superwick.com

Today I was presented with a challenge. In a project I’ve been working on (to be announced soon) - the Matt Sommers Digital Archive, there are musical artists, with many albums, which have multiple tracks. In the app, the tracks are uploaded via a form, and are processed using attachment_fu. What we needed was a way to generate a zip file of an entire album’s mp3’s, with the ability to re-generate it if any of the tracks change, and be able to present a link to make the entire album downloadable. At first, it sounded a little hard to do, but once I found out there was something called rubyzip, it became easy as cake. Here’s how I did it. (Hat tip to the author of this post for helping make it even easier for me.)
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So, I have this site I’ve been working on for what seems forever: Sceneseed.com. I wanted to add to the “News” section a list of latest stories from certain RSS feeds of my choosing. So, my challenge was finding a way to parse RSS feeds, and get display them properly on the page.
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It’s been a while, eh?

For the past month or so, I’ve been using up a ton of my spare time with a sort of experiment. It may be a great thing for me, but it also may prove to be a bust. It’s taken alot of time and effort, and I’m only about 25% of the way through to the goal. The project? Rebuilding a prominent music website from the ground up. That statement doesn’t sound too hard by itself, but trust me, it ain’t been easy. (more…)