What should I listen to next…
Just added a bunch of new resources. I have had requests for some more (I really would like to get SeeqPod…), but some sites don’t have a simple way to do a search via passing a url.
Here are the new resources:
You can add these to resources by logging in, going to ‘Your Resources’, and adding the ones you would like to your resources.
You can now download a copy of all of your music.of.interest data! Just in case I get hit by a truck, or the hosting company fails to tell me that the credit card I have on file has expired until it’s to late (yes, that did almost happen…), you can now get an XML formated download of all your data. I have added a ‘Data Feeds’ section to the left navigation with both a personal RSS feed and a Download XML option.
You can now easily search the NPR archives for your music of interest, just add ‘NPR’ to ‘Your Resources’
There have been a couple of people asking for the ability to add their own resources. This is a little easier said than done, so for now, if you have a resource that you would like to see added to music.of.interest, either send me an email, or leave a comment on this post, andÂI’ll do my best to add it.
There is now a RSS feed for the latest posts, just navigate to the Latest Posts page (located under Community in the left hand navigation), and you will find an RSS symbol at the bottom of the page. If you want to add the feed manually, the address is www.musicofinterest.com/feeds/latest_posts. Are there other pages that need RSS feeds - user list, user posts?
Other things of note - the left navigation is now consistent across the site (at least when you are logged in). The explorer page should now work a lot better under Internet Explorer, and I’ve also been playing around with toolbars - they are really ugly and buggy right now, but its a start - is this something that interests people?
When I first built music.of.interest, I wasn’t really intending it to be a discovery platform, but a way to explore and research after you had made the discovery, thus the tag line ‘going beyond discovery’. I was wrong.
As more people have joined, I catch myself clicking over Latest Posts list to see what people have been bookmarking. If something catches my eye, I’ll hit the Explore link, and find out more. That happened this morning. Moyseslopes posted Camerata Brasileira. I hit the explore - nothing on Wikipedia, a match on All Music, but no information. This is usually my signal that it is time to try the mother of bad design, but lots of music, MySpace. Direct hit, I had four tracks to listen to, and I loved them. I bookmarked the band, and sent a note to a friend of mine that I thought might enjoy them. An hour later I noticed that Camerata Brasileira is now bookmarked by three people.  If that’s not discovery, I don’t know what is.
So what does this mean for music.of.interest? What can I do to encourage this behavior, without distracting from the sites primary purpose - exploration and research. What do you think?
Ok, between kid birthday parties, meetings, karate belt tests, and a trip to see the parents (2 hours each way), I did manage to do some bug squashing this weekend. Tags and lists should be working much better (note to self, always make sure you remove the files in production that you removed in development…), the user lists now supports viewing users by user name, number of items bookmarked, or join date, and there are now some meaningful titles on the pages, so you have an idea of where you are. Nothing ground breaking, but every little bit helps.
First off, thanks to Paul Lamere for calling out music.of.interest in his blog. Second, welcome to all the new users that have stopped by to check it out, I hope you have found it useful. Please continue to come back, comment, complain, and generaly bug me to make things better, as feedback is greatly appreciated. As Paul so excellently put it, the paints still drying, and probably will be for a while. I went through the site last night and wrote out a full page of ‘todos’ to take a bunch of the rough edges off, so it looks like it could be a busy weekend. Should be fun…
- Craig
So you may have noticed that things seem a bit quiet on the site lately - not anything new going on. Don’t despair, I haven’t given up (although I have been going to bed at a more reasonable time lately). Instead of writing code, I’ve had my head in Enterprise Architect, doing hacky UML class diagrams and thinking a lot about meta-data, playlisting, and playback. Right now music.of.interest has a huge hole - you remember something, you come back and explore it, and then you ????????? Yes, exactly, you hit a dead end. Sure, you can goto Yotta Music (the better version of Rhapsody, in case you were not aware), and listen to a specific artist (that’s what I end up doing), however, you may want that artist to then become part of your standard ‘rotation’. So I’m trying to figure out how to do this. My biggest barrier to entry to doing this is that I’ve been designing parts of this system for close to 10 years now, so I’m probably way over thinking what I need; however, I’m starting to get through that, and reality should hit sometime soon…
So what does this mean for the site? Hopefully soon you will start to see artist and album information on the site - I’m going to source the base data from the excellent Music Brainz database, and then try and tie that over to the Rhapsody. After that, it’s tracks and playlists, and…
It’s going to be a fun summer!