Status of site rollout

No time for a long post today, and my head is full of lists of things I have to do by tomorrow morning, so you get some of the list.

I'm attempting to roll out the SerpentPublications.org site by the time I start distributing flyers about it at the Boston Early Music Festival. The exhibition starts tomorrow morning, and I'm planning to be there with a stack of flyers.

If you aren't interested in the site, come back later in the week, when I'll be mostly posting about all the exciting concerts I've been seeing.

Site Content

All the database-backed stuff is there, with enough PHP and mysql to provide most of the functionality of the old site, plus previews where I've generated them.

Unfortunately, moving all the relevant written stuff from the old site to the new site is being more of a pain than I expected. It needs a lot of editing, and should probably be completely redone from scratch. This can happen in the next month, but not today. So I'll probably just leave some of the old stuff on the old site, and move and redirect it as I get it rewritten or decide it's not relevant any more.

One missing piece of functionality is the list in order by the date the PDF was last generated. I don't believe this is getting used much, but it's certainly useful to me when I write the blog posts, so I may end up putting something like it back.

I haven't yet written the PHP for the search form, or added the number of parts to the database.

But I did get the code for generating previews, and a script for automatically uploading the files when they've been rebuilt. So working on the site is going to be a lot easier, and updates should happen in much closer to real time than they have been.

I'm also hoping that the previews will make the site a lot easier to use even without the search functionality and the part counting in the database.

Appearance

Page design

The pages don't look like I'd planned them yet. Doing major image editing while I'm also doing major programming in two languages I don't know very well just didn't turn out to be possible. I'll take a Friday afternoon art session some day soon and beat the images and the wordpress PHP into submission.

The plan is to have an image at the top and bottom of the page, where the facsimile of "Adieu mes amours" from Petrucci's Odhecaton merges into the lilypond transcription I've done. (See this post, and this later one for the material I have to work with.)

I haven't either gotten the images of the merge, or convinced wordpress to put images where I want them yet.

Color scheme

One comment I got from one of the friends I asked to look at the site was that it was pink on white, which isn't the color scheme scheme she would have picked. This is actually not true of the site as a whole, but the page I asked people to look at particularly, the Music by composers page, is all links, and the links are currently fuchsia. So I might change that to a darker pink, that would still go with the teal body text and headers.

Navigation and sidebar

I think the current theme with the page hierarchy as drop-down menus along the top is a clear improvement over the old two (for the blog) or three (for the static site) column layout. And when I get all the pages written, it will be more obviously useful.

The sidebar looks a little cluttered. When I have time to work on it, I'll get the links a bit better organized.

Also, when there's a bit more data, I'll put in some links to the most frequently downloaded pieces and blog entries.

I wrote the framework for counting how often a file has been downloaded and putting it in the database in a fairly short amount of time yesterday afternoon. This made me feel good about having recovered my programming skills.

Interface

As I said, I haven't written the grand search form for searching by country and century and number or parts. But I think people will find that the bycomposer page is easier to use than it used to be, and if all you want is to search on title or composer, "find in page" there will do it.

Another thing that has to happen today is linking from the top level to the wordpress site. I haven't decided whether to just do a redirect or to have a splash page.

I did a laymusic.org splash page once in the Gimp that I felt pretty good about, but it can't be used directly as is. But you should look at it anyway:

Unfortunately, it won't be usable for the laymusic.org redesign either, since I've split the music off to the new site.

Another concern is that the view I defined on the database is pretty slow. I set up some more indexes, and cut a couple of seconds off the search, but it really takes about 10 seconds to get anything out of the database if you go through that view. I may have to work on that some more later.

Summary

So as of tomorrow, there will still be rough edges, but I feel pretty good about what I've done.

I did pretty minimal changes to the brochure from two years ago, so that wasn't an enormous amount of work. I posted it on the serpentpublications blog.

Related posts:

1. What I should be doing on the new site
2. New Serpent Publications Website
3. Programming again