Rating these now gives you a chance to gain points. Those who have already rated might have seen a net increase in points.

In order to put this in motion, we had to change the points in the database to allow for decimals. With that said, there are now numerous places on the site that might be displaying a user's points in decimal form. We don't want that. Each person that finds a place we need to fix this will get a badge. If anyone finds an inordinate amount of these locations, they might get a special badge. Happy hunting!

Remember, we want to find the places that display decimals!

Corey and I decided to give a little thing we call 'daily rewards' a test run. Basically, for signing in, you get 10 points. This only happens once per day, but we think it'll make things a little more interesting around here.

As I said, this is just a test. We are tracking the points, so if this somehow manages to make things worse around here, we'll yank them all away.

Any thoughts?

Just a heads up, but as some of you already know, we had a major database burp happen at some point last night, continuing through the morning. I contacted our wonderful host and had them reboot the database server, so things should be in order. Let us know if you find anything that got borked along the way.

Rock out, y’all.

I finally got some time / motivation to work on the site. I added a 'mixtape central' section with an expanded 'top mixtapes' list, a longer 'recent mixtape tags' box that I'm already having a lot of fun with as well as a random mix art collage thingy.

Just go check it out. On the left, in the 'main' box.

A similar page for profiles as well as searching to come soom. Have a happy 4th, or for those not in America, have a great day.

I just wanted to tell you all how stoked I am to have over 150 registered users on the site. Totally awesome.

Corey and Eric have started their post-college jobs and are planning a few new things for the site. You'll all be the first to know.

Finally, keep cool, as it is really, really hot (at least here in the NW US), in case you've missed the weather.

MUCHLOVE. MTC4LIFE.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it is to find an artist/ album/ track in the database (probably by using the 'music' option on the left) and write a short personal story of a time in your life and how that song reminds you of it, relates to it, influenced it, etc.

My example track: Peaches in Regalia by Zappa.

So, delve deep into your brain-RAM and leave a comment on a track/ album / artist. Be sure to tag this post with the artist / album/ track name so that everyone can read 'em as well -- that's how we'll be keeping, as we have badges to award.

Rock out.

So, we decided to wrap-up our referal contest (sort of... I'll get to that).
The winners were Galaxiepi and Daedalus by a long shot. The final tallies will be posted at a later date. Congratulations to our winners who each received a custom badge and +150 points.

We have decided to keep the referal contest going though. Same contest as last time except starting over with today. Depending on the turnout, we will be awarding badges/points to winners every 2-4 weeks. Each round of winners will get a unique badge (ie, a different badge than Daedalus and Galaxiepi won). Keep those referals flowing people.

Thanks for hanging in here and using the site. We've been a little slow at working on anything (ie, no work at all). But hey, we just graduated (pics to come soon), and are both starting real jobs next Monday. Scary stuff, but once we are settled, I'm sure we will be hammering away on some new stuff for all of you.

Keep up the mixes, I'm enjoying reading/listening to what you all have come up with. Especially all of the drama.

School is out for me (Eric shortly). Going to take a week or two to unwind and then am going to get back to working on fixing things and working on the page.

We will begin our much talked about code redesign, but none of that will be made public for quite some time. So in the meantime, we want to keep all of you people happy...what features would you like to see most? and what about the site would you like most to be changed?

I'll start: I'd like to see "Mixtape Themes" -- Having a few common templates to base mixes on. ie: "The Breakup Mix", "The Road Trip", etc... When making a mixtape, if you so choose, you could select one of these themes to submit your mix under. Each theme could have its own competition, so we could keep a list of the top 10 "Breakup" mixtapes, maybe even award badges, and have more mixtaping outlets.

What I want to see fixed: The moderation system. I made it pretty poorly. I'll try and rework it so it is more usable.

So, I'm not sure if this project is a blessing or a curse. I'm trying to finish up my last term here at school, but all I want to do is make mixes and try to climb the oh-so-steep top-10.

But, this log post isn't about me and my procrastination, it's about new users. We're running the referral contest, which has brought in some new blood, but we're running out of ideas on how to spread the word of the Mixtape Collective.

So, does anyone have any good ideas on how to get the word out there? The more users, the more interesting things will be. As always, badges to those who help.

Thanks again, crew. Happy mixtaping.

