Ask HN: Review my first Rails app? Pitchforked | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Review my first Rails app? Pitchforked

pitchforked.com

24 pointspstinnett24 comments

I just "launched" my first Ruby on Rails application last night. It creates a random playlist of songs from Pitchfork.com's best new albums area. Up to now I've primarily worked with PHP.

A little backstory: Just a little over a month ago I saw Zach Klein (now working at Boxee) tweet this: http://twitter.com/zachklein/status/7770633908

I had been reading through the new railstutorial.org, but I always learn more quickly working on a real project. So I took a stab at the app and here I am.

I'd love to hear any feedback or comments/questions.

Thanks!

Very nice design.

Looks like pitchfork improved their security a bit. I remember they used to just have an XMPP player, where the XML behind it just had an additional node titled security. It's contents said something to the effect of.. "Don't download these files!". Or something like that.

Thanks. I'm not really sure about Pitchfork's security...I know they lock down their mp3s and had some recent trouble (maybe?) with leaking albums? Not 100% sure on that last part.

All the mp3 files that I'm using are provided by 8tracks.com via their API.

I like the clean design. Do you have a blog with notes of the whole process - plugins used / css / js / hosting.

No blog yet. After I get the first round of revisions done on pitchforked I'll get something up that details the process. I've been taking notes throughout the whole thing, just haven't gotten around to it yet! I'll post again once that's ready.

This is off-topic, but does your mother teach math?

Edit: yes, I believe that is indeed you, patso. I'm Daniel Higginbotham. Neat app. I like the user interface. The "loading" bar is neat.

The icons (notes, price tag/star, calendar) look clickable to me but it seems like they're not.

Dan! Strange meeting on HN! Hope all is going well with you.

The icons aren't clickable but the text underneath click through to the review page. I'll see about making that entire area clickable to keep people from being confused.

Yeah this is strange. I keep thinking of how your mother would get mad at me for reading in her class.

Anyway, feel free to contact me any time about rails or ruby stuff. I've been doing rails work for more than four years now and would be happy to help out. My email's in my profile and my AIM is willmakeawhisper

Haha. I'm sure she doesn't remember that now!

I'll shoot you an email shortly.

I like it a lot, reminds me of muxtape before they got taken down.

One suggestion - the onmouseover gray hover color gets a bit annoying for the current song playing. Also, a fast forward link would be great, in case the song is a little "out there".

Also don't forget to package up those assets. I recommend jammit (http://documentcloud.github.com/jammit/), as it can use the google javascript compiler to squeeze out a couple extra kb.

I'll take a look at that! Nothing is packaged yet. Is there an easy way to get this into the deployment process so that my dev site isn't packaged and everything on the production side is? Thanks!

Yep, that's the whole idea. In development everything is unpacked, uncompressed and debuggable. In production, you get packaged CSS, JS, and (optionally) images, for the smallest size and fewest HTTP requests possible.

If you have any questions, feel free to email me (jeremy at documentcloud dot org), or start an Issue on GitHub.

Excellent! I've got this added in to my issues for pitchforked. Will be implementing it in the next couple of revisions.

Great site! I typically use Last.fm for background music while working, but I think I like this at least just as much.

I agree w/ dogas that a next button would be nice though.

great domain.

doesn't work so well with chrome and flashblock, can't find the flash element to unblock.

Thanks. I've gotten some reports about problems with Flashblock/Clicktoflash. I'll hopefully have an update to fix that tonight. Thanks for checking out the site!

I think it's pretty neat. Very simple interface that tells you pretty much exactly what it's going to do.

A pause/play button would be nice.

You can pause by clicking anywhere on the track name (except the links to the review). I guess that might not be obvious though...

Yeah, I figured that out after playing with it for a while. Another nice feature would be a skip button.

Unfortunately, due to licensing restrictions, I can't add a skip button in:( Same sort of problem with Pandora. You can only skip a certain amount of tracks in a certain time period, so I've just excluded the option to skip tracks.

Easy to get around by just reloading. :)

Nice job! I did something like this awhile ago too. I wrote a scraper that pulled all of the reviews from Pitchfork (scraping was necessary before they updated their site with rss feeds). My app currently just display a random set of reviews on each visit.

http://pitchforkd.thirtymontgomery.com

I was actually thinking about updating it to add playlist functionality. Thanks for pointing out 8tracks.com. I'll have to check it out.

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