Tagfriendly Update

I am going to tie off version 0.1 since I've accomplished the meager goals I set for myself in January with regard to Tagfriendly. Here is what they were:

1. Track music blogs.
2. Full-text search.
3. Dynamic RSS feeds (turned on last night).
4. Learn python (still a work-in-progress).
   

I've added other features along the way, but those are the basics that I wanted. Here are some things I've been thinking about for the next iteration (roughly one month):

1. More Last.fm (social) integration. Lots of ideas here. For example:
• What if when you scanned the recent MP3s, you could know which ones your friends like?
  
• What if you could create an RSS feed that would generate entries related to your top 10 (20 or 30) songs or bands? (this was suggested by a friend.)
  
• What if you could scrobble love/hate directly from the website?
  
• Lots of cool things here, and they won't be too hard to implement.
• The problem with Last.fm is that using them has a detrimental impact on Tagfriendly site performance (their services are S-L-O-W). I've used a lot of caching (artist information mostly), but that only gets me so far.
  
2. Simple identity management. This will enable features like "show me all the new stuff since the last time I was here." I'll start with just a cookie. That has limitations, so I'll eventually push for simple email registration.
3. Flash based in-browser mp3 player to stream the songs from the blogs. The ethics of this are probably dubious, but I have noticed that many of the bloggers deep link to mp3s stored on other sites. I guess we're all in this together. Hopefully I can find something off the shelf that does this.
4. I need to clean up the back-end scripts that do the crawling and generate the static pages.
5. Better tests.
6. More blogs. I'm up to 30 and crawling+indexing get done in about 3-4 minutes. I'd like to scale up to 100 blogs for this iteration and see how things are handled.
   

That's about it for a month. I average about an hour a day of Tagfriendly development, so this is about the right amount of work for a month. (Honestly, I could probably spend an entire month on testing, but how sexy is that?)