I finally implemented a flash-based solution to enable visitors to just listen to my songs right from the music section. I kinda renovated the code of the page while I was at it. Here’s a screenshot of how the “user interface” works.

useful AJAX-y goodness

I got rid of the FJAX implementation for the time being… and just put in traditional XMLHttpRequest scripting. Pauline was supposed to download my new songs, but she couldn’t because the FJAX wouldn’t load in her browser. I remember setting up her iBook, and I could’ve sworn that she had the Flash plugin. Anyways, I thought it wouldn’t hurt to just use what everyone else was using (even if it entailed more lines of code). Hopefully even she can avail of the AJAX-y goodness now.

The “renovation” was actually just putting the provision of the preview area. Which also was loaded via the XMLHttpRequest object. I thought long and hard wether to just load the preview into the main information area. But I thought that should someone listen to a song. It would probably be more functional if you could continue listening to the song while perusing the information on the other songs.

There’s a lot of redundancy as far as “clickable” elements are concerned as well. Simple stuff I just thought were good measures for user-oriented design.

• Download and info icons (links) on the preview area as well.
• You might be reading another song’s info while listening to a different song, then suddenly decide “hey, I think I wan’t to download this after all.”
• Or what you suddenly were interested again on the song playing, you could click on the info icon and go to the playing song’s information page right away without having to look for it on the playlist.
• Preview icons on both tracklist and main information pages – works both ways:
• If you want to listen to a track directly without having to go through the main information page
• Of course that’s a mandatory link for the information page of a song.

Simple stuff like that. Quite redundant, but it makes navigation more intuitive.

There’s one bug on the flash player though. Actually it’s more of a bug on the MP3 files used for streaming. Apparently, some songs playback considerably slower than they should, which is irritating since that would mean I’d have to re-encode them again and hope they playback correctly.