The Song Fight Bulletin Board

Wow, that's a lot of posts.

Lunkhead wrote:I am working on modifying the unofficial Song Fight! archive jukebox site to work like thesixtyone.com and lala.com, though, where you have an MP3 player that persists as you navigate around the site, and that keeps a playlist of the songs you've listened to in that session, etc. I've learned a lot of stuff building that site that I plan to apply to my somesongs knockoff if I ever have time and motivation to do so.

This is a great idea, and I love it on lala. But for somesongs, I think it's important to make sure that it is still easy to review and vote on a song that is playing in the bar without having to find it again... meaning that maybe the vote/review is in the player, or it is easy to follow a link back to that page. Just to make sure that the point of the site is not lost.
-bill

reist wrote:are we talking about the same page?

I have no problem with that page. What, you want me to type in my own damned SQL query? Or do you think that the free-form database query capability even existing somehow makes the site worse?

Spud wrote:

reist wrote:are we talking about the same page?

I have no problem with that page. What, you want me to type in my own damned SQL query? Or do you think that the free-form database query capability even existing somehow makes the site worse?

Spud, I agree with a lot of what you're saying - I love the idea of having advanced features available, but out-of-the-way. However, it's hard to deny that the Advanced Search on somesongs (as evidenced by Reist's screenshot there) is cluttered and opaque.

Surely, of the myriad advancements in web coding technology that have been made in the decade since somesongs first launched, some of them can be put to good use in improving the site. There has got to be some middle ground between leaving it exactly as it is (which is obviously not working), and completely "modernizing" it by making it look and function like lala or thesixtyone.

I understand what you're saying, Jon, but don't forget that you're talking to the guy who not only designed this page but uses it regularly without hurting himself:



What gets me going is that he is not suggesting that the page be redesigned, he is asking for it to go away altogether. The implication is that if he has no need for the functionality provided by that page, no one does. This is the logic that I am having a hard time with. Could it be cleaner? Sure. But what does he care? He's never going to use it. I might. Unless, of course, he was to get his way.

You mean "unless he were to get his way."

Anyways, I hear what you're saying. But the Web Machine config page is still a lot more readable than the somesongs advanced search. So sure, there's no reason to delete it altogether like Reist suggests. But I think Reist has a point in that it's not acceptable for public consumption the way it is.

Um...maybe we should start documenting requirements so that people have a chance to actually define what they feel is important. From these requirements a short list can be made that includes minor revisions that are both reasonable and attainable.

One section would be "Search" where the desired capabilities are described, such as basic and advanced. Basic could search across titles and artists by default, or allow specifying either. Advanced can be as intense as reasonable. Also defined would be where these search features appear.

So, break down the site by the functions you care about and do your best to describe what you think are key concepts. Don't describe what doesn't work, although that can be useful as reference if the discussion gains by it.

From these, priorities are made and developers identified to implement it.

that's roymond, getting all processy on us. good idea, actually. organization is good.
-bill

My sites have been moved to new servers, so things should be much faster. (They're 2GHz quad-core servers with 8GB of RAM and 2TB RAIDs. Pretty awesome.)

Meanwhile, the account of the official somesongs.com is suspended.

tuuur wrote:Meanwhile, the account of the official somesongs.com is suspended.

Well, that's certainly a cleaner interface! Oh my. Now, even if I do get back to recording, I'll have nowhere fun to put it

Well, there's still http://www.bozos.com/ssj/ ...

I guess we can start to call Lunkhead's somesongs the official somesongs...

If Jefff still owns the domain but has only lost his hosting account, then he should be able to redirect somesongs.com to the new version.

Hey, I just posted a song on there.

I already had to report one of you guys' songs as a broken link btw!

Also, I've noticed that links to Songfight now go to the fight page instead of straight to the mp3 if you click 'em, but they still work in the .m3u so I'm not going to report those as broken.

I notice that somesongs.org is unowned. Lunkhead could register for his new version.

I emailed Jefff about it. I had been hesitant to try to take it over before because I thought that I would need to figure out a real hosting situation, which would involve investing more time and money in it. I wasn't sure that would be worth it because I wasn't sure there was a lot of interest in keeping somesongs.com going. Currently my hosting is free, provided by my brother, and it's overall pretty good except that the servers are basically his toys and are under his control. He might play with them and break them at times, or the hardware could fail in which case they'd be down until he could fix them, and he lives in New York while the servers are here in California. Considering the teeny tiny amount of interest, though, those issues probably don't really matter. If all I have to do is procure the domain and get that pointing to the site, that seems worth it to keep it going for the few folks who want to keep using it.

There's still the question of all the old data from the original somesongs.com. Jefff gave me a dump of the data from his database. Would folks want to try to load that in? Or just start from a clean slate? It might be nice not to have to try to compete with MC Frontalot for the top rankings. Or maybe I could try to code in a way to incorporate that data but make it read only and not have it factor into the rankings, etc. Or I could set up somesongs.com/classic, which could be a read only version of the site with all the old data.

Oh, also the broken link reporting stuff isn't working on the backend for some reason. You can submit a broken link report, and it gets saved to the database, but nothing happens with it after that. I'll get it fixed some day...

it would be nice, at least, if the old reviews remain.
-bill

I could try to preserve the songs, and everything that was associated with the songs (the artists, the users, the ratings, the comments, the comment replies) and everything that was associated with those things (artist links, user profiles, etc.) and maybe the message board stuff too.

Also I could post the source code somewhere, like GitHub, if folks are interested. It's written in Java though, which I know is quite unfashionable these days.

HeuristicsInc wrote:it would be nice, at least, if the old reviews remain.

I agree... that was hours and hours of work...

So, the somesongs.com domain situation is a bit tricky and will require some time to work out. In the meantime:

http://somesongs.org/

Awesome. Thanks for doing this.