Music on Rails

It’s official - Song List is part of web 2.0. I’ve been slashdotted here. The torrent was hard to withstand… a total of 10 hits! Nonetheless - a milestone.

I have interest in seeing how the site is being used. The logs and google analytics give a very nice snapshot of that. What I don’t get is visibility to the clicks to external sites. With Google Analytics you can instrument click-outs but you need to add Onclick javascript code to each link.
So.. I added a level of indirection. Now when the users click on an online music store icon - it comes back to the Song List controller. For example:

http://www.song-list.net/mp3/itunes/949650/949525

The MP3 action then redirects to the appropriate music library (in this case itunes). I keep all the neccesary information in the url so the controller doesn’t need to do a database call. I’ve seen some shopping sites do the same only the real link is transmitted via a key - requiring a DB call, and taking much more time.
Now I can see in the logs which music libraries get clicked more often (answer: so far it is Rhapsody).

I just released a new version of the database. There are now over 2,000 artists listed. This is of course just a drop in the sea of available music.

I’ve started a new job, so I have a limited amount of time to enhance the site and collect more data. At the moment I am trying to get the current content indexed a bit better by google and yahoo. This has been challenging - more in a future post.