ThirdChord

It’s been a while, but progress is being made. ThirdChord has had a bit of download activity lateley and the new users are submitting some good bug requests. I am currently working on version 0.85 which will fix all of these bugs and will also add a few good features.

0.85 will contain support for the aforementioned themes which will allow a much easier customization of the “front-end grid”. In addition, I will address the most requested feature - deletion of albums and tracks. I know it’s pretty annoying to upload and process a batch of tracks only to realize that they are incorrect or you dont want them lingering around for what ever reason. This version should allow you to clean that mess up.

I don’t want to promise dates, but I have been devoting some serious time to it so I hope to have it out there soon.

Thanks to Giles’s, 0.84 fixes a bug that was casing some installations (most Dreamhost customers) to not be able to save any information. The bug was caused by a problem with the way xajax was written. This version also upgrades the xajax library to its latest version - 0.2.4.

For the full change-log, head on over to the forum.

On onther fronts, the transformation to Ruby on Rails is not going as planned. I have to curb my over ambitious goals for this project for now and instead focus on smaller, more mangeable changes. Right now I am working on adding a way to create and mange track grid themes. These themes will allow Thirdchord users to customize the way the track grid is displayed to their customers on their website. I’ll be rolling that one out in the next few days.

Thirdchord has been put into a sort of stalemate right now while a few things happen. 1st, it has been tax season and I have been juggling TurboTax and a day job that has been slowly creeping into my night job.

Second, I plan to completely rebuild ThirdChord.com using Ruby on Rails. So while I attempt to teach myself this new technology, things may move slowly.

In anticipation for Ruby on Rails, I’ve had to switch to a web host that supports it. Thirdchord.com has a blog and a forum both of which have databases. In addition thirdchord.com it self has a few databases so in short this makes for a couple of nights dedicated just to switching from one host to another.

Finally, ThirdChord the application is managed on my home computer using Subversion for version control. This awesome new hosting company I have chosen (Dreamhost), just so happens to have Subversion installed on its hosting accounts. So I am going to move the whole repository over to the webserver so that I can make this a true Open Source Project. Contributors welcome!

I had hard coded “Bobbie and the Douche Bags” into trackGrid.php for some strange reason which was causing the “Add to Cart” buttons not to work. This is fixed now. This release added CDATA tags to the data in rss feed and updated the license.txt file.

0.82 fixed a few minor things, one of which hopefully being a problem with the Flash track editor and track player movies where the fonts were not embedded correctly. A few people have made mention of incompatibility with PHP 5. I fixed one issue, but I do not have a test set up with PHP5 installed so I am quite sure there are many others.

In addition, this version ships with an RSS feed. This feed will be used to index users content back into the ThirdChord database.

This kicks off the inaugural offering of the ThirdChord source base. It is released under the GPL.

Get it from the front page of the ThirdChord site. There is a support forum here for any questions you may have while installing or using.

I’ve posted a demo if you’d like to see ThirdChord in operation. The write to disk featured are disabled, but you can at least play with it. Its here:

Demo
Log in with thirdchord / asdfasdf

Comments appreciated as always.

Well, I jumped the gun with enthusiasm. I was hoping to head back to my hotel to try and tidy up the source code so I could release it tonight, but the lure of the SXSW afterpartys (free booze) have me thinking otherwise…

I also am working out of subversion on my home computer and am really of weary of screwing around with things outside of that nicely controlled enviornment.

So instead I thought I’d share the new feature that has my brain buzzing. ThirdChord is going to ship with an RSS feed that is a dump of the artists albums including track samples created with the Sample Editor. When ThirdChord the site is fully built out, a musician can index the info from this feed into the ThirdChord database. So ThirdChord will in effect will be able to aggregate all of its users into one place. Then hopefully community based things like voting, chat, blah, blah could follow.

If anyone is reading, I’d love to hear suggestions.

While at SXSW 2006, I was lucky enough to have the chance to meet very briefly with Matt Mullenweg (the creator of the blogging software , WordPress, that I am using to post this info). He convinced me in a matter of minutes, that open source is a much better option for distributing this project. I originally had intened to follow Shaun Inman’s approach with Mint by selling licenses for $30, but after listening to Matt and many others at this conference, it became apperant to me that I would have a far greater reach if I just gave it away.

So… I am going to do just that. In the next few hours I will be posting the source code to ThirdChord (in its beta state) here as well as on SourceForge, under the project name The Music Store. Please check back as I hope to have a lot of activity with new posts (and visual changes).