Whew, it's been a tough week and a half. Earlier in the month I began coding up the section of this website dedicated to music. The functionality itself is something similar to what I've tried to accomplish in the past, however, rather than manually entering music track information, this time it needed to be automatic. Like I mentioned in a previous post, thanks to Brandon Fuller's Now Playing plugin for iTunes on OS X, I can now use iTunes as the agent that makes the POST requests to this web site. The rest is handled by some Ruby on Rails magic.
- Title
- Album
- Artist
- Year
- Genre
Since all tracks have the information I just mentioned, the next step was to use 'Now Playing' to make HTTP POST requests to this site when a track is played. This means that each time I play a song in iTunes the track information is sent to a web service on this site and stored in a database. As you'll notice when you begin browsing the music section, there is album art included with tracks and albums. Some of this album art is retrieved automatically from Amazon's Web Services (AWS), other art has to be uploaded manually.
Are there actual music files for download? Absolutely not, just meta-information about the music I'm listening to from day to day. So once this information is inserted in the database, I can retrieve it and display it on the website.
How much of this section is done you might ask? Well, check out the Music section for yourself. Most of the functionality should be working (e.g., Playlists, Genres, Billboards, Shuffle) with the exception of the search functionality. I haven't yet bothered to tinker with any of the searching stuff yet, that is going to come last since I'm going to add that functionality to all pages at the same time.
Hope you enjoy the new addition, feel free to comment on this post if you have any feedback.
