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...

Posted by The Zythe Blog Droid at 02:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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

Posted by Andy Theyers at 08:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

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.

Posted by Andy Theyers at 02:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Posted by Doug Winter at 06:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The moment you've all been waiting for is finally here. Sleevenotez is live. Time to get in there and start breaking it! If you have a last.fm account and listen to a lot of music type your username into the search box on the home page and away you go. If you're not a last.fm user or aren't listening to anything right now it might be worth having a look at our office account to get the full comety loveliness.

Please remember that it's in pre-pre-pre-alpha state at the moment and so it will look rough and ready in places and like as not it will fail on you somewhere. That said, if you are using it and it fails on you in a spectacular fashion please let us know (by leaving a comment here).

We're particularly interested in the following information:

• What the user you were looking at was listening to, or which artist page were you looking at
• Did you get any message?
• What browser version/operating system are you on

The only proper breakages that we know about at the moment are the weird behaviour (or lack thereof) of the back button in IE and the occasional timeout which presents a rather natty flashing warning. We're looking at them both at the moment and will hopefully have fixes in place soon.

And, yes, we know, some of the data for some of the bands is completely wrong (Nirvana, Parliament, Air, etc etc). We are looking into ways of fixing it, but like as not it will be a community driven thing. We're planning on implementing the tech to support user editing of site content in iteration 3, so please hold on!

edit 18:08 01/09: so we launch, and literally 10 minutes later the audioscrobbler post servers go down, meaning that all our comety loveliness doesn't work. Clearly we need a way of a) testing the status of audioscrobbler and b) communicating any failures to our users...

Posted by Andy Theyers at 04:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)