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Just thinking out loud here.

What to do about mp3s? I'm going to use a lot of the code from the image system, but I think we need some security. I'm not really interested in serving up our mp3 collections to the general public (for bandwidth as well as legal reasons) but at the same time there will of course be legitimate mp3 files that need to be served to the general public.

So I guess there will be some option while uploading to put sound files into either your public or private directory. I'm imagining that the private directory will be available to everyone who has a non anonymous user account. I mean everyone who has an account that was not merely made by clicking 'remember me' on a comment page.

[For the record there is a group_level number associated with each account: 0 is a random surfer without a cookie, 50 is someone who clicked 'remember me', 100 gets you image upload ability, 300 lets you add other users, and 900 makes you a super user (I'd tell you what that means but then I'd have to....)]

This means that private mp3s will be accessed through PHP (so I can check cookies.) I am really not sure what kind of a hit this makes on the server (just using fopen($filename) and then passthru()) but my guess is that we have power to spare. Of course this is the sort of assumption that can come back to bite you.

One thing that will alleviate this problem (if it even is a problem) is that my OS X (unix) uploading client can also be a downloading client - thus moving the CPU hit to the client. God I love that idea. I wish I could make that stuff available for windows too. (Theoretically I could, since it only relies on Apache and PHP, both of which can run on Windows, but I would be completely unable to support getting those to run on anyone's windows machine.)

If I do the public/private directory thing for mp3s I could reuse that code to make private image directories as well. But I can't think of why anyone would need that. And I don't want to add even a single checkbox that isn't necessary (despite the look of the [settings] page.)

Also, although I keep saying 'mp3' the new music system will allow for any encoding type (.wav, .ogg, .whatever...)

Going to finish the /image pages first though. Those are still in very rough form. If anyone has any design input for how those image and album listings should look I am all ears. Mock it up in photoshop if you want. Design is obviously not my strong point, but if you don't mind messy table laden HTML I can probably make a fair representation of most designs.

I'm still praying for the day we recruit an HTML/CSS design person to work with us.
- jim 3-09-2004 8:29 pm [link] [3 comments]