Well, the website’s been live for two weeks now and hasn’t crashed once.
It has been up and down plenty of times as I fixed things (sorry if this has affected you) and in particular I spent ages trying to sort out different character encodings in abc files that were causing all sorts of headaches (I’m still having nightmares about UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1, but my therapist tells me it should be better in a few years time). However, the site hasn’t actually crashed.
In fact, the clustr map is showing over two and a half thousand visits from all over the world and my own log is showing a wide variety of searches. Unfortunately, a lot of people are searching for pop, rock and other copyright tunes, which I know for sure aren’t listed in the tune search, but I hope they find something of interest.
The forums haven’t taken off in a bit way yet – maybe they never will. To be honest, I hadn’t even planned on including them for the initial site relaunch (though I was planning to add them later). And then I found this very tempting “install” button on the website control panel provided my web hosts … and an hour or so later, there they were (the power of software!). But time will tell if they are going to be useful or not.
This blog was a similar discovery. I hadn’t even thought about having one originally. I’m not sure how active it’s going to be, but its probably the best place to keep up to date with changes to the site (though major changes will be announced).
Anyway, I hope everyone who’s visiting is finding the new site helpful and easy to use.
Chris
Tags: abc, character encodings, pop rock, site, tune search, Website
“I’m still having nightmares about UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1”.
*laughter*. I came here because I just heard you on R4 mentioning ABC from China – I’ve been having them too. I think they start as soon as you begin accepting live input over the web …
Does your therapist have any suggestions for making them stop ? I’ve fallen rather out of touch with developments. Is anybody dealing with Encodings at all ? All I know of is abcm2ps’s choice of 6, which helps for our locality, but won’t do the Chinese much good.
One quick fix is to write ABC in utf8 and translate it into Lilypond. This mangles it in other ways, and I don’t know how far it’ll go, but if you just want to print a Welsh tune with a W-circumflex in the title …
Oh, and the idea of people looking them up from Timbuktu is fun, too.
Yes – doing it live / in real time during a search is a problem.
In particular (as far as I know) there is no way of detecting whether a file is UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1 (or something else) until you have read the entire file in – for example, if the very last character in the file was the only one with an accent.
However, the abc tune search indexes files off-line (as Google and most / all other search engines do) so I convert them all to ISO-8859-1 – by far the most popular encoding – at that point.
Chris
“In particular (as far as I know) there is no way of detecting whether a file is UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1 (or something else) until you have read the entire file in – for example, if the very last character in the file was the only one with an accent”
Yes. Unless it’s got some sort of header, and you choose to believe it.
My site’s accepting submitted tunes online, so I’m going for ‘be liberal in what you accept’, converting all input to utf-8 and working in that, going back to something the abc progs can handle when I need to generate an image/midi &c. Ideally, I’d like all comers to be able to submit, eg, a title in whatever language they want to write it, and have it render properly …