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RollDaBeats v3 now live


haste

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So, you may have noticed that we've gone live with the latest version of RDB. There are still a few bugs here and there and some parts of the site need speeding up a little but we thought it was best to get things out there seeing as it's been around three years in the making.

 

If you spot anything at all that looks wrong please let us know about it.

 

There are many, many changes around the place. Here are a few:

 

More opportunity to contribute to the site

 

Users can now upload images for artists, labels and releases as well as submit new releases to add to the database. We're currently only letting people submit releases from third party databases (for now just Juno/Juno Download but the Discogs import is nearly done).

 

To add a release just paste the URL into the pop up and the site will add it to the import queue. The data should be added to RDB very quickly afterwards.

 

Users can also add videos and genres to tracks. Please help us by adding genres where you can so that we can make sure that all tracks in the site have genres attached to them!

 

Completely redesigned database

 

The new database structure allows lots of added extras including artist name variations, multiple versions of releases and a far better way of accurately storing the release info itself.

 

New digital and physical collection

 

We've split the collection feature so that you can keep track of your physical vinyl & CD releases as well as storing all the tracks you've bought in a separate digital collection. At the moment there aren't all that many digital releases in the database, but feel free to pick out the ones on Juno that you own and add them to the site.

 

Track pages

 

Each track on the site now has its own page with all the releases it features on as well as sound clips, videos and lyrics, where available. The extra bits of content will be appearing more and more over the coming weeks.

 

There's plenty more, so feel free to explore!

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Some bugs being looked at

 

The site is generally slow, sorry about this. We're looking at why this is but it's most likely because the site cache still needs to populate. Hopefully things will be much quicker over the course of today and the next couple of days. If not I'll look at how to recode the various pages and try and streamline the db calls. It was always hard to know how the site would cope with the much larger amount of traffic that the live sites gets compared to the development area

 

The date you added stuff to your collection is currently set as yesterday, this will be fixed and back to the correct date/time in a few minutes.

 

The search results may be a little off in parts, this is due to the search index not being fully complete yet. Again, I'm hoping this will be fixed over the course of the next day or so

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You should see a pink link under every track on the extended view in a release to add genres & videos and there are also links on the right hand side of each track page to add videos when you are logged in.

 

I'm guessing it might not be clear enough? Where had you expected to see the link?

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Ok I may not have been logged in properly or not looked very closely. There's a lot to see, a lot of fine detail and at the same time not looking terribly different than to before... I will take a good proper look when my head is clear.

 

It certainly looks very professional. To be honest I actually think I miss the old text based navigation of when it was 'Tarzan', very quick and nimble and easy to get lost down the rabbit hole following information! ;) But times change and I suppose the remit of this site has expanded also

 

I will report back shortly.

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There's a lot of new stuff up there and many of the new features are not obvious to start with. It's taken a long time to get here and so much has changed that making a list of it is almost impossible. It would be great to get any feedback on all of this so that I can work out what people might be missing and work out better ways of making it more obvious what people are now able to do.

 

Would be great to have more people getting involved and adding content. We're testing out the new admin system right now so am hoping to open that up once we've give it a proper go on the live site and let people submit releases to the site directly.

 

It's certainly a lot different from Tarzan!

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This error message came up when I did a search for 'D'Cruze'

 

MySQL query error: INSERT INTO `discography_searches` (search, searchtype_id, previous_search, member_id, created) VALUES ('d'cruze',1, 10987,227, '2012-10-17 18:30:21') MySQL error: You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'cruze',1, 10987,227, '2012-10-17 18:30:21')' at line 1 MySQL error code: 1064 Date: Wednesday 17th 2012f October 2012 06:30:21 PM

 

I had to type 'D Cruze' to generate search results.

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Yeah, that's to do with the character limit on the server. I need to reduce it but don't know how it's done - my techy other half is currently away so, sadly, it's likely that it'll have to wait till he's back. I'm gonna give it a shot but that sort of thing is beyond my understanding on the server side stuff.
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There's a number of things that have changed, or are broken, that I dont know where to start

 

However, one thing is the entry url's. They all read in the format:

 

http://www.rolldabeats.com/release/###/label_name/cat_no/

 

this means all existing links are broken! Which also ties into something else I've been meaning to ask, about Google rankings - our entries used to rank quite highly, now they dont seem to pop up until the second, or third pages. Is there anything that can be done about this?

 

meta tags? other possibilities?

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From the samples database:

 

It's now really difficult to edit your posts. It brings up a tiny box to make the edit in. Also, if you use the full editor, all the characters/sentences etc are bunched together, meaning you have to go and separate all the line.

 

Also the search icon (where you search for a phrase or a collection of words) is missing. If you click on the empty space the link still works, just the icon is missing.

 

Cheers

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There's a number of things that have changed, or are broken, that I dont know where to start

 

Well, please let me know if anything that you can see that's broken. Basically the entire site has been rewritten and as it essentially boils down to just me working in it it's so hard to test everything, especially as the live site (used by thousands of users) and teh development one (used by a handful) reach very differently to each other when faced with different amounts of traffic.

 

However, one thing is the entry url's. They all read in the format:

 

http://www.rolldabeats.com/release/###/label_name/cat_no/

 

this means all existing links are broken!

 

Shit, I had thought I'd built in an old look up for URLs. I'll fix this.

 

Edit: this is now fixed

 

 

Which also ties into something else I've been meaning to ask, about Google rankings - our entries used to rank quite highly, now they don't seem to pop up until the second, or third pages. Is there anything that can be done about this?

 

meta tags? other possibilities?

 

The new site should perform much better in terms of SEO, the initial slowness of the site after launch may have knocked the places down a little on search rankings but I'm expecting this to get better.

 

Meta tags aren't really that important in terms of SEO any more so there's not a great deal worth doing there.

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From the samples database:

 

It's now really difficult to edit your posts. It brings up a tiny box to make the edit in. Also, if you use the full editor, all the characters/sentences etc are bunched together, meaning you have to go and separate all the line.

 

Also the search icon (where you search for a phrase or a collection of words) is missing. If you click on the empty space the link still works, just the icon is missing.

 

Cheers

 

This seems to be a bug that came with doing a forum upgrade at the same time. What you're probably seeing it a cached version of the forum as I had the same issue for a little bit before we managed to find a fix. I'd suggest doing a hard refresh a few times when you're on a forum page (CTRL + F5 on a PC, Command + F5 on a Mac) and see whether this fixes it. If not, then try clearing your temporary internet files. Hopefully it'll be better after that

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