Amazing honeymoon
01/05/2007 19:06:05
We've just come back from our honeymoon - Dubai, Kuala Lumpur, Borneo and Langkawi. It was absolutely incredible!
I'm getting married!
01/03/2007 21:20:05
Yes, I'm finally tying the knot with my long-term girlfriend Siobhan on Marc h 24th!
SHV new look
12/02/2007 22:05:00
Second Hand Vinyl is getting a revamp. Expect to see the new version go live at some point soon
Full release for mp3-anywhere
01/02/2007 20:35:02
mp3-anywhere gets a full release! See the homepage for more info.
New Demos
13/05/2006 23:17:10
Hi there
I've been busy today putting together 5 new demos for the site that really give an idea of what the software can do.
You can see the demos by clicking on the features page.
Enjoy!
Rich
We are live!
29/04/2006 17:37:02
OK, the payment system is now live, everything is working properly as it should.
The next step is to get some marketing done.
If anyone out there would like to link to this site, that would be great, feel free.
And I guess the last thing to say is - please buy this fantasic bit of software! it will change your life...
Rich
Long time no blog entry
22/04/2006 12:57:28
No, I haven't dropped off the face of the planet. 2 whole months without an entry, but I have good reason.
I've getting married next year (round of applause please) and my fiance and I have spent a good few weekends recently scoping venues. We've seen some lovely places that are just outside our budget and some less lovely ones that we can afford. So the quest continues...
As well as that, this site has had another redesign, as you can see. I'm fairly happy with it now, so it'll stay like this for launch.
Speaking of which, the mp3-anywhere software has undergone numerous tweaks to make things run properly in firefox and to allow me to easilly update the software with new versions etc.
It's a fantasic bit of software and I have every faith that it will sell. I just need to figure out how to promote the thing now!
More soon (I promise!)
Rich
Beta testing in force
12/02/2006 09:42:07
Good morning,
Been a while since I last posted, but that's because I've been doing lots of work on the mp3-anywhere software.
There's now a proper setup that gets any non-installed components (ie dotnet framework, MDAC etc) from the web during installation so the setup file itself is nice and light.
I've also got a few more installations as you can see. The additional installs are all running on access and cassini, and everything seems to working pretty well.
Email addresses should be getting set up today, which will make things a bit more professional.
I've also sorted out some funky email templates for emailing the beta testers, and eventually the actual purchasers with updates etc.
I just worked out that it's exactly 6 months to the day since I started work on the software. If only I'd realised the potential when I started I could have had it all written and tested in about half the time, but I suppose that's quite often the case with developers writing stuff for their own use.
Anyway, better get on, it's valentine's day for god's sake!
Cheers
Rich
Board functionality
04/02/2006 17:46:42
I've also made some updates to this site, the messageboards have some extra functionality that was added in response to some posts I got on the boards.
You can now get notified when someone responds to one of your posts or threads. There's also a new "done" column which shows when bug fixes/mod requests have been completed and what version they are in.
Speaking of versions, I've decided to drop the version numbers by a whole '1', so we are currently on version 0.8. This means that the first version to be sold will be version 1.0 which makes a bit more sense I think.
Cheers
Rich
Muchos Progress Has Been Made
04/02/2006 17:41:01
I did some cracking work on mp3-anywhere (as it's now officially called) at the weekend.
I've managed to get the whole thing running with an Access database instead of MSDE (now superceeded by SQLServer 2005 Express) which I was using before. This obviously makes the whole thing a lot more saleable, albeit with a slight drop in speed.
I also wrote an importer to take the existing SQLServer data that are in all the intallations and bish that into Access.
But, the main thing I've managed to do is customize a version of Cassini to run mp3-anywhere without needing to have IIS installed. This is pretty huge as it means it will run happilly on XP Home, which beforehand was impossible. I can also bundle my customized cassini for free with the rest of the app.
So now I just need to write an installer and get the app on a few more PC's to get some proper testing going and then I should be able to sell the bugger.
