

Show HN: My first weekend project. - companyhen

http://hiphopblend.com<p>The website is responsive, so check it out on tablet/mobile, too! I'm currently working on adding more features to the website. It's my first official project since I started to learn programming (PHP). I would love to get an audio player in the site, which would scrape the blogs for new audio, but I'm having some difficult getting there. I really appreciate any feedback about the site at all!<p>A little about me: I've been making Wordpress sites at a digital agency for almost 9 months now (from scratch). A few months ago I became really interested in learning programming. Prior to this, I didn't really see the point. I have to thank a friend of mine to helping me get started. My HTML/CSS skills are pretty high and I wanted to take it further. Making websites has always been a hobby, but I went into music in college. Graduation came and there was an opening for a Wordpress developer at a small company. I took a shot at the interview, taught myself to make custom themes by looking at their old dev's source code and now I am where I am today. I like the direction I'm headed. I'm in metro Detroit and dream of working out in Cali one day. Enjoy!
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instakill
For the lazy: <http://hiphopblend.com>

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hartleybrody
Congrats on shipping your first project! This is very similar to something I
built a few year back that aggregates music from blogs in the "college music"
demographic (hip-hop + pop + electronic).

<http://www.thecollegecartel.com/>

Are you using Magpie RSS (<http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/>) or scraping
more directly? I remember that was the first third party library I had ever
used.

I found that the simplest thing was to split the list of posts out by site. I
was thinking of having a "most recent" section at the top, but -- as others
have mentioned -- I had trouble devising a good de-duplication strategy.

The other issue I struggled with was grabbing the actual music file from the
site and potentially allowing it to be streamed on my site. I suppose there
are a small enough number of embedded audio players used that I could have
dissected each one and figured out how to pull the link to the audio file.

But, I grew bored with that project and moved on to other things. I'd love to
lend a hand if you have any questions!

~~~
companyhen
Very nice! I'm actually using SimplePie (<http://www.simplepie.org/>) which I
found a pleasure to work with.

I'll take your comments into consideration. I was thinking to try to sort the
stories by popularity (measured by # of clicks?) as well.

I definitely would like to talk - you can shoot me an email, it's my username
@gmail.com!

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shyn3
I like the UI. Really simple.

Maybe avoid duplicates across the tracks. Would require some hardcore regex
because of the way all the different sites name the tracks.

Some of those sites have a direct DL link so you can scrape and provide a
direct DL link instead of having to go to the page.

A category that says "music" and lists all the tracks and threads the same
songs. So if 2dope and nahright have the same track it wouldn't show twice.

Anyways, this makes life easy for a lot of people I would bet. Cool idea, nice
clean UI.

Edit: If you do get the direct links scraped and make them auto-play you can
set it so I can click a site like "nahright" and listen to all the songs in a
loop without having to leave your site or select songs. Then have a "download
this track" option which would grab the songs I like only.

~~~
companyhen
I really like those ideas. I definitely want to get rid of dupes somehow, but
as you said it definitely will take some work. Thanks!

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bira
How about adding a tag line in the header saying "Fresh hip hop music, news,
videos and more" ?

I couldn't understand what the site was about. I'm still not sure.

What is it?

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WiseWeasel
I use SoundManager 2 for music playback on my site. It's flexible, it works
well, and it has good cross-browser compatibility.

<http://www.schillmania.com/projects/soundmanager2/>

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flexxaeon
i thought it was all music at first until after a few clicks, so perhaps an
icon next to each link to discern music from articles from interviews?

for some of them (the reddit ones for example) they're already using a 3rd
party player (youtube), so with a little extra scraping of the content you can
grab the necessary info and embed the content yourself in lieu of your own
player

also +1 the previous comment about duplicates

i like the concept as i enjoy finding new hip hop music but there's way too
many places i have to visit to find them.

edit: grammar

~~~
shyn3
I second separating the music from articles/interviews/misc

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Zaheer
Great site, One nitpick: I found the font used for each section a bit hard to
read. If I'm focusing on it, it's fine but when I'm scrolling through the page
just skimming it's a lot harder to decipher.

~~~
companyhen
Thanks for the feedback.

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thoughtpalette
Which agency are you at in Metro-Detroit if I may ask? I have friends in that
area.

Sick site as well.

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mvts
> target="_blank";> Why the semi-colon?

Apart from that, grats on your first project!

~~~
companyhen
Thanks, still have some validation work to do as you can see!

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sktrdie
It's kind of hard to understand what the site does exactly. Do you have an
'about' page?

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russtrpkovski
Congrats on shipping your first product!

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muratmutlu
Congrats! Think it looks great so far!