After spending the better part of 6 months working on this, it is nice to finally sit back, enjoy and watch everyone use it.

In these first few weeks of v1.0 I've come to some conclusions that are far different than what I was expecting with the site.

I - People must not like rating other profiles. Since the ratings were reset a bit ago, I've been noticing most profiles have only been rated a couple times. Definitely thought profile rating would be a bigger hit (especially since you get a point for each profile rated!)

II - Tags are a lot more fun than* I thought they would be. On other 'social networking' sites, tags have never really held my interest. It could be that this is a smaller knit community...but I think it is the ease of reverse tracing conversations back and forth between profiles. I read ALL of your conversations.

III - The moderation system blows. In theory it is great, I just got lazy and poorly implemented it. I'll make it better, I swear (or else I'll make Eric do it).

IV - Database whores are dominating the points. I kind of expected this in the beginning, as this is mostly due to a lack of users. However, with the current trends, even if we had 1000's of users, only like 8 people would be rating profiles (hint hint).

V - Finally, our hokey badge system may have actually worked. You people seem to be enjoying the badges as much as Eric and I do. This calls for only one thing: we need to make more.

Anyway, thanks again for using the site. I'm having a blast watching all of this unfold.

* VI - Addendum. No matter how many times I proofread a dev log entry before posting, I ALWAYS find a typo later and have to log into the database and fix it.

I went away for the (much too short) holiday and just returned a few minutes ago. I'm amazed at how much activity is going on here -- I love it!

Corey and I have been quite busy with other things (plus, we kind of need a break), but are about to jump into 'fix-it' mode. If you have any suggestion on how to make the site better or find something broken or misspelled, leave a tag here, send me a private message, leave me a tag or use the contact form. Badges to good suggestions.

Also, by request, I have increased the length your liner notes can be by 1.5.

So, keep telling your friends, keep making those mixes and drop me a line sometime -- I'm big on procrastination and have been steadily running out of things to distract me.

Happy mixtaping.

So, I'm a moron and broke the referal system!

Anyway, if you have refered someone and the points have not shown up, have that person send me a private message or post in the contact form so that I can get it taken care of.

Our first contest was an absolute hit!

Congratulations to Bootylicious for winning both the overall award, as well as top tracks. He added a whopping 1901 tracks!!

Congratulations to me for winning the artist portion of the contest. Yeah me...like I need another badge! (but hell if I don't deserve it!)

Congrats to Sledgebrainerd for winning the Albums leg of the contest.

Finally, we decided to award 3 honorable mentions. The criteria for honorable mentions was to have added at least 500 pieces of information (sum total of artists/albums/tracks/options). Congratulations to our honorary monkeys: whackedtollie, jaysix, and marzocchi!

Well, with the first contest down, we have a new one for you all to partake in!

As we all know...this site needs more users...more users means more mixes, more ratings, more points for all, and more to do!

With that said, we are introducing our latest contest: "Crowd Control". The contest is to get the most people signed up that you can. Go to the contests page to find out more!

By the way, happy to announce that last night we had 8 concurrent users signed in at once...that is a pretty big deal, that is like 1/7th of our userbase!

I made some changes to the point system.

First of all, there was a problem in the way we were storing the point history for user ratings. When a user was rated, the point change would be stored correctly...however, we keep track of point changes through time so that we can regenerate people's points in case of error. Anyway, long story short, there was a glitch causing your level not to serve as a multiplier when first rating someone.

Also, we have decided to reward users with +1 point for each user/mixtape rated, this should encourage people to partake in the ratings.

Additionally, we have increased the mixtape rewards to net you +50 points for each level your mixtape reaches (this was previously +25)

Finally, you will get +25 points for each badge you unlock on the site.

We're hoping that some of these changes should make it a little easier to go up in the first few levels, and as we all know, things will get a lot more interesting when everyone is at higher levels!

All of your mix and profile ratings have been reset, so go back and rerate! (artist/album/track ratings are fine)

Just to let you all know, we will be ending the database contest on Wednesday.

We have received a pretty good response to it thus far and as a way to reward those who have worked so hard we have some amendments to the original description.

The rewards are as follows:

- 1 unique badge, +100 points for the user who adds the most total correct information (this includes artists, albums, tracks and options).

