The Illuminated Engineer

According to Google Analytics the SSS breached the 1000 unique visitors mark last night.

While this is a tiny number of people in terms of the internet, or even in terms of the Spotify user base it's still significant to me as probably the most widely seen thing I've ever created (bar job related stuff).

Looking in to the stats in a bit more detail we can see:

• While there have been 1012 unique visitors there has only been 1404 actual visits.
• 72% of visitors only visit once, look at the curtains and then leave
• 3% have used the site more than 15 times (and less than 25)
• 88% of people stay less than ten seconds (why did they even click through?)
• 8% stay more than a minute
  
• 1 person visited the site via a translator service, but I don't know what language they wanted
  
• 223 people were sent here from comments on the Spotifty blog and 532 from Afront's site

From this I deduce that lots of people dipped a toe and a few people are finding the site quite useful.  All together not to bad for a 3 or 4 days (if you add all the nights together) work.

Pushed up a new version of the SSS tonight.

This version adds a history tab to the interface. Your previous 10 queries will be stored in a cookie in your browsers cache (thanks to Klaus Hartl for the jQuery cookie code).  There's no identifiable info in there, it's just the queries.

On top of that there's a few small interface tweaks and clean-ups.

Enjoy.

UPDATE: 2.2.1 pushed up. Had to change the layout a bit due to a bug in firefox causing graphical corruption and an issue with IE7 handling of div tags with scroll bars. I've switched to a cleaner layout that causes less problem, theres a few other little clean-ups and optimisations in there as well.  Assuming we don't find any issues in the next few days this is likely to be the last update for a while.

A little later than expected the SSS has been updated to V2.1.0.  This is just a small bump to add a few missing features I wanted in V2.0.0 but didn't quite have time for.

This version adds support for auto complete style searching on the genre list (thanks to Ryan McGeary for that code) which makes the newly updated genre list (now sitting around a 1000 entries thanks to a definitive list from Spotify) more manageable.  I've also included Afront's how to video (which will hopefully soon be updated for the new UI).

The search should now work on IE 7.0 and later, Chrome, Safari and Firefox.

UPDATE: Pushed a 2.1.1 up at lunchtime, turns out a couple of the genre entries had been merged together.  This should fix this.  Also a minor UI update to make the right bar look a little cleaner.

Web App: Spotify Super Search

Spotify is an interesting (I'd like to say wonderful, but it has too many flaws for that category yet) application that lets you stream a large catalogue of music directly to your PC for free.

"Free" costs however and you pay in terms of advertising, a single advert every 30 minutes or so inserted directly into the audio stream.  30 seconds every 30 minutes isn't much to ask and its less than most radio.  Personally I can't see how the service can survive on that level of advertising and their current subscription service isn't worth paying for.  I really hope I'm wrong however (and I know what they'd have to add to get my money each month).

Spotify is missing a lot of features that would take it that step beyond the competition.  The biggest problem is the search feature; it's limited in scope, full of inconsistencies, has no documentation and lacks a cohesive UI.  It's fine for the basic searches you'll do 90% of the time, but that one occasion where you want 90s rock metal by 3 different artists you're in trouble.

Here then is my solution: Spotify Super Search.  Based on the original SSS by Afront and incorporating his input on the new UI this web app provides a shiny GUI for building spotify queries.  Click the query and it launches in Spotify.  I'll try to keep this up to date if (or hopefully when) Spotify updates their search capability.

I have moved my various blog sites over to movable type, this has required a reset of the old Illuminated Engineer site.  I hope to update this with information on various small projects I am working on over the next few months.