Over the last few evenings I’ve been able to add a few cool new features to Jinzora. Album Sorting, Google Ads, and YShout.

Album Sorting
We’ve added a new drop down box to the album list block on the artist page. This lets you with a simple drop down sort the albums by year (the default) or by name. It’s pretty fast but we do plan on AJAX’ing it fully with the 3.0 interface.

Google Ads
Thanks to Wim for point out some very cool hacks that he saw (sorry I don’t remember who right now!) to add our next two features, Google Ads (and YShout in a sec). You can specify your Google Adsense ID in the Slick settings file and show a nice little Google Ads block over in the left colum. It’s even themeable, chaning style to whatever stylesheet you select. Yup, the default Google ID is our’s – but it’s not enabled by default.

YShout
Thanks go to Yuri at YShout for his help today. I was able to IM with him and get his YShout AJAX Shoutboard software embedded within a Slick block very quickly. Basically lets you embed a small simple chat window right inside Jinzora.

That’s pretty much it for the upcoming build, 2.6. That’ll be out this coming Saturday which is a big day for Jinzora Back to bug fixing…

It sure doesn’t to me. Boy it is just amazing how expensive it can be to fix cars these days. Yes yes, I’m fine and so was the other guy but somehow that is little comfort. At least I have good insurance and was able to get a rental car yesterday afternoon (and it was even a Toyota Corolla since they were out of Dodge Neon’s!) Oh, and right now that estimate is a “rough estimate” and it should take at least 2 weeks to fix (which in auto mechanic speak means more like 3). I already miss my Pathfinder….

Well I had a crappy morning and I thought it might make me feel better to bitch about it. This morning, my Monday morning since Melanie and I took yesterday off for her birthday, I wrecked my 2003 Pathfinder. Long story short I was driving in light traffic behind a Dodge Durango that was behind an . All at the same time the Audi jammed on his breaks to turn right at the last second, the Durango accordingly jammed on his breaks all while I was looking to the left so I could change lanes. The next thing I know BLAMO I smash into the Durango and the Audi goes on his way. Oh, and I get the ticket for it! Damn Audi drivers!

So my car had to be towed (all the radiator fluid leaked out) and is at the shop now. I’m waiting for estimate now, fortunately I have good insurance so I’ll probably pick up a rental car today or tomorrow (oh fun, at least 2 weeks in a crappy little Dodge Neon!). Fortunately no one was hurt at all (it was very low speed) and the other driver was very understanding (after all his cursing at the Audi that really caused the accident).

So while you might have had a bad morning it probably wasn’t as bad as mine. Nope, writing this didn’t make me feel any better, beer for me tonight, I’m sure that’ll help!

If you follow my blog at all you’ll know that really love Microsoft Windows Media Center Edition. I’m using it on all my televisions and most recently with my XBox 360 (which is finally back from repair). One of the great things about my system is that I have access to all the television shows that I’ve converted to DivX from any TV in the house – any TV except the one my XBox is connected to. See the issue is that the XBox 360 can’t play DivX files.

Well that’s not entirely true. You can use this great little app, Transcode 360 to convert your DivX files (actually a huge list of files) to MPEGII and stream them to your XBox. The problem with that is you have to go through extra steps, about 30-45 seconds worth, to get the files to play. Not very wife friendly and not very me friendly for that matter. So while I’ve been using that solution for a while now I wanted to figure out a solution that was easier/faster when I just want to throw on an old episode of Cheers while we’re eating dinner. WinAVI to the rescue.

I’d been looking for an app that would do the following for me for quite a while:

• Convert from DivX to WMV
• Convert them at 100% quality (or very near to 100%)
• Keep the AC3 audio track (for my movies if I did this)
• Allow for batch encoding
• Be fast and easy to use

With WinAVI I’ve found almost all of that. While I haven’t tested the AC3 stuff with it it does everything I need. I can setup a batch job (not super easy to do but it can do it) to convert as many files as I want. I’ve had 3 machines at home converting files 24/7 for about a week now (yes, I’m crazy). So far it takes about 12 hours to convert an entire season of a show so while it’ll take me a while when I’m done all these files will play perfectly on my XBox (and of course on my PC’s) without me needing to transcode them. My WAF (wife acceptance factor) is now very high Highly recommended

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….