A music chart site.

Hi Guys and Girls.

I’ve been around the modx forums for a while, but have been silent recently.

This is what I’m currently working on at the moment.
Please have a look and tell me what you think.

http://www.bluetomatomedia.com/TRAAMODX/

There’s a combination of web technology in here.
I’ve got lightbox happening, as well as the reflection.js script, as well as my own charting software in there too.
These are a couple of the snippets I’ve used: WebLoginPE, Easy Multiple Mailing List, A Poll voting thing, A Printing snippet, and some I’ve grabbed from a version of etomite.

The site is for the Aussie Christian music charts.

It’s a database driven site where old and past charts can be visited and looked up.
Click on an artist, then you’ll see the charts.
Click on a chart and you can see a graph on how the song has moved up and down the chart.

It’s still in development, but it’s all database driven and seems to be going well.

I also ask this question. What do you think a site of this nature and size could/would be worth?

Cheers,
Steve.

Nice concept. Did you use JPGraph?

A few remarks:

- Some sort of timeline would be nice. Browsing/filtering/searching via month/year.
- search or browse by song-name would be useful (sometimes you remember a song, but don’t remember the artist name)
- The graph in the the bottom right is a bit squashed, because you just resize it via HTML. A "real" thumbnail would look nicer (and reduce filesize)

How do you import those chart data? Manually? Are there XML feeds for these kinds of infos out there?

Hi GaneshXL,
That was a quick response. Ta!

Quote from: ganeshXL at Nov 29, 2007, 03:38 AM

Nice concept. Did you use JPGraph?

Come to think of, yeah. I think I did use something like that... I can’t remember now, as I changed and modified the code so much.

- Some sort of timeline would be nice. Browsing/filtering/searching via month/year.

That’s a good idea. Hmm... that’s given me something to think about.

search or browse by song-name would be useful (sometimes you remember a song, but don’t remember the artist name)

Yes, this is something for the near future to implement. I didn’t have much fun with the AJAX search when I initially started playing around with it all, so the searching went a little out the window. That sort of thing is definitely on the cards and is coming soon. The trouble is there’s two searches available. The artist profiles are all stored in the modx database table, yet the actual database files are in other tables... so that could prove very interesting....

The graph in the the bottom right is a bit squashed, because you just resize it via HTML. A "real" thumbnail would look nicer (and reduce filesize)

Great pick up! Yes, That is I guess a minor thing I need to update properly. Now if I could just find that php manual...
- fixed.

How do you import those chart data? Manually? Are there XML feeds for these kinds of infos out there?

Oh boy... I so wish there were XML feeds. This is beginning of the feeds. In the future I anticipate that feeds will come from this site. It’s all entered manually, with as much automation as possible. The idea of the site is to move away from manually created downloadable PDF files which take a long while to create.
I am aware that some radio stations can, and do, export their playlists to the internet, but creating vulnerabilities like that in a mission critical environment, most stations don’t ever do that. A stations on air music server connected to the net is... well, can be a dangerous thing to the station.

I am aware that some radio stations can, and do, export their playlists to the internet, but creating vulnerabilities like that in a mission critical environment, most stations don’t ever do that. A stations on air music server connected to the net is... well, can be a dangerous thing to the station.

I’m not sure about vulnerabilities and publishing XML feeds being dangerous. Why do you believe that? In what context?

Also, a live playlist is not the same as charts-data. One changes every few minutes, the other once a week.

Here’s a charts site from Switzerland: http://hitparade.ch/weekchart.asp?cat=s (Singles top 100) and their corresponding feed: http://hitparade.ch/rss.asp?cat=s
Granted, the way they constructed the XML is not very user-friendly if you want to parse / re-use it (the position should be in its own node, or an attribute, not just part of a string), but that’s another point.

In the end, an XML file is just a text-file on a server. The only real danger I see is that the server gets too many hits for those feed-requests. But even that can be easily managed. Simply choose to publish static text-files instead of querying the database with each single feed-request.

I like what that other site has done. It’s very good.

The data for this site is collected from radio stations that email their playlists. The data is then collated and turned in to a chart.

The danger I’m talking about is not about reading scripts and things, XML, or overloading. It’s having a live audio server open to the internet. I don’t know if you are aware, but radio stations these days are automated with many shifts voice tracked. A computer just plays the music, and slots in people where they have recorded a segment.

Once you put these studio computers online, it can make it too easy for someone to potentially hack in and thus have access to on air systems. And I’m sure we can see where things could go wrong. It’s not uncommon for stations to have two separate networks running. One connected to the outside, and one not.