One of the other major things taking my time up is an exciting new web project:
I started this in earnest just before Christmas, and development is going well with the front end pretty much done. You can see the pre-launch page here, which will give you a pretty good idea of what the site’s about. There’s also a blog by Mr BeatsBase himself; Robbie.
BeatsBase.com is built on WordPress MU, the multi-user version of the incredibly popular WordPress blogging system. Early on in the project I realised that while it’s entirely possible for me to write an entire system myself to do all this, it would take a long time and therefore be costly. Using a powerful and scalable system that takes care of the basics – user registration, blogs, pages, content management and user administration – means I have more time to spend doing the real meat of the website.
And what is that meat? Well, in a nutshell (mmm, meat in a nutshell…) BeatsBase.com is a community site for DJs that allows people to share and use information about tracks such as the BPM (beats per minute), key, style etc. Users can also build playlists from multiple tracks, and save details about events. And of course everything a user does – adding tracks, creating playlists, adding events – links back to their own personal blog.
Just in case you thought that this doesn’t sound very Web 2.0-ish, tracks and playlists will be rateable, everything with have RSS (and probably Atom) feeds, and there will be judicious use of AJAX for those of a progressively-enhanced bent.
So, take a look, sign up and keep an eye on progress. It’ll be great when it’s ready.