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…

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….

Well we finally released the next version of Jinzora, Jinzora 2.2. We’d be waiting for a bit to release it on Jinzora’s 2nd birthday which was yesterday…

It’s hard for me to believe that I’ve been hacking on Jinzora for 2 years now. It’s been a lot of fun along the way and I’ve certainly learned a lot. I’ve not only learned a lot of PHP/MySQL/HTML/coding in general but I’ve learned a ton about general project management – specifically from the development/product side.

There’s been one other unexpected side affect of all this. All the amazing people I’ve met all over the world. This I was not expecting. I’ve heard from people on every continent (expect Antarctica) and it over 80 different countries. Amazingly enough on friend I’ve made, Wim Hager from the Netherlands, is actually coming to Denver next week on vacation and we’re getting together for dinner! This is just amazing to me, that I’ll get to have dinner with someone from the Netherlands thanks to Jinzora. Amazing.

So back to Jinzora 2.2. There are several big things in this release, for all the details see the full Jinzora Changelog. Most notably there are a few critical security fixes – all users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to this release immediately.

So if you know me at all you know that I spend most of my free time on Jinzora. If you don’t know what Jinzora is, in a nut shell it’s a web based streaming and media management application written in PHP. I’ve been working on Jinzora for almost 2 years now and it’s grown to a user base of around 6,000. Hopefully that number is gonna jump like crazy now.

When I started Jinzora there were a few others like us, Zina (which is what Jinzora originally started from) and Netjuke. I originally modeled a lot of what I did off Netjuke, as they really were the big player. Netjuke’s been around for about 5 years now and the main reason I didn’t just use it was I didn’t care for it’s interface, I’m very visual and wanted something that looked as good as it worked.

So why tell you all this history? Well if you read the headline you probably know. This week we announced that the Jinzora and Netjuke teams are merging. I’ve been speaking with the guys at Netjuke and we all couldn’t be more excited about this merger. This is truly a merger, we will all be working on our next product (whatever we call it, we’re not sure yet…). It’s looking like I’ll be the project lead for this new project, as I’ve got the time and desire to push it forward.

What does this mean? Well it means that our 3.0 version is gonna just floor everyone. If you didn’t notice from the headline we also released Jinzora 2.0 which was over a year in the making. Ben Dodson and I spent countless hours on it and are very proud of what we’ve produced. So far we’re getting great feedback on it, I hope you’ll give it a try.

So drop by our news page and read the full press release about our release and the merger. Oh, and of course post back here and let me know what you think…

Ok, so today is Jinzora day. If you look over to the left of the page you’ll notice a little block that says “Now Listening”. What’s this you may ask? Well I’ll tell you…

For Jinzora 2.1/3.0 we’re working on a new API that 3rd party developers can use to easily pull data from Jinzora. One of the first things we’ve added is the ability to pull what you are listening to, in real time, from Jinzora (or the last thing you were streaming if it’s quiet time…). So if you use Jinzora and Moveable Type (or other blogging software, I’m sure it would work with just about anything I just only use Moveable Type) I’d love to hear from you to help us test this.

So if you’re up for it email me at ross@jinzora.com and I’ll work with you to get you all setup. Remember that you’ll need your own working Jinzora install first, you can’t use mine

Well I finally did it, I finally released Jinzora 1.1 today. Rather than rehash everything here you can read the release announcement for yourself. Along with this release I’ve released a new design for the website that I think is much cleaner and more professional looking.

It’s been a long road for this release, and I have to admit I did get into a mode of feature creep where I just kept getting ideas and kept adding things in. I guess that’s how software goes, huh? Please check out the release and let us know in our forums about any issues you find. Enjoy!!!