The Modern Riffer » Site Features http://blog.rifflet.com The Official Blog of Rifflet.com, the home of unfinished songs Tue, 12 Apr 2011 02:27:23 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 In Search of… http://blog.rifflet.com/featured/creative-commons/ http://blog.rifflet.com/featured/creative-commons/#comments Wed, 12 Aug 2009 02:18:33 +0000 Jon http://blog.rifflet.com/?p=178 Search by Creative Commons license at rifflet.com/creativecommonsLet’s be honest: Rifflet, like every music site before it, is worthless until you find something you like.

Teaser: To try out the new Rifflet Creative Commons search here.

The original Drupal search was nice, until it stopped working, and the Google custom search was a big step forward, but there’s still no way to find the Creative Commons (CC) license attached to a particular song without clicking on all of them individually. When your entire site hinges upon adaptation and remixing, Creative Commons is kind of important.

Why did it take so long?  Shouldn’t it be easy to search for one stinkin’ property with the most powerful open source content management system on the planet? (Sorry WordPress, with which I’m writing this very post.) Sadly, the answer is no. To simplify the problem, Drupal records the CC license attached to each song, but it doesn’t allow that information to be accessed by the search function (the Views module, if you’re a Drupal-er).  With a ton of help from a great book and the larger Drupal community, I was able to write a quick module that makes the CC license searchable.  It doesn’t sound like much (and it isn’t), but it took a crapload of time for a guy who is functionally illiterate in PHP.

My hope it to have it available as a real, live module available from drupal.org, but I want to make sure everything is kosher before I try to release it. If nothing else, I want to give a tiny bit back to the open-source community that has given all of us so much.

courtesy http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses

courtesy http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses

]]> http://blog.rifflet.com/featured/creative-commons/feed/ 0 Get the Widget http://blog.rifflet.com/site-features/get-the-widget/ http://blog.rifflet.com/site-features/get-the-widget/#comments Thu, 12 Feb 2009 04:52:31 +0000 Jon http://blog.rifflet.com/?p=28 Here’s a way to pass new music on to your friends and show off your love of crappy ’80s retro: Embed the Rifflet Widget on Facebook, MySpace, LiveSpaces or whatever other page you not-getting-off-my-lawn kids like to visit.

Our widget, which is powered by the very cool (and free) Sprout Builder, has 1-click additions for pretty much every social media site you can think of, and a few that no one is thinking about (I’m looking at you, NetVibes.)

If you want to see it in action, head to the bottom of this page.

The idea is that the widget is a monthly snapshot of the best of Rifflet; each month, we’ll pick some new (or old but awesome) rifflets. Your widget will be automatically updated with the new songs, so you’ll have new music on your page without having to do anything.

Did I mention it has a cassette on it? It’s practically a signifier in a box.

If you have your own site, or you don’t trust automation, you can copy the following code into the appropriate location:

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