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Friday's Featured Feature: Site restructure and sheet popularity

Started by Jamaha, January 10, 2014, 11:27:47 AM

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Jamaha

Hello! It's time for the First Friday's Featured Feature, the weekly news post where I explain new features I've added to the site.

If you are reading this on the site's front page, you probably don't see anything changed. Most of the changes made in this update should be fairly transparent to the user and if something looks different, I probably broke something.

The reason things haven't changed much, is because I focused mostly on the back end of things, meaning that the changes affect the things happening on the server and development side. It might not affect your use of the site much, but it definitely helps me do my work. In the older site version, moving things around and adding new pages meant changing things in multiple files and still most likely breaking something. Considering that I just moved the new site from the test environment to the live server by just editing a couple of variables in the configuration, I'd say the changes were rather successful.

But how does all this affect you? The biggest change you can see at first is that the links in the navigation bar have changed a bit. Help has been divided into About and FAQ, to make their purpose more obvious. The order of the links also changed a bit and the change is probably going to annoy those of us who reflexively click the familiar location to access the forums. Sorry.

Clicking on any of the links you should notice that the format of the page urls has changed somewhat. This might result in some broken links if you've directly linked to the pages somewhere. The sheet archive links redirect automatically to the new system so you shouldn't have any problems there. Also, it's not like anyone would really want to link to the other...two pages we had in addition to the sheet archive.

The new FAQ and About pages have changed a bit from the older Help page. They don't contain that much information at this point, but I've made updating them a bit easier so they will actually be updated as time passes. The Staff page was also redone. Now it gets the data from the forums, so it instantly updates when someone gets added to the Staff group on the forums. It's rather plain looking right now, though. Look and layout weren't exactly the focus of this update today.

There's also one extra feature that might actually be of some interest: Arrangement popularity. If you go to the sheet archive, you should see a bar next to each download link. The bar represents an arrangement's popularity with a scale from 0 to 10. The popularity is based on the number of downloads in the past week and it is updated weekly. The popularity feature will be expanded later in the form of top 10 lists or something similar.

And that wraps it up for today, thanks for reading. Also, if you notice any errors caused by the updates today, please report them for example by replying here. Stay tuned for more updates next Friday!

spitllama

Love that popularity feature! The front page also looks much more appealing: a bit more orderly.

I'm curious what scale is used with the 10 bars on the download feature.
Submissions Page
Currently using Finale 2012

mikey

#2
It's very interesting to see the popular pieces of a song; eg link's awakening is pretty much empty except for Ballad of the Wind Fish and Tal Tal Heights xD

EDIT: I mean game xD I don't know why I put song.  You guys know what I meant though right? :P
unmotivated

Jamaha

Quote from: spitllama on January 10, 2014, 12:22:46 PMI'm curious what scale is used with the 10 bars on the download feature.

Pretty much a sorted list from most popular to least popular which is then divided into equal-sized parts. So the sheets with the full popularity bar are the 2251/11 = ~200 most popular arrangements. The 9 popularity sheets are the next 200 and so on.

spitllama


Quote from: NocturneOfShadow on January 10, 2014, 12:35:38 PMIt's very interesting to see the popular pieces of a song; eg link's awakening is pretty much empty except for Ballad of the Wind Fish and Tal Tal Heights xD

Ikr? Oracle of Seasons is bare.

And gotcha thanks JaMaHa.
Submissions Page
Currently using Finale 2012

BlackDragonSlayer

And the moral of the story: Quit while you're a head.

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Yugi




Kinda sucks that my best sheet has absolutly no popularity while the arrangement that I want pulled off the site the most is the most popular apparently.

Olimar12345

Well hornet dance has only been on the site for a little over two weeks.
Visit my site: VGM Sheet Music by Olimar12345 ~ Quality VGM sheet music available for free!

Bubbles


spitllama


Quote from: Olimar12345 on January 10, 2014, 02:28:08 PMWell hornet dance has only been on the site for a little over two weeks.

The ranking is based on the past week's downloads so that's irrelevant.
Submissions Page
Currently using Finale 2012

Yugi


Olimar12345

Quote from: spitllama on January 10, 2014, 03:03:42 PMThe ranking is based on the past week's downloads so that's irrelevant.

Ah, misread. Thanks.


Oh and thanks for the update, Jamaha!
Visit my site: VGM Sheet Music by Olimar12345 ~ Quality VGM sheet music available for free!

Bubbles


Yugi

Fun Fact, Maestro is the only arranger to have a perfect 10 popularity across all arrangements.

This is further proof that we need a 1000 % Maestro update.

Waddle Bro