Friday, November 30, 2007

What I did this summer and other frightening tales!

I'm an admittedly terrible blogger. I assume (incorrectly) that others are paying attention and that blogs often just repeat repeat the obvious.

Finetune development has continued like crazy since the last time I posted here with little to phone home about.... sort of.

http://www.finetune.com

We reworked the site templates to make some room for on-page advertising... a slightly smaller flash player, a much larger pop-out flash player, a flash based playlist status box (which reduces tons of javascript Yay!). We moved data centers (about 12 feet), we quadrupled the server footprint, and introduced much higher capacity load balancing for much higher capacity web traffic. We've started reproducing the artwork for hundreds of thousands of albums in many sizes and formats. We're developing artwork for top and featured artists as time permits... so what looks like a simple re-skin is really a prequel to a lot of new capabilities.

Now there are still little irritations about how some of the new templates work (or don't work)... those will get worked out.

What else.... oh right I almost forgot about facebook. Our facebook app is that scary stranger that chased me around the abandoned amusement park all summer and all fall. Hopefully pretty soon we'll pull the rubber mask off the beast and it'll be the kindly old caretaker.... Rhuh-Ro!


http://apps.facebook.com/finetune/

The facebook app... again seemingly simple is massive. If someone out there has developed a good way of working with the facebook platform without making everything they do "live" I would love to hear about it. So we build hidden pages to test live pages and we write log files when our scripts recognize our own user ids.... seriously there is a million dollar idea there... facebook platform emulator for the win.
Check out both finetune and finetune on facebook... I'm always happy to get feedback, it helps us make the next idea better.

Happy Holidays - Mykel

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

hey nice blog!

here's one of my fav playlist on finetunes called All Day Breakfast

http://www.finetune.com/playlist/1572945

Anonymous said...

I want to be able to embed users playlists on to my web site but don't want them to paste the HTML code in. I would rather they just gave me the ID of their playlist and I use that to insert the correct embed link on to their page. Is this possible? How does the playlist Id correspond to the HEX value used with the embed tags?

Fernando Cerutti said...

Hi,
The player isn`t loading in the finetune website, but I can use it your blog. What's going on?
Could you help me?
Greetings,

Marianot

frank_ezelle said...

It's unlikely that anyone will see this comment, but here goes. First, thanks for building the finetune.com website. It has been my favorite site on the internet when it comes to music.

I'm sure there's a reason that the ability to create playlists was removed this month, but that was the feature that set you apart from the others. It's a shame that it had to go. I do appreciate that you left the playlists that were already created and I'll certainly return to finetune at times to listen to those, but it just won't be the same as in the early days. That's life, especially life on the internet. Good luck to you all and thanks again for hundreds of hours of listening pleasure. Frank (FLE on finetune)

frank_ezelle said...

It looks like all the features are being turned off at Finetune and the website is slowing fading into the sunset. While disappointed that I'm losing this source of great music, I recognize that all good things eventually must end.

So, while there's still a chance that you are still around to see this comment, let me say thanks to all of you who put together Finetune and provided me with hundreds and maybe thousands of hours of listening pleasure. Good luck with your next venture and know that your work on this project was appreciated by many. Take care,

Frank Ezelle (username: FLE)