MRC2k12 - Lyre Bird | MSX Resource Center

The days are getting shorter, the temperature goes down gradually, ideal weather for development! While there was a storm outside, the MRC crew - with Jorito at the steering wheel - sat comfortably inside outlining and implementing new functionality for this website. So, what exactly is new?

There is now a music player in the side bar. It plays all the mp3 files in our downloads section. Give it a go! You can shuffle tracks and filter the playlist to find tracks easily.
Facebook integration! You can now create new accounts using your facebook login and/or connect your existing account to your facebook account. In order to do so, go to your account settings and click the Facebook Connect button.
MSX Resource Center Facebook page. Keep up-to date on the latest MSX news and share it with your friends on Facebook.
We've adjusted the forum index a bit, merging forums in order to create a more compact and clearer overview.
The user profile page was improved to reflect recent activity better
Improved eBay block, showing worldwide MSX auctions now
There's now a new download counter with improved accuracy and better download speeds
We now have an MSX topbanner to promote MSX events. This bigger and more prominently presented banner is now in use for three contests (our Tenliner challenge, the #MSXdev compo, and MSXdev'12). If you wish to use that topbanner for your organisation, event or product, do get in contact with us and we'll work something out. We can provide design, or tweaks of a current design for you.
There's now support for Youtube URLs with time codes.
News tweets linking to Youtube now open in a movie popup.
There are now tooltips for large content boxes on the homepage.
A bug has been fixed which allowed you to post in forum containers.
And of course, lots of smaller bugfixes.

We'd say that's enough to keep you entertained, don't you think so? So, what's up with this Lyre bird? This creature is an Australian bird (South East part), famous for convincingly imitating a wide range of sounds and animals. Not just other birds, but also man made machines such as camera shutters and car alarms. It's a bird that listens carefully, which is what we've done too; to our readers, and to our own experiences. A website like this is never really finished, but if we keep our ears focused, we're getting there!

As usual, if you spot any bugs, or if you have any brilliant ideas, make yourself heard in the MRC 2k11 Feedback thread

Relevant link: MSX Resource Center

Comments (22)

By Jorito

Mr. Ambassadors (1784)

01-11-2012, 00:29

Woei

I'm glad it's done. Time to move to the next release!

By NYYRIKKI

Enlighted (6011)

01-11-2012, 08:51

The music player is great addition, I like!

May I also ask to add programming wiki to top bar of the site? At least I like to use it quite a much to check things out, but now I always have to navigate there trough index.

By Rataplan

Champion (276)

01-11-2012, 09:01

Great work, I also think the music player is a fantastic addition. I still have OmegaMSX on Live365 playing quite a lot, no need for that anymore Missing some old-scool PSG music though, but that's because it's not in the download section.

Great work again guys! Keep it up!

By Jorito

Mr. Ambassadors (1784)

01-11-2012, 09:02

I thought that was a good idea, so I added it to the Wiki sub menu

By NYYRIKKI

Enlighted (6011)

01-11-2012, 09:13

Now, that was a quick!

By Huey

Prophet (2694)

01-11-2012, 10:48

I am experiencing a much longer loading time (firefox 16.0.2 windows7).

By Sarcasmic

Master (149)

01-11-2012, 10:55

Great to see my bouncy remix of ''Dike de twin van mike" good old memories

By anonymous

incognito ergo sum (116)

01-11-2012, 12:28

@Huey - that should not be happening, although the music player does of course add some weight to every page. From where we were testing there was and is no drastic decrease in page load times. Are you still experiencing this problem?

...and is anyone else suffering from slow page load times since the update?

By Huey

Prophet (2694)

01-11-2012, 14:16

The issue is gone. I guess it is a caching issue. I think it was waiting long an external plugins (count iirc)

By ro

Scribe (4867)

01-11-2012, 16:10

press [like]

By NYYRIKKI

Enlighted (6011)

01-11-2012, 18:22

Just noticed a little bug in the music player (tested now over slow connection with Mozilla Firefox) The play bar (yellow) does not reset when you change the song, It only resets when the song is started to play. This causes the download bar (blue) to get hidden behind the yellow bar untill the song is downloaded over the previous song play bar.

(I don't know if that explanation made any sense at all)

BTW it would be nice feature to have "Download currently playing song"-button. (Just testing is Jorito always so fast to do changes or was that latest superman-like speed just accident )

By Jorito

Mr. Ambassadors (1784)

01-11-2012, 18:59

Understood, NYYRIKKI

It'll have to wait a few days though, I'm a bit busy the next 3 or so days. I also thought about the download button, but we're a bit out of space

By mars2000you

Enlighted (6403)

01-11-2012, 19:58

About downloading, a tip for Firefox users : install the module DownloadHelper and you can directly download the current played song without going to the Download section !

