Ask HN: Review my first Rails app? Pitchforked

http://www.pitchforked.com

by pstinnett • 16 years ago

24 24 16 years ago

pstinnett10• 16 years ago

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!

evlapix• 16 years ago

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.

pstinnett10• 16 years ago

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.

nonrecursive2• 16 years ago

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.

pstinnett10• 16 years ago

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.

kungfooey4• 16 years ago

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

kungfooey4• 16 years ago

A pause/play button would be nice.

pstinnett10• 16 years ago

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

pclark• 16 years ago

great domain.

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

pstinnett10• 16 years ago

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!

dogas2• 16 years ago

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".

dogas2• 16 years ago

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.

pstinnett10• 16 years ago

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!

AndrewHampton• 16 years ago

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.

wsbail29• 16 years ago

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.

Ask HN: Review my first Rails app? Pitchforked

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