Krass

Richie Hawtin recently started to post the records he is playing on twitter. He is using Traktor while he plays, which now has a new plugin which allows this functionality. Others have posted about this and what it means for techno music enthusiasts, DJs and the music industry. I think it is one of the few good applications of twitter and I decided to hack something together to display this information in a little bit nicer way. I created a site at sets.krass.com which gets the tweets from twitter and generates a list of DJ sets and a top10. As Hawtin is the only DJ I know who uses this application the overall top10 is not much use, but it shows the potential. This is my first project using symfony and I was surprised how good it worked for this task and how easy it is to get started. If you have problems accessing the site, come back a bit later, there seems to be a problem with one of my secondary DNS servers. Some thing I have planned for the future: add links from the tracks to krass.com, discogs and co. It is a bit difficult, because artist names are not always present or correctadd more DJs, if you know of someone also using this kind of tweets give me a shoutmake the combining of tracks into sets better (at the moment I just use the day) and allow more sensible names for thesepages with tracks listed by artists and links to the artist pagesThat is enough for today though, because it is bloody hot here in Barcelona.

The Sonar 2009 - krass.com pages are up. This is probably the last time I do this, as it is just too much work and nobody else is helping me with the wiki. Sonar is doing a special offer of 125 EUR for the general pass for the three days. The normal price is 140, which is the same as last year. Maybe they realize that they can’t raise it every year. Some of the parties were very empty last year.

This weekend I moved more websites away from my old dedicated server. The site of my girlfriend moved from mediawiki to a blogger.com account. Our family website is now a planet running on the new virtual server. And today I moved http://krass.com/ also to the virtual server. This turned out to be a major hassle, because the mediawiki version was pretty old and the mysql server changed from 4.1 to 5.0. As usual with these things I run into charset troubles. After playing for ages with various combinations of iconv and mysqldump I gave up and put a ‘SET names latin1’ after the connect in the mediawiki code. This is obviously not a good solution, but I can’t be bothered at the moment. I changed the skin to keep most of the mediawiki layout to make it a bit easier with upgrades and userfriendlier for people who already know wikipedia. I will play around with it though to make it look better. Someone from Wikia contacted me last week again and wanted to know if I wo uld be interrested in moving krass.com to Wikia. I am not at the moment, but if it turns out to be too much work in the future I might take them up on the offer. I also have to see how the virtual server can take the load, it seems to be a bit underpowered.