Tonight I managed to do some power coding for Musecast, was hoping to get it ready to show Jonathan Briggs after his ecommerce lecture.
The following changes included:
Improved the tags section
The tag section now includes a view tag page where you can view the tag and see where it’s been used. This tagging system is used alot in many web2.0 applications (including this blog) and provides users with a unique way of finding articles by tags rather then by a search engine, it’s almost like GIVING you the search terms rather then making you search it yourself
As well as a view tags php, I also managed to implement a quick tag cloud kind of style for the tags page, all that’s been done is that the query used to draw the tags include the number of times they’ve been used (via the tag links table) which means you can use that as a variable for deciding the size of the font. For now, the algorithm used is number of times used x 10 and the font size will be that (in pt units). I’ll definitely need to calculate a mean average for the tags and use that to generate a few steps of sizes (rather then a big bunch of steps). This shouldn’t be hard at all but I felt like doing other stuff before I got to keying in the algorithms, as well as that I might also include the font colour as another tag cloud factor (like my blog) This one is slightly tedious but still doable
Created the song section
Amazingly enough this was probably the easiest task I did. The songs section was used to tag songs into podcasts, this is so users can find out songs used for it and perhaps make it so each page includes a bit more detail about the song (havent looked into that one yet). The good thing about the songs section was the fact that it was almost identical to the tagging system, it was simply a tag, but with song titles. Though I did consider merging them together. It’s probably better to keep them separate in case I want to add additional fields for the songs section.
Implemented a “Feeds” section
This is where I really get into the xml/rss stuff. This section involved configuring the site to include feeds from other site, all you had to do was enter a url and it will instantly generate a page that includes the items inside the feed. I used a little small app called lastRss.php which allowed me to save time in coding the rss parsing, the api system was pretty neat so it was easy to implement what I needed, though I need to look into a bit more so I can see how I can further use it.
The limit field is probably the bit where I would actually need to look into the lastrss php a bit more, I would like to make it possible for the user to simply limit the feed to a certain amount of items, hopefully that can be done quite easily (should be done via the number of tags.
Quick podcast RSS feed
Managed to quickly knock off an RSS feed for the podcast, this used the fields on the podcast to generate most of the information, I’ve already done stuff like this before so now it’s definitely come in handly, will be using the w3c rss validator to ensure that i’ve got everything I need, not only that, I will probably need to use the podcasting standard too to ensure that it’s a valid podcast feed.
Another thing I will look into is getting feedburner to parse the feed, this tool will prove very useful for my client as he will be able to view all the subscribers to the feed. This tool has been used on most of the big sites such as Neowin which was where I initially found it
sing a song here!