By SkyeWelse

Champion (471)

01-11-2012, 22:10

Nice update! Loving the music choices so far. : )

-Thomas

By Huey

Prophet (2694)

02-11-2012, 11:59

Ahw... Too bad the music re-player is reset during browsing the site.
I guess that continuation of the replayer during browsing could be quite a hassle to implement. But can we have a popup link with only the replayer?

By Jorito

Mr. Ambassadors (1784)

02-11-2012, 13:03

Huey wrote:

With all things like popup blockers and other nastiness when it comes to popups, I decided not to. After all, your browser has a better mechanism for this; simply open up another tab and play the music in the background

By sd_snatcher

Prophet (3609)

03-11-2012, 13:53

Thanks for the improvements, Jorito! The music player is indeed a very welcome feature!

1) Some ideas:

- Instead of a pop-up, maybe a small hidden frame could be used to host the real music player so it doesn't stop while browsing the site. The Interface on the sidebar would only relay commands to the hidden player.
- Could the player just skip to the next music if it stomps on any not-found/connection error?
- I also vote for the NYYRIKKI's "Download currently playing song"-button.

2) Some bug reports:

I'm receiving quite some errors like this one, then the player just stops.
Error loading http://www.msx.org/download/downloads/challenge/scene2/Jorit...

By Edwin

Paragon (1182)

03-11-2012, 18:06

I'm pleased to see that the facebook stuff is nowhere to be seen when I'm logged in. I don't like to have that stuff forced on me.

With regard to the music player. I agree with the others that it's not particularly convenient now. Maybe a button to pop out a window? I suspect that activated popups still work for most.

By Jorito

Mr. Ambassadors (1784)

03-11-2012, 18:59

sd_snatcher wrote:

Thanks for the improvements, Jorito! The music player is indeed a very welcome feature!

1) Some ideas:

Hm, forcing a hidden iframe for the music player is a very bad idea. It would render all Google searches and bookmarks useless, as the URL in the address bar would always be www.msx.org in stead of a normal URL. That's something we definitely wouldn't want.

And unfortunately just adding a hidden frame to every page doesn't work either, the frame would get lost on every page reload. The simplest solution is definitely a new tab, your browser is very good at this anyways :)

sd_snatcher wrote:

- Could the player just skip to the next music if it stomps on any not-found/connection error?

Maybe. I'm not sure if the 3rd party component supports this, one way or the other.

sd_snatcher wrote:

- I also vote for the NYYRIKKI's "Download currently playing song"-button.

It's also on my wanted-list. I'll try to have a look at this tomorrow.

sd_snatcher wrote:

2) Some bug reports:

I'm receiving quite some errors like this one, then the player just stops.
Error loading http://www.msx.org/download/downloads/challenge/scene2/Jorito-copyisprofile.mp3

I'm guessing you are using Chrome? Chrome is the only player that keeps on bugging about files with errors as far as I can tell. Even in the middle of the playlist. Not a lot I can do about that, unfortunately...

By Jorito

Mr. Ambassadors (1784)

04-11-2012, 17:38

I just updated the website with a new version that deals with most of the issues mentioned here. Here's a changelog:

Popup option; click on the icon on the right of the 'MSX Music player' title to open the player in a new window so you can have music while your browse.
Download option; click on the title of the currently playing track to go to the download page.
If there's a load error, display a message and resume with the next track after 3 seconds.
Reset progress bar if a new track is loaded.
Added first and last buttons to the pager.

Have fun with the update

By mars2000you

Enlighted (6403)

04-11-2012, 19:12

Quote:

Download option; click on the title of the currently playing track to go to the download page.

That's useful for non-Firefox users.

If you use the best browser (Firefox), just install the module DownloadHelper and you can directly download the current played song without going to the Download section ... Faster solution !

By FiXato

Scribe (1741)

06-11-2012, 01:08

mars2000you wrote:

Quote:

Download option; click on the title of the currently playing track to go to the download page.

That's useful for non-Firefox users.
If you use the best browser (Firefox), just install the module DownloadHelper and you can directly download the current played song without going to the Download section ... Faster solution !

However, using such solutions (and I'm sure Chrome/Chromium offer similar extensions) result in the download stats not being increased.

MRC2k12 - Lyre Bird

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