The following 3 rewards are exclusive of each other (the same person can't earn more than one)
- 1 unique badge, +50 points for the user who adds the most correct artist information
- 1 unique badge, +50 points for the user that adds the most correct album information
- 1 unque badge, +50 points for the user who adds the most correct track information

Finally, we don't want those who worked valiantly but failed to qualify to be left out in the cold, so we will be awarding honorable mention badges for those whom have put in a solid effort. How much information do you have to add to be considered? Why would we tell you that? If you are uncertain, add more data!

We will announce the winners on Wednesday and introduce a new contest.

The Engineering Expo is over. Both Corey and I spent hours explaining the details of this site to those that were curious. While we didn't win any of the awards, I still think that we had one of the best-designed (both front *and* backend) projects around.

So, I don't speak for Corey, but I'm going to take a break from developing and actually make some mixes, add some tracks and try to win some of these badassed badges.

Thanks again, y'all.

Well, the Engineering Expo is upon us in about 12 hours. We have been working frantically this week to fix minor problems to make sure that the site is clean and professional.

With that said, we have added some minor functionality.

The display of related mixtapes based on the keywords specified now works correctly.

We have also introduced 'System Messages'. You will now receive a system message when a user adds you as a friend, or when a tag is made on your profile or on one of your mixes.

Finally, 'My Relationships' is back online. You can now write a description or anecdote about your friends and foes. These descriptions will be viewable to the public when viewing their list of friends. This information might eventually be displayed in profiles as well.

I have to make a post about this. The obnoxious flicker AND disappearing 'stuff' bar in FF 1.07 is officially fixed. Although this is a confirmed error in the Gecko (FF) browser itself, we finally stumbled across a coding fix that seems to correct the problem. This is a monumental day for all mankind.

I spent a chunk of time today visually overhauling the 'My Mixes' section as well as the entire mix creation page. Pretty. There are a few minor glitches in IE that need to be resolved, but I need sleep.

If y'all have any suggestions on how we could improve the interface to make things easier, more intuitive, whatever, please, let us know. Badges for good suggestions.

Finally, thanks for helping us get this off the ground, you guys rock -- we're nothing without our userbase!

With the release of version 1.0 of the site, I thought it might be nice to let everyone know where we stand.

As most of you know, this website is Eric's and my senior project for our Computer Science degrees. We have spent most of the school year working on this. Our initial plan for the site started as a pretty simple idea...however, as we continued to discuss the project, we kept coming up with more and more features to add. We still really haven't even touched the tip of the iceberg as far as what we'd like to do with this.

Most of all, we want this to become a close-knit community of music lovers.

When we first started working with this, we both had some experience making websites using PHP, MySQL, CSS, XHTML and other common web languages. However, neither of us had ever created something this expansive from the ground-up. Because of this, our infrastructure that we are using isn't optimized to be handling as much traffic as we'd like, but hey, this was supposed to be a learning experience, right?

Well, with the school year coming to a close and the deadline for this project arriving next week, we won't be able to devote as much time to this project as we are currently. This will especially be the case when we have jobs (or should I say 'when I have a job'...stupid Eric already has one...). However, we both strongly desire to continue this site and make into something even bigger and better.

We've mentioned some of our plans before including 'gangs', 'showdowns', a custom-built forum, and more. However, we want to wait on these things. We have learned so much during the making of this website. We learned a new technology (AJAX) that allows for things to be done without reloading the page (the new rating bars, tag posting, the music searching/adding interface). Of course, if we had all of this new knowledge before starting, we could have made the site even better.

Our current plan is to continue to fix bugs and optimize things on the live site. After all, ensuring a fun viewing experience is our primary goal. Thankfully, with the onset of the mixtape creation system, we are hoping to have enough to entertain you all for quite awhile. In the meantime, we are going to take all of the knowledge we have learned and use it to rebuild the site from scratch to have it be efficient, more bandwidth-friendly, and more accessible. We feel that before we add new features, we need to get the backbone of the site stable and ready to handle hundreds, if not thousands of concurrent users.

Finally, we will both continue to be very active members of the site, but in order to finish our dream of establishing the Mixtape Collective community, we need your help. We need all of you to tell your friends and to try to recruit people to try out the site. After all, the experience and fun of the site will inceease astronomically with more people.

Thank you all for showing interest and helping us out. This project has turned out to be very rewarding because of all of your activity and positive feedback!