Progress indeed.
Version 1.8 available
29/01/2006 22:06:41
Yes, it's finally here, get em quick while they're hot, version 1.8!
Just open the zip and save to C:\inetpub\wwwroot and overwrite any files that are already there.
I've helpfully removed all configs so it will work right out of the box!
Cheers
Rich
dotnet upgrade
28/01/2006 16:22:40
Just upgraded this site to asp.net 2.0. Wasn't too painful actually.
Will be putting version 1.8 of the software on here shortly, check the version history page to see the mods and bug fixes.
Gonna to restyle the webmp3er with the mp3-anywhere styling in version 1.9, I'm gonna need a spinning globe for the "busy" icon, any thoughts?
Oh, and there's a new RSS feed for this site. Cheers to Nixon for sorting me out with some code to get it working.
Nice one
Rich
Messageboards
21/01/2006 14:14:27
Afternoon
Spent a fair amount of time over the weekend working on the site, including the all new Message Boards. Just need to publicise them now I guess...
Unfortunately the fella who registered my home email address and website some time ago (bassconsorium.com) has gone AWOL and taken the domain with him so I've had to sort out something else until I can find him and break his legs. Pain in the arse!
Anyway, sign up with the boards and tell me all the new features you want and the bugs you've found.
Cheers
Rich
New Look
13/01/2006 20:54:58
As you can see, the site has had a bit of a re-design.
I spent a good few hours working on it last night (in between coming third in a couple of tournies on Stars. Inspiration has come from various places, including microformats and Color Schemer. There's still a fair bit of work to do on it, but progress is definately being made.
There's also a new logo for mp3-anywhere, big shout out to Ian for finding the funky globe, and muchos gracias to Kit for spending a couple of hours wrapping a musical note around a globe and then sticking it in a glass bubble that looked a bit metallic. Unfortunately I couldn't tell what it was supposed to be at the end of it all, but that could just be my dodgy eyes ;o).
I need some funky link-buttons at the top that replicate the links at the bottom. I'm also going to write a messageboard so that people can report bugs and add feature requests. And the titles in each box are a bit rubbish.
A busy weekend ahead then...
Google Schmoogle
12/01/2006 21:35:00
Having yesterday stated that a google search for webmp3er returned a solitary hit (this site), I was a bit annoyed to find today that it returns no hits at all. This is a bit odd, as I thought they only removed you if you were dong dodgy things on your site like hiding links or making pages full of keywords.
So I've signed up with Google Sitemaps to try to get some indication of what's happening.
I've also just done a search for mp3 anywhere. There are a staggering 10,700,000 pages returned. I'll have to go some to get to the top of that list I reckon. Looking at the search results returned (not all of them, obviously), I can see there is already a product called mp3 anywhere. This appears to be some sort of wireless streaming device for the home. Should have really checked before I bought the domain I guess.
Frysey's Installation
12/01/2006 08:00:06
Last night I went over to Frysey's new gaff (which was very nice indeed, good work) armed with a CD to do installation number 3.
I was expecting it to be fairly straightforward but it turned out to be much more complicated than I had envisaged. Things to remember for install 4:
1) As well as IIS and MSDE/SQLServer, you need the dotnet framework (add it to the install cd!).
2) Setting security for the dotnet worker process is quite tricky when you have Simple Security switched on in XP.
3) Currently, the watchfolders have to be directly off the root of one of the hard drives in order for the conversion from physical path to web path to take place correctly. Unfortunately, Frysey's music collection was stored in his My Docs\My Music folder, so I had to move it. Which then broke lots of other apps - oops. I've been thinking about this and I reckon I can fix it.
4) There is an extra config file that I always forget to change which is in the /mp3er/bin folder (why, Microsoft, why???)
5) There was a bug inserting the HashKey value (dodgy coding). Fixed this.
So an install that I was expecting to take 10 mins actually took an hour and a half.
Lots of work still to do then.
