You've got to love those Flickr hamsters... Today they launched processing of 'machine tags'. One of the things we've been tackling with Zythe's ongoing development is improving on the layer of metadata around social content. Implementation of machine tags really takes that challenge head on. Definitely something to play with over the next week or so....
yesterday a friend of mine was talking about a Lordi gig he attended last week. He was particularly enthused by the support band - Turisas - a ‘battle metal’ act who played a somewhat original cover of Boney M’s ‘Rasputin’. He knew nothing about them but wanted to find out more. It actually took me more than two seconds to realise that Sleevenotez was probably the best place to go for a detailed overview of said band. I mailed him nothing more than a link to the Turisas page on SN (a semantically comprehensible link at that), where he could get the skinny on Turisas and even watch them performing ‘Rasputin’ via YouTube. I suppose one might link to Last.fm in these circumstances, but an artist page doesn’t necessarily provide you with a huge amount of background information. While it’s great for providing recommendations based on an artist you’re already familiar with, Sleevenotez is a good starting point for artists you don’t know much about at all. I would love for SN to become the authoritative online music information resource, to the point where anyone referencing an artist instinctively links to the artist page on SN.
On a related note, I really wanted to be able to ‘digg’ the Rasputin video, so that other users would be alerted to its crazed genius. Luckily, we are addressing this very subject in our next iteration.
Right then. We've just about recovered from the last iteration, got all of our other jobs back in order, seen the wives and girlfriends for a few days, and now we're back on it.
A couple of things...
First up, much of the feedback that we've received is around the speed that Sleevenotez updates related to when the track you're listening to changes. This is a (very sensible) artefact of the Audioscrobbler protocol (which you can read here if you're that way inclined). The main point in there is that tracks are only scrobbled when they are 50% of the way through, or at 4 minutes, whichever is the sooner. That means that for a 3 minute track it can easily be 2 minutes before Sleevenotez notices that the track has changed, giving the feeling that it is always one track behind.
Luckily version 1.2 of the submissions protocol is in draft right now, and includes provision for a 'currently playing' scrobble at 10 seconds in, which hopefully will sort out the lag once and for all. I can't say how pleased we were to be pointed to this by Paul at SnappRadio - it fair made our week!
Second up, we have finished the iteration planning for iteration 3. This one is all about users interacting more with the application. This iteration of Sleevenotez makes the most of the data collection features of Zythe (the platform Sleevenotez is built on), by providing lots of things to poke at and fiddle with while using the site. This is in reaction to one of the other main pieces of feedback; that, if you were listening to an album by a single artist (rather than radio, compilations or your collection on shuffle) the site became quite static. One of the things we're aiming at is an application that supports the wonderful notion of "Partial Continuous Attention" - hopefully this iteration will take us one step closer.
As always, please keep the feedback coming in. With your help we've found a fair few things that we'd never noticed or thought of (and we love it when you're nice!)
We've had a quick bug sprint and stabilised a lot of the code, now that we've seen it running in the wild with a few users. Hopefully you'll see less incomplete pages now and a more stable service in general.
Also, a couple of people have reported not receiving their confirmation codes. Amazon's EC2 servers seem to be listed in pretty much every spammer database out there (something we hadn't really thought of) and so many of the early sign ups won't have received their confirmation mails. If that's you, try typing your email address into the forgotten password box on the homepage and you should get sent your code again, through less spam friendly servers. If that still doesn't work mail us at help@sleevenotez.com and we'll try and sort you out.
Woot, or should I say \nn/. Iteration 2 has gone live, and seems to have stayed up all night too. As Andy Baker pointed out we have been remiss in not providing a contact address. We fully intended to do a blog post, but went to the pub instead in celebration. Yes indeed, we know how to live.
Anyhow, for Andy and anyone else who needs help with anything, email help@sleevenotez.com and we’ll get back to you pronto. Andy: I’m looking into your confirmation email issue right now.
We pretty much completed iteration 2 yesterday on schedule. I’ve been working on another project for 2.5 days a week, so we extended this iteration. We could have chosen to scale down our expected stories for the iteration, but I’ve been doing all of registration which is quite a big chunk that needs a whole suite of stories to make a sensible iteration.
All of registration is done now, apart from some low priority admin stuff we are punting to the next iteration. Andy has been working on a number of new data sources too, which look really good. We’ve also fixed a whole load of defects, so the system is much more reliable.
There’s a bunch of UI work to do to polish off the new features ready for a release, which we’ll be doing on Monday, and then we’ll release what we’ve got so far. As Mark said, we’re taking the password protection off again, now that various annoying things have been resolved.
I expect a few of you were wondering what's been going on with SN lately - no posts to the blog, authentication on the website... Well, the reasons are too arcane and tedious to go into here, suffice to say that we had to sort out a few internal issues, and during that time it seemed prudent to limit access to the service. Now that everything is tickety-boo again, it's time for a progress report. First of all, we plan to provide open access to the site again some time next week (all being well.) We're introducing a registration process, for obvious reasons (persistent login, personalisation etc.) Secondly, we're integrating more third-party data. Thirdly... well, you'll find out soon enough. More info to come...
We've launched a new feature today - full length biographies for an artist are now available by clicking the more link after the short version on an artist homepage. We've also identified why you were getting a blank page sometimes, even though you'd scrobbled a track, and we've put in something to try and get round it. That said, it is a fairly hairy piece of guesswork, so you may find that you aren't getting the right data sometimes. Still, my thinking is that at least you are getting *some* data now...
Any other issues you'd like to see fixed? As always, please comment here
Thanks for all the feedback - overwhelmingly good (so far), which is nice. We noticed a couple of things as users started actually hitting the system which we believe we've tweaked successfully. We've certainly turbocharged the database queries, which turned out to be our main resource issue.
This afternoon we've made another major change. We've put Twistd on port 80 and removed our reliance on Squid. We did this to tackle the occasional timeouts, but also to decrease the complexity of our install (we've also removed our reliance on DivMod's excellent Mantissa as we realised that it was unnecessarily complex for our needs). This means that there may be some oddities - we have a feeling it should go quicker (and it's definitely simpler under the hood), but if you see anything odd please let us know by leaving a comment here.
I’ve set up an IRC Channel over on OFTC, #sleevenotez. Do drop by if you want to talk about it, or if you have any questions.