Spring migration
Monday, March 19, 2007, 12:57 AM
All my sites have gone a massive migration to a centralized hosing account and it looks like thewhitespaces is up and running just fine now.
I still have a lot of content on here, so this blog will live on for a while until feedtune gets on its feet.
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Move your URLs
Saturday, January 6, 2007, 02:27 PM
Just FYI,NateTodd.com will be redirected from this site to a personal portfolio in a couple days. You will still be able to access this site at TheWhiteSpaces.com/music.
FeedTune Will be Released in '07 (I swear it!)
Saturday, December 30, 2006, 02:25 PM
I doubt anyone really checks this blog anymore since I have stopped updating regularly, but I want to get some updates out on FeedTune. I have been focusing pretty heavily on my photography business and have wasted a lot of time dealing with clients who expected a bit much out of me, designing collateral, and developing the backend for my photo store. There is also another project in the works to build off FeedTune, but that is staying under wraps until a few more things happen.Now on to the updates.
Artist View
You can see a lot has changed since the last screen capture. Artists now have profiles and information and individual albums are editable with info as well. Note, the sidebars are now active and formatted and the user profile at the top looks better (not perfect yet).
Artist Reviews
Logged in users can now write reviews and give ratings to artists. Other users can rate the reviews based on helpfulness and report comment abuse (spam).
Artist Edit
This is the edit pane for the artist. You can see it has the information from the profile page in editable form. This allows any user to add and edit information about the artists. Any changes made are recorded on top of the previous information so that nothing is destroyed. If someone goes and deletes everything, another user can just rollback the changes to any previous state. This interface is not complete yet, but the information is currently stored in this fashion.
Browse Panel
The browse panels are always getting reworked in different ways and this portion is mid change. You can still get an idea of how it will lay out in alphabetical form and how the information will be displayed. 1 major change is that I figured out how to remotely resize images from Amazon.com so all the images now come in at the right size and do not waste bandwidth.
User Profile
This is very much in development right now, but will eventually be a repository for all the user's settings. The first 2 tabs (profile and My Tracks) will be visible to everyone, but the last 2 (Blocked Users and Edit) will be only available to you. Here you can manage your privacy (who can see what about you) and the list of people you don't want to see or talk to.
A lot of other things have been changed, but these are the most notable. A lot of functionality is still missing from certain areas, but the music portion is largely in place. I won't feel comfortable about releasing this for a while yet, but I feel it is still worth working on.
I'll keep you posted.
Sorry FeedTune
Monday, October 9, 2006, 01:52 PM
Sorry there hasn't been too much up here as of late. I stopped work on FeedTune on Sep 13th with the intention to do something that actually was going to make me money instead. Well, it's been almost a month and now, with a little more cash in my pocket, I hope to work a bit again on the site. Development will be a lot slower as I primarily need to tend to my other businesses, but hopefully it will continue to move forward. I've come this far, no reason to stop now.
If you want to just grab some music, I have a lot I have been submitting to the site to test it. All you can do is browse and download. You can't create an account there and access all the submitting and podcast feed features unless you really really want to and promise not to break things and I can get you a code. I'll be wiping the database out before too much longer anyway.
FeedTune
FeedTune
Wednesday, September 6, 2006, 01:28 PM
The new site is underway and is a complete (read: total) overhaul. I have been working a couple weeks on and off and still have quite a way to go. But, I figure it's time that I put a little bit out there so people can see what is coming. I have some screenshots of the rough interface. You will be able to see some formatting problems and a lot of other issues, but my style of working is to work on a lot of things all at the same time. I work a little on something and then move on to something else. It keeps things more interesting.Ok, on to the screenshots.
Artist View
This is the view that each artist gets. An artist can have any number of albums and tracks that all collapse into here. You can write a review, rate a track to add it to your recommendations feed, or download it directly from here. There is a lot missing like artist watches, historical edits, and a lot of other things.
Browse
This is a really rough spot for now. I intend to add a nice interface for paging through the songs, but for now it's just a list.
Recommendations
I have built a weighted slope-one algorithm to do item-based comparisons on tracks that have been rated by you and tracks that have been rated by others. Using this algorithm and your historical data I can predict what you would rate a track. The more you rate, the better this algorithm gets (to a point, then it hit's the long tail effect). Still needs some tweaking though...
Submit MP3
To submit a track to FeedTune you merely copy the url into this box and hit go.
ID3 Information
The system takes the url you gave and goes out to get the song. It caches all the ID3 information for that track and prepopulates all the information you need. If it's wrong, you can correct it, but if the ID3 info is right, you won't have to. If the artist exists it will link it all together and add a new album if needed. If not, it will do what's needed to add it all. It's pretty effortless to add anything to FeedTune. I added 15 tracks in about 5 minutes one night.
Album Art
FeedTune interfaces with Amazon.com to pull down album art for any artist. If the album art is shown, you can just click it to attach it to the album. If it isn't shown, you have to option to upload your own.
These are just a few of the features of FeedTune that are coming down the road. This project is alive and going strong. Just wanted to get an update out there.
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