the fanconcert blog

Monday, June 12, 2006

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.

Wednesday, June 07, 2006

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.

Friday, June 02, 2006

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!