A New View

A strange advantage of stepping away from a project for a few months is that when you come back, everything seems different.

I'm looking at fanconcert's code now wondering a) what the hell was I thinking doing it like THAT? b) wow, Railshas really progressed since I started fanconcert back in May 2005 and c) I better get my ass in gear and start using more AJAX/RJS.

So that's what I'll be doing.  fanconcert is already pretty big -- but I've done a few smaller (than fanconcert) projects with cool AJAX features, so now I want to bring some of those things to fanconcert to improve usability and really stretch the possibilities.  It should be fun.

Discouraging Duplicates

I've taken some measures to discourage people from entering duplicate Artists and Venues on fanconcert.  On the Add Artist and Add Venue pages, a warning appears when someone tries to add a dupe.

It's not quite there yet -- but it's an improvement.  The duplicates currently in fanconcert are a great example of the kinds of new problems that this new kind of collaborative editing has to deal with.  Sometimes the best option is to just keep iterating and trying new ideas until something sticks.

What to do with the current dupes in the system?  I want to be able to merge them together somehow.  Dupes will be discouraged but still possible, so I'll need a way to deal with them.

Add to Favourites with One Click

I'm going to try to update fanconcert more often with small updates, like once per week. Now that I'm an independent consultant for Ruby on Rails, unfortunately I'm a lot shorter on free time for fanconcert.

The first example of a small update this week: you can now add artists to your Favourites from the artist page with *one click*. You can do the same things with releases (Release Collection), concerts (Watched Concerts) and users (Friends).

Spotting fanconcert #1

This week fanconcert got a nice boost in traffic and number of members with a mention on beer.com and a blog post on FreshArrival. Nice!

Duplicates and Merging

I like seeing fanconcert in the wild because it's nearly impossible to predict all of the ways people will use your software. I'd like to restrict - for lack of a better word - fanconcert so the information is usable but at the same time leave it open-ended enough that people can be creative.

As if to confirm suspicions that fanconcert isn't ready for prime-time, people are adding duplicates -- especially artists. There are a few good reasons why duplicates are occuring:

1. I haven't made the Favourite Artists group clear enough and how to add artists. People are adding new duplicate artists just to add them to their favourites. I need to write something on the site help about this and steer people in the right direction.
   
2. I'm allowing duplicate artist names because they can happen in real life. fanconcert needs to prevent most duplicates, like 99.99% of them, while still allowing the valid duplicates to be added: ie. bands with the same name from different countries, or even different cities in the same country. Making duplicates harder to add might do the trick.
3. fanconcert is a new approach. People aren't used to it, the technology isn't mature. It needs more time.
   
4. I was working on other things and didn't have time to address the above issues.
   

To solve the duplicate problem I'm going to address 1 and 2 and possibly do one more thing: allow merging by administrators.

If the number of duplicates goes down, the need for merging could go away. But for now, it would be nice to be able to merge one duplicate into another, especially to preserve favourites that users have already made. It would also merge concerts, releases, etc under that artist with the other artist.

Once one artist's data is merged with another, any duplicate concerts and releases can be scored and dealt with. Hopefully I can merge duplicates quickly enough so that there won't be a lot of data on both sides. Merging will be a manual and (it seems like will have to be an) unreversable process. For that reason merging will be done carefully and can only be done by administrators (me).

Statistics are Back

During the last reorganization of fanconcert, the statistics pages were lost in the shuffle. Now the stats pages are back! Check out fanconcert by the numbers, top posters and venues by country.

Let me know if you have ideas for other stats pages.

Attributes with Multiple Values

There are a lot of situations on fanconcert where an attribute can have more than one valid value. An example is the Bell Centre venue in Montreal, which is also called Centre Bell in French. Both are "official names", so it's hard to pick one name to represent the venue.

In the last few days I've changed fanconcert so that both names can represent the same venue. This has interesting implications for the entire site, not the least of which is searching. I'll have to adjust name searching on fanconcert to handle multiple attribute values and display the results so they make sense. I'll be working on that this week.

For example, if you venue search for "Bell", it should show that it matched Bell Centre and Centre Bell but both names are on the same venue. At the moment, that's done with a second venue that "redirects" (or is an alias) to the other venue. It's klunky and that's why I wanted to replace it.

Another thing: how to link to a venue with multiple valid names? The site should pick one of the names for the link -- but which one? How about the name that users score the highest? I've been calling this the 'primary name'.

...except one more detail: each language can have a primary name for the same object. Eventually I'd like to have separate pages for the same venue in different languages. Language support on fanconcert will get very interesting now that attributes can support multiple values. Soon you'll be able to indicate the language of the value you're entering.

Old Tags are Groups

Here's a small change for you longtime fanconcert users: 'tags' are now called 'groups'. This is because they were never actually what the web considers to be tags in the first place. Web 2.0-style tags (like tags on del.icio.us) are coming to fanconcert soon and they will be called tags. Sorry for any confusion in the meantime.

YAOB

Yet Another Offsite Blog.

The good thing about having the fanconcert blog NOT ON fanconcert.com is that I can still do updates if the site is down for some reason. That's why I chose Blogger/blogspot.com.

What will this blog contain? I want to keep fanconcert users updated with new fanconcert stuff. Details about fanconcert development issues will probably stay on my personal blog. If you're hardcore, you'll probably want to keep up to date on that blog as well.



For some silly reason, Blogger doesn't link to this blog's Atom syndication feed in the template. How silly is that? I put the icon above in this post so I could use it in the template. I'm not sure what that funky black border is about. Not helpful!