Martune.net Dev Blog

I’ve started writing another blog for the company I work for. Mainly I’ll be doing reviews of Movies, Music and Video Games. Check it out and drop me some hot sweaty comments if you get a chance.

You can find it here .

I’m going to continue to post updates on the development of martune so stay tuned. I’ll going to be taking a week off of work in the near future and hopefully make some serious progress on the site. So keep an eye out!

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I’ve started messing around with elgg. It’s an open source social networking tool. It’s seems to be fairly new still, I’m not finding much for live sites at the moment. What I’m liking so far is that it takes advantage of openID. openID is sort of an open source version of Microsoft’s passport. What I’m thinking this will be good for is if I use seperate prepackaged applications on my site my users will only have to maintain a single account.

Other then that I’m still taking the lynda.com classes trying to learn a thing or two.

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Okay I’ve changed my mind again. I’m messing around with Zen Cart now. Why not I guess this would be the time to do it.

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As I said earlier I’ve messed around with web development over the years, but I would hardly consider myself professional by any means. So I need to learn some stuff, a lot of stuff actually. So where to start? I have a stack of books that I’ve bought over the last few months, on everything from ajax, php, mysql css, information architecture and on and on.

I hardly ever read nerd books from cover to cover though. They’re usually pretty big thus it’s time consuming to go through the whole thing and not all of the information is applicable. I mostly read what I think I need to know and use the book as reference when I run into trouble. Since I’ve got so much info I need to get up to speed with. Books just aren’t the most efficient system, I’m an avid reader, but a speed reader definitely not.

A coworker had referred me to Lynda.com and it’s proven to be a goldmine. They give instructional videos on a wide array of subjects, mostly design/web design related. Best of all it’s cheap, it’s only $25/month for a basic subscription which gives you access to all of their videos. You can watch as many as you want. It’s been very helpful for me so far, so I highly recommend it if you’re looking to learn more about web developement.

linky –> http://www.lynda.com

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1. Create an easy way for bands to submit music to me. I think I do want it all to go through me before it’s listed on the site so I can enforce some standards on quality, tagging and naming.

2. Theme , I want to come up with a unique clean look for the site. I still want to go with a 1950’s style space theme.

3. Catalog

4. Tying sales of specific items to the band that owns them. This shouldn’t be hard, I just need to get a system in place.

5. Figuring out ‘the cut’ or whether to go with an advertising based model. I want to give the biggest cut I can to bands. I’ll be using paypal to process transactions and they take 2% to 3% of the transaction plus 0.30. So that’s a pretty big chunk of an order if someone only buys 1 song for 99 cents. If someone buys an album for 9.99 then it isn’t so bad. My costs for hosting and bandwidth are insignificant to begin with so that isn’t a factor now, but it will be if things start to takeoff. I really really do not want to go the advertising route.

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So I figured while I’m still kicking the tires I might as well try out the ubercart store module as an alternative to e-commerce. Very similar, but I think I like it better. So far it’s been much easier to configure. Configuring digital file sales was no problem and I think it may be a good fit for the store portion of the site. I think I just need to do a little bit of testing and then I’ll start working on making it pretty.

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Okay I think I’m going to change things up a bit. One of my coworkers had told me about the CMS Drupal recently and I thought I’d check it out. Holy Crap, it’s awesome. Very wide open, highly customizable, PHP and MySQL = Tommy likes those wingies. They also have an e-commerce module that allows for merchant services and file download based purchases. Those are huge chunks of work that I wouldn’t have to worry about for starters. It would at least help me get the ’store’ portion of my site up and going. I’d would be able to focus on the social networking portions of the site more fully.

Well it looks like I’ve got some work cutout for me this weekend.

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As I said before I’m kind of a n00b when it comes to web design. I like the concept of separating the formatting from your HTML so you can make the look of your site standardized throughout it’s entirety. Also giving you the ability to make changes globally.

So to start out I just grabbed a template from freecsstemplates.org and I’ve been modifying it to my liking. The one I picked is called blooming if you want to check it out. I snagged a login app system that I’m modifying for my purposes and dropped in the form portion of it into my right sidebar column. Now I just need to get it looking a little purdier. It’s PHP and MySQL so it works with the rest of the stuff I have going on great. The table that the login fields sit in were just developed to sit in a plain html document so it doesn’t look quite right.

I found some great examples over at AListApart.com I’ll be trying them out over the weekend and hopefully I’ll get a chance to start working on some of the user profile content as well.

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So I’ve decided on going with a PHP, MySQL based solution. I’ve run various phpbb websites over the years and I’ve dug into coding with them a little bit on the other hand I’ve done more programming with Visual Basic so I would probably wouldn’t have as steep of a learning curve if I go ASP.net and I’d be able to push Martune out much quicker.

Both of them have excellent communities I can pull info from and they’re close to being tied when it comes to performance, PHP being slightly faster. Either choice would work fine for me. I guess the real decision came down to cost. I don’t really have deep pockets for startup capitol and I’d like to go the legal route when it comes to software. If I went down the Microsoft path I would definitely be starting out doing it illegally:) If things take off and I need to scale servers quickly at low cost again the choice points to a *nix based solution.

All around I wouldn’t say open source is cheaper in the long run though, the cost comes in the form of the people you hire to maintain it. There’s a lot more M$ techs out there working for less then there are unix guys. Lucky for me I’m the only one working on it so I won’t have to worry about that.

I think I’ll stop now before this becomes a big MS vs OS post. I like them both it’s just that PHP/MySQL is a better fit.

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Hello Hello

I decided to put away my photo gallery site since I haven’t really touched a camera in a long time and use martykokes.com for a development blog for Martune. It will still be accesible here, but I wouldn’t expect any updates.

First of all what is Martune? Well basically it’s will be what I think will become the music store of the future. It’s a MP3 based music store similar to iTunes combined with a social networking site similar to MySpace and facebook. I know that there are already some very established players in the arena even though the new digital music industry is still somewhat in it’s infancy. I would consider the existing competition to be more of a Sam Goody/Best Buy flavor when it comes to comparing them to brick and mortar music stores. What I want to create is more of a hang out somewhere where music fans can meet and talk about what they’re into, recommend music to others, share video and pictures. Also where bands can set up shop and have an assortment of networking and self promotion tools free of charge. I’ve got a few tricks that I think will set me apart from my competitors.

So now comes the hard part actually making this beast:) I’m not really a developer by trade, for the most part most of career has revolved around network administration and desktop support. I do like to get my hands into everything though and I’ve done small programming projects over the years and gradually more and more work with databases. Well now I guess I’ve got reason to dive in a little deeper.

So for the most part I’m just going to be writing about the parts of the application I’m currently working on and the tools I’m using to make them. Current problems that cause me to consider seppuku, etc. If you have any tips, suggestions or ideas with me feel free to leave me some comments!

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