Final Submission: LOCAL.LIVE
LOCAL.LIVE is my final mashup!
Link: http://thaliacamille.com/sites/mashup/index.php
LOCAL.LIVE is a live music mashup intended for Australian music fans. It sources data from Flickr, Twitter, Fasterlouder, Rave and Youtube via RSS feeds, and condenses it into a straightforward, "one-stop" interface.
Focusing on state capitals, it's easy for the user to navigate to view information on the different cities. At this stage, only Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide are available, but it is feasible that with more time, knowledge, skills and info other cities could be added.
The site aims to show a snapshot of the live music scene in the selected city. It shows photos of recent gigs, music news, reviews and upcoming events, as well as video footage. It's intended for people who want to know what's on in their area, as well as people who may have missed a recent show or want to see or read someone else's perspective on one they've been to.
Created using php, CSS3 and Yahoo! Pipes, this was a huge undertaking for me that tested skills I didn't think I had. I learned a lot of cool CSS tricks (no more images as header text!) and some php (a prospect I still find frightening), and think this will definitely be useful in future endeavours.
I did have a few issues with Pipes (slight understatement), mainly Twitter and Youtube. At the time of writing this, Twitter is still sometimes not returning any results (although I know it works), and Youtube still occasionally shows irrelevant results. I've excluded some search terms that seemed to be coming up a lot (Iranian soccer games, anyone?), but it's hard to completely avoid inappropriately-tagged videos. I definitely feel like this is something I'd like to have gotten better control over, but it's really too far above my head, and I'm reasonably happy with how things turned out anyway.
I've enjoyed finding good data sources, and struggled with some of the less convenient ones. As evidenced in this journal, I went through quite a few ideas and used my data sources as inspiration to help me narrow it down. I think that stylistically, my final mashup comes quite close to my initial mockups and is true to the look I was going for.
On the whole, I'm proud of the way my mashup has evolved and the final product of my hard work. Despite some small issues, I've achieved my main goal of bringing together many sources to give an overview of live music on a city-by-city basis, in a user-friendly way.