New Domain Registration
11/01/2006 21:24:04
Oh yes, I forgot to mention something - I decided the other day that if I am ever going to sell the webmp3er, it probably needs a better name.
The name "webmp3er" originally came from it being the web version of the "mp3er", written by Paul. We have a long history of naming applications that we write by what they do and then sticking "er" on the end. So Virgin Holidays (for whom we used to do a lots of work) have a number of systems named "Loader", "Reporter", "MISBuilder" etc.
Thus the mp3er, and then the webmp3er.
However, it is pretty unlikely that someone looking for a browser-based mp3 player is going to type "webmp3er" into their favourite search engine (in fact, at the time of writing, "webmp3er" returns a solitary hit, and that's only coz I pushed it to all the sites last week).
So, I had a search on nicnames for suitable domains.
I tried "webmp3", "mp3web", "mp3anywhere" and a few others but none of them had a .com jobby on the end (what is the name of that bit???), and everyone wants a .com don't they?
So I settled for www.mp3-anywhere.com which I think is rather good, although it has got a hyphen in it which is a bit shit. And Paul seems to think it sounds like a mobile phone mp3 player.
But I think he's wrong.
So now I need a new logo - where's that photoshop book gone?
The Story Continues
11/01/2006 20:49:50
So it turns out that it wasn't black magic at all, but something called SOAP (insert gypsey-related gag here).
By using javascript to call a SOAP wrapper which then calls a web service, it is possible to execute the web service from the browser directly. The web service then returns data to the browser, and some more javascript processes this data.
What that means in laymans terms is that you can do data-related stuff (like searching a music database for example) from a browser, and return the results without posting back to the server and waiting for the page to refresh.
So, that was the theory. Now, my javascript at the time was fairly shabby, so it took a couple of days to get something working. The hardest part was not actually the retrieving of the data, but the generation of the results tables.
Anyway, I'm getting far too technical.
I'll have to put up a demo webmp3er on this site so you can see it in action.
Tonight is going to be interesting as I'm installing it on another mate's pc. Fingers' crossed all goes well, if it does there'll be a third installation in the list on the homepage tomorrow.
And then I'll be Billy Bigtime.
Welcome!
10/01/2006 23:02:55
Hello and welcome to my blog for all things related to my browser-based mp3 player, the webmp3er.
This is the first entry so it's possibly going to be a long one....
The software was originally conceived when I got sick of having to transfer large quantities of mp3's from home to the office in order to allow me to play them during the day. I have a lot of mp3's, and it's just not practical (or indeed ethical) to store this amount of data on work servers.
My mate and all round top geezer, Paul Nixon, had written a windows-based mp3 player after we both became a little annoyed with the lack of a decent player that could handle large collections without slowing down to a complete crawl.
We initially thought it could be possible to write a bit of windows peer to peer software that could stream the tracks from the "home" pc (where the collection would reside) to the work pc. Unsurprisingly, Paul knocked something up fairly quickly that could connect and download the tracks, but streaming was proving to be a problem as neither of us had any programming expertise in this area and the process is anything but trivial.
So we decided to write a browser based solution.
As Paul was being selfish and being busy getting married and going on honeymoon, it was left to me to sort it out.
After looking in to playing music in a browser, the classiest solution seems to be using a Flash music player embedded into a page. After a bit of reading and a fair bit of playing around (I was a flash virgin), I managed to get a .NET page playing an mp3 from my hard drive.
However, refreshing the page caused the playing track to start from the beginning again. If you can't refresh (and therefore, by implication, post back) the page, then how can you possibly search for more tracks, add stuff to playlists etc.
The answer was provided by something Paul had seen on Google, called Google Suggest. It looks like the normal Google search page, but as you type into the search box a dropdown list miraculously appears that contains matching phrases to the letters you have entered.
So there it was, a web page retrieving data based on user input but without posting back to the server. What black magic could be involved to achieve such a thing?
Find out tomorrow in the next exciting installment of the webmper blog.
Bet you can't wait