mp3Salad _BLOG

Over the past several months a lot has been going on behind the scenes with mp3Salad. As the popularity of the site has grown, the need for a more stable and extensible framework has become more apparent and the developer (me) has done just that. mp3Salad is using the latest release of the ever popular Model Glue framework for Coldfusion which has enabled it to be 'enterprise' ready and easily extensible for future features and improvement.

You may have noticed a few new features pop-up in the past few days such as the Onion Meter and the ability to download playlists in RSS format. You also might have also noticed that a key feature, the Inline Music Player is no longer available on search result detail pages. With the migration of the new platform came some unforeseen issues that are currently being worked on, rest assured the music player will be re-instated!

As I mentioned there have been some visible and non-visible improvements made to mp3Salad recently, here are some notes about a few of them:

Onion Meter
The Onion Meter is feature that gives an indication of the likely hood that the search result page you are viewing is an Onion. Onions are pages that contain invalid, missing or broken links to mp3 files. These pages are worthless to mp3Salad and users on it. We calculate the rating based on several factors such as our crawlers inability to find links, user supplied flagging of the page as well as crawler that verify that file on the other side of the link is actually an mp3.

Playlist Downloads and Permalinking
Previous to this latest release, playlist did not have a permalink that would allow it to be shared with friends or archived for later use, you basically had to navigate to a search result page and click on the icon to get a hard copy of the playlist. A new link structure has been in place so that users can directly link to playlist, like this link. Be on the look out for tiny url'ing of these links in the near future.

RSS Playlist Format
With the new permalinking abilities of playlist, I decided to build in a new format for consumption, RSS. Media capable feed readers out there like Google Reader, support audio playback capabilities which you can now use to save playlists that you find if don't want to link directly to mp3Salad.

FAQ
While its not much to brag about, the FAQ is slowing growing. I've received enough questions from users to decide that I really should have a FAQ. I'm sure there are many out there with similar questions or other questions in general about the site but don't want to take the time to ask and wait for a response, hopefully the FAQ will address that those people have. However in the meantime please send me your questions, if enough people ask I will post them in the FAQ.

Thanks to my good friend Jason Ashby of the band Chicowater, we now have our first Firefox plug-in for the Quick Search. The Quick Search feature in Firefox lets you easily search for keywords on sites that are OpenSearch compatible like Google, Yahoo and now mp3Salad.

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Late last night I decided to launch a flash based MP3 Player so that you can listen to songs (continuously) online without the need for an external player. The inline player shows up on the details page for search results, but also can be launched into it's own window for continuous play while searching for more songs.

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Improvements to the MP3 Link Parser are on it's way. The other day I noticed a few sites were incorrectly being labeled as onions because my link parser wasn't intelligently identifying links to mp3s.

I was using a regular expression to find and extract links, which worked well for 'index of' sites, but not so good on non-directory listing pages.Because of that I'm testing an approach to parse the returned page content from the crawler into an XML object which I can then easily query using XPath to pick off links.

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