Well, it's been a while huh? As you may know I go through slumps where I just don't have the time or energy to write here, something I really hope to change in the future (I've never said that before right?).

Ok, well let's get to it. If you've been following Ben and I recently you know that we're back to it, back to Jinzora. Ah, it's so nice to be back into it once again. And we've been busy, adding features and improving performance (yes, we know it's slow and it's going to get a LOT faster). More on speed in a second, lets talk about new features first.

As for features we've added a number of things lately, since the 2.5 release. The major things we've added lately are:

• Support for Xoops and the e107 CMS
  
• Mobile playlists are now created with unique names - no more "file already exists" warnings in Windows Mobile
  
• Lots of small GUI updates for Andro
  
• Added the "Show all art" link back into Slick (sorry I missed that one!)
  
• HTML View elements in ASX playlists
  

I wanted to take a second and explain that last one, the HTML View elements. Basically what this allows is for Windows Media Player to show HTML data inside the player while playing tracks. You can set this for the entire playlist, or a different URL for each track (what I'm doing). What this does is query Jinzora for all the information about the currently playing track. Right now this shows the track/album/artist information including the album art and description of the album (if available). I need to update this so if that information is missing it'll still look nice, but for right now you'll need to have that data in your collection (remember you can use our Meta Data services to get that for you). I'll post in the forums about this features and solicit some feedback about it.

Ok, enough for features what are we doing to speed things up? Well in short a lot. The major things we've done lately are:

• Made our page caching system fully dynamic. What this means is as you browse Jinzora and it creates pages they are cached for later use so they don't have to be regenerated all the time. The main issue with this was what if the media changed? Well now we hook into our LiveUpdate functions to know when the backend data is updated so we can update the cache accordingly. This feature alone can speed up page loads by as much as 1000%. This is now enabled by default.
  
• Along with the page caching Chris has been helping us by using some great PHP profiling/debugging tools (namely xdebug) to figure out where our bottlenecks are/were. I've been able to shave several seconds off some of the page loads by tracking down slow code
  
• We've also disabled the "secure_url" functions. Basically this is the code we use to encrypt the URL's so users can't easily figure out information about your collection. While these work great they slow things down quite a bit, especially on large collections. You can of course re-enable this if you'd like
  
• The big one is yet to come, that is the full backend/database redsign that Ben is working on. We'll be moving to a truly relational database schema soon, and a new importer system. Ben's got a ton of work ahead of him but those of you that know Ben know this is gonna rock!
  

So that's about it for my quick update for today. I plan to write more in the future about what we're doing with Jinzora to try to keep everyone in the loop. Oh, and next on my list? Embeddable blocks. Allowing you to embed Jinzora elements in your site/blog/etc. Should be in the next few weeks....

Posted in: Jinzora