on the site so others can do the same. When adding a new track to CC Mixter, you can show what tracks have been sampled for the new tune. Staying in accordance with current trends, you can also tag a song, creating one massive tag cloud.
One thing that I think would be cool to add is a kind of ‘tree’ view to graphically illustrate where all the samples for a particular track come from. I think it would be neat to have an ajax-y/flash interface for the phylogenetic analysis of music on this site.
If you think CC Mixter is a good idea, why not grab the code and start your own! Although I think it should have been built on top of Drupal (of course), the code looks clean and well documented. It will be great when there are lots of these sites floating around serving different communities.