The Song Fight Bulletin Board

Looks like a stray slash got into the sfjukebox whitelist rule. One of those cases of "how the hell was this working for anyone at all?" things.

Incidentally, it looks like a referrer was being set. Also, a lack of referrer is whitelisted (since some people have referrers disabled for privacy proxies).

Yay! It's working now, thanks!

I've made a few more tweaks to my site:

http://sfjukebox.org/

I shortened all the URLs by getting the "/sf" out of them. I've got a favicon now. I've also changed the "about" page to be the home page, rather than sending people straight to the page for the current fight when they go to "/". The home/about page now has an mp3 player for the current fight in it, with some really brief info about the site. I also changed the mp3 player UI a bit, to hopefully make it more intuitive. If you click on a fight/artist name it will play the song for that fight/artist. There is now a new icon for fights and artists that you can click if you want to navigate to the page for the fight/artist.

If you use the site, please consider registering. Currently you don't really get access to anything, but it would let me know that you're a user.

I added links from the Jukebox to the Wiki for fights, artists, and songs. Nearly all of them should work, though there will be a few that are broken, like artists with funky characters in their names and artists that have been merged according to this page:

http://sfbase.net/wiki/Help:Artist_name_mapping

I don't have any replication of that merging yet and may not implementing that.

I added the artist profile pictures and info from the songfight.org archive to the jukebox's artist pages, e.g.:

http://sfjukebox.org/artists/15-16%20Puzzle

Of course, only a small percentage of artists have that data, and most of it is very old, and possibly completely out of date. The Web site links seem particularly stale. I haven't displayed yet the "See Also" artist info, though I have the data. I'm trying to think of where to add that to the page... I will make those links to other artists, and if the artist name from the profile info happens to match an artist name in the jukebox, the link will work. Otherwise the link will not work.

One thing that was interesting is that a profile exists for somebody named "hoopshank" but I couldn't find any similarly named artist in the archive. Anybody know what is up with that?

Yeah, I was trying to figure that out while I was fixing the artist info filenames. I'm guessing it's someone who was planning on entering (and possibly riding on their gigantic production credentials) but never got around to it.

Here is the guy's profile info, in case anybody recognizes him:

Location: Emsworth, Hampshire, England
Web site: http://www.myspace.com/paulturrell
Description:

'Hoopshank' is multi-instrumental English songwriter/composer, Paul Turrell.<BR><BR>

The weird part is that his "See Also:" is:

Former member (keyboards and string arrangements) of London indie/rock band, Boa, with whom he wrote and recorded albums 'Race Of A Thousand Camels' (Japan) and 'Twilight' (USA). Boa's single, 'Duvet', was used as the theme tune for the internationally popular Japanese anime 'Serial Experiments: Lain'.<BR><BR>Influences: early Genesis, late Beatles, Frank Zappa, Henry Cow, Caravan, Gong, early Adam And The Ants, early Queen, Syd Barrett, Madness, Jane's Addiction, etc, etc....

Well, for what it's worth, the profile file is dated 2007/01/26, which would put it in about the same vintage as the most recent song posted on that Myspace page.

Lunkhead wrote:Influences: early Genesis, late Beatles, Frank Zappa, Henry Cow, Caravan, Gong, early Adam And The Ants, early Queen, Syd Barrett, Madness, Jane's Addiction, etc, etc....

Is this me?

OK, the "see also" artist links are visible, but in a pretty crude and not so great looking way. I wanted to get the stuff out there, as irrelevant as it may be, since that had been on my "to do" list for so long. I may make it look nicer some time later.

For example, Jon Eric lists many:

http://sfjukebox.org/artists/Jon%20Eric

I actually really like that interface.

Thanks! I just thought using a UL tag was kind of ugly. I just updated it to display them in a table with alternating row background colors like on the song list, and I think it looks much better.

EDIT: Maybe I can have this little popup have sections, like "From songfight.org: (then the list of "see also" artists impored from songfight.org) From user suggestions: (then a list of artists that registered users suggested as being related to the artist)"?

You realize UL/LI can be styled to look like that without losing the semantic integrity, right?

(Oh man it's been forever since I've carried that particular torch. Feels good.)

Yes, but I already had code for doing that look with a table, so I was lazy and just copied/pasted it. Minimal effort for the win!

These links are actually pretty cool. I went from fluffy porcupine, to the elite inner echelon, to glenn case, back to the inner echelon. I think I am going to try to imrpove the way I'm handling the data so that the links are automatically bi-directional. And then adding user suggested links too would be really cool. And that should actually be pretty easy to implement.

OK, imported "See Also" links are now bidirectional, which is kinda cool. What that means is that if for example Jon Eric lists "Jo Neric" as a "See Also", then that means that "Jo Neric" will show up in the "See Also" popup for Jon Eric -and- "Jon Eric" will show up in the "See Also" popup for Jo Neric. I'm thinking it'd be pretty easy to add a user generated version of these links that registered users could set up very easily (maybe an autocomplete on an artist's page for adding a related artist). That's probably what I'll work on next...

I've added code for displaying user created artist links. You can see an example on the BSS page:

http://sfjukebox.org/artists/Berkeley%20Social%20Scene

Click the "(show)" link next to "See Also:" and you will see that I have linked BSS to Lunkhead. On the Lunkhead page you will see the links from Lunkhead to other artists imported from songfight.org, and you can also view links created by users, specifically the one created by me to BSS.

I just created the one example link using SQL for now. I don't have a UI for users to create the links yet, though, and I'm not sure what to do for that. If anybody has any suggestions on where they would expect that kind of functionality to be available and how they would expect it to work I'd be happy to hear it. So far my thoughts were that I would put it on the artist pages, when you're logged in, there'd be a button to open a modal dialog to select an artist to link to the current artist, and then in your user section there'd be a list of artist links you've made with a delete button/link next to each one so you could delete them.

1 (bug). On my Android tablet, when I try logging in, as soon as I start typing the search box steals the focus away from it.

2 (suggestion). It would be nice if there were a password reset link and a way to change one's password to something that I'd have a chance of remembering.

1. I'll fix that soon.

2. Now that I'm thinking of actually adding a feature for users, I will have to start taking details like password and account management seriously I guess, huh? Want me to just send you your password in the meantime?

#1 should be fixed.

clicking through the See Also, which is really cool, I have a problem with my Heuristics Inc. link to Dollar Bill and the Inkpoints... probably an issue with the & vs. and.
-bill

Fixed on songfight.org, by correcting the name in the "see also" list.

I will try to update my data tonight. I don't have a regular synchronization going for the artist profile/see also stuff yet. I just have a manual "drop all local data then import all data from songfight.org" process for now.

It is pretty cool to be able to navigate through the artists. I'm hoping to have time this month to add a UI for allowing users to create links between artists. I've got the backend code for storing that and for displaying it already. I will probably also add a password change and recovery UI too, so it will be less painful hopefully for people to actually sign up and log in to use the site.