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Down the home stretch.
The music system now defaults to sorting by album (then artist, track number, track name.) You can click the column headings to get it to sort by 'track name' or by 'album'.
And the search engine was not constraining it's results properly in some cases, most notably when searching while in a 'by artist' view. Now you should only get results from the restricted collection of music defined by whatever view you are in. (If I am looking at /music/jim/artist/beatles and I do a search, I will only get results back from hits on just the set comprised of my beatles songs.)
Assuming everything is working correctly now, the only thing left is to add the ability to order the tracks inside a user created playlist (this will happen when you click through 'edit this playlist'.)
So my idea is to use the new /music scripts as the basis for all the media management on the site. Right now that means updating /image to the new format, and also creating /video. Basically all the heavy work is done, I just have to tweak the script to look in different tables in the database (say, the image table instead of music) and then change how the output is displayed.
First, does anybody see any big problems I am missing?
And next, what information do people want displayed in /image? Obviously the description of the picture (this will be like trackname is in /music.) Do we want the filename displayed to, or just link the description to the filename like /music does it? Of course the size of the image file. Maybe the upload date? Do we need to see the image owner listed?
I'd like to keep it as simple as possible. Additional information for each picture could be displayed (as it is now) on the image edit screen. But what info can't be left off the main /image lists?
Not sure if anyone other than Tom and Dave have looked at the new /music stuff yet. If you already have, here are some changes from today:
You can now (in most situations) click on the artist and album column headings to sort alphabetically by artist or album instead of track name.
Search now works better.
If you /sync/, and all the files you sync are music files, you are automatically redirected to /music/yourname/recent where the new files will be right at the top.
The checkboxes let you edit (click 'edit' at the bottom - although you can only edit your own songs of course.) Note that you can edit multiple songs at once. This is especially useful if you are adding album and artist info (yeah, sorry, I can't read the id3 tags from the mp3 files yet.) On the edit page you can fill in the artist and album info one time, and have it apply to all the tracks you have selected for a multiple track edit.
So I'm imagining: FTP a whole album worth of songs. Go to /sync and they will be sucked into the database and you will be taken right to /music/username/recent where what you just uploaded will be at the top of the page. Click to select them all and on the edit page add the artist and album info in one place to assign them to all the tracks.
Also note that there is a checkbox at the very bottom that will select all the checkboxes above it (or unselect them if any are selected.)
Also to note, 'trackname' is distinct from the actual filename. So trackname can have any special characters or spaces or whatever you want. When you /sync the system just uses the filename as the trackname (probably I can make it smarter about this), but you're going to have to do a little editing no matter what. I leave the filename as whatever it was when uploaded, say, 01_ella_and_louis-I_wont_dance.mp3 and change the trackname to the more readable 'I won't dance', while making the artist 'Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald' and the album 'Louis and Ella Again'.
Since the system sorts by album and artist it would be nice if we could be careful with spelling. When entering artist names (again on the edit page) I also supply a pull down menu of artists already in the system. Take a look in there first, since using that for repeat artists will assure that all spellings are consistent.
I've been building something for the site, and for the first time ever I didn't put it up live well before it was done. I've actually been, like, testing it. And shit.
It's really hard not to let it loose (not that it is so cool or anything, but I get attached to these things.) I think maybe tomorrow. So yes, this post basically amounts to nothing but I had to at least let out a squeak.
My stupidity really pays off in the sense that I end up working for a long time on simple problems, and then when I finally solve them it feels like I am some kind of genius because, well, the problem must really have been hard for me to work on it for so long!
Follow that?
Anyway, I believe I have the OS X client ftp uploading script now working. At least I slightly impressed Dave with it. The script is an icon that sits on my desktop. Any file (or files) I drag onto the icon are FTP'd to the dmtmusic upload server (which can now handle all media types, not just music.) No connecting. No signing in. No hassles. Just drop 'em and they upload.
I think I could just email this script to other OS X users if anybody wants it. I'll be curious to see if that works. So let me know.
I ended up doing it completely in Applescript so it should be very portable across OS X machines (doesn't rely on Apache and PHP like my first attempt.)
The music system is getting the same makeover the image system got. We are still stuck with the FTP upload system for now, although it looks like I'll be able to automate it at least for OS X people. But as long as you are comfortable with an FTP program, it's extremely easy. And really more powerful than [upload] since you can set your ftp program to upload directories of files ([upload] still works the same as before, just to be clear.)
Once you have files in your directory on the ftp server - (dmtmusic@tulip.he.net/dmtuser_n) where n is your user id - you now go to:
http://www.digitalmediatree.com/sync/
instead of /music_sync/.
Basically it does the same thing, except now it is much smarter, and it puts your files in the new /library/music/n/ location. The /sync/ script can handle most files provided they have the proper extension. Feel free to FTP .jpg, .gif, .mpeg, .ogg, .swf, .png, .wma, .avi, etc... files into your directory. /sync/ will grab them and put them in the right place. If it's an image it will add it to your 'complete list' of images. If it's a music file it will add it to your 'complete list' of music. If it's a movie file it will at least put it in the right place, although the /video/ system isn't built yet (but since it's almost exactly the same as /image/ and /music/ it should be easy.)
Fiddled with the client side uploading script today. It was timing out on large uploads, but now seems to be working after a tweak to the httpd.conf file. This is a very exciting feature I think. Watch what happens to the music library now.
I think Tom was onto this a long time ago, but the Userland weblogs.com update notification system is now not only not working for us, but actually causing posts to time out (if your page is set to notify userland when you post.) So I have removed that function (even though it's still listed as an option on [editpage].)
When I'm done with the media library projects I have open now I will look into this. I know a lot has happened in this space since I last looked. If we want to be doing this sort of thing then technorati is maybe a better place to be pinging. And there are others too.
One thing at a time though.
/editpic now gives you a fully formed img tag so you can cut and paste. This is helpful if you are replacing old instances of /getpic/ with the new img tags. Just [edit] the post. Copy the /getpic/xxxx number, and put it onto the end of /editpic/?pid=xxxx. Then the editpic screen will give you the full img tag you can copy and paste back into the post to replace the img src=/getpic/ tag.
Note, there is no need to do this to old /getpic tags. They will still work. But the new way is slightly (noticeable though) faster. So it is probably a good idea to replace often loaded images (like images that load every time your page loads) with the new form. At least if you want your page to load a little faster.
I've done this for a few pages that are (relatively for us) high traffic. Hopefully nobody minds me taking that liberty.
Mark was onto this potential problem already, with his previous suggestion that I include the picture ID numbers as a custom argument to the img tag. The problem is that given an image in a post, there is no way to get to the editpic page for that image (without looking up the picture in your complete list of [images] to get the ID number to pass to editpic/?pid=xxxx.)
But instead of doing that I made it so editpic understands image paths. So now you can pass editpic the image location in the URL, like this:
http://www.digitalmediatree.com/editpic/library/image/5/example.jpg
You can also still pass the ID number as ?pid=xxxx.
A little esoteric, but this situation will probably come up.