My hope for this plog was to be able to log progress on my projects and detailing the journey from beginning to end instead of just spitting out a summary of the project after I got tired of it.
As you can read from the description and maybe gather from the name, hurddit is basically reddit for music. It aims to make discovering new music or listening to a fresh playlist that fits your mood easier. Right now I have a barely working edition running that you can check out at hurddit.com.
I decided to go with Ruby on Rails again as I still feel like I have much to learn in that area. At the moment, Spotify is required to play any of the songs, as I couldn't find a good reliable alternative way to play a specific song for free. Ideally, there would probably be some streaming player directly on the site and playing music wouldn't rely on which software the user has, but Spotify will have to do for now.
Here's a quick tour of the first iteration of the site:
Here's the home page. Right now, it just lists all the existing channels and gives you an option to create one of your own. I haven't really moved away from the default Rails-generated layouts, but styling will probably only come after I settle on what to actually display on these pages. Moving on to a specific channel...
Here we have the actually songs in a particular channel. Basic information about each song is given and clicking on the song name plays the selected song in Spotify. If you're logged in (via Facebook for now...seemed reasonable as Spotify accounts are currently directly linked to one's Facebook accounts), you can vote up/down songs so that the higher scoring ones are listed first by default. To add more songs to a channel, click on the "add songs" link on the top and you'll see...
Create a queue of songs to add to a channel by searching for it (by title or artist) and selecting the song from the generated results. I'm using the Spotify search API to produce the results and the song selector is based off of select2, a powerful jQuery-powered input extension.
That's pretty much all there is to see at the moment but some of the things in my queue of things I want to work on are:
When adding a new channel, be able to seed the channel with a few songs and add many suggested songs to the channel based on similarity to the seed songs. This would allow building up a channel to be faster and less work.
Being able to play all or a selection of the songs in a channel as a playlist. This unfortunately does not seem trivial to do in Spotify (maintaining a playlist for each channel remotely), but it could be a fun challenge.
Maybe put a bit of social into this? Maybe not. I'm not a fan of Spotify trying to broadcast everything I play to everyone else, but there's maybe something useful that can be done if users are linked via Facebook.
More updates to come as I keep dabbling in this!
