Technologically, the current site is a mix of PHP, Perl and Tcl, and adding features to the site when 3 programming languages are in the mix is particularly hard.
Some features, such as a "my favorites" and "search", are oft-requested and will be part of the relaunch in January.
Content-wise, the /info section will be completely reworked. It's grown as I've written documents about whatever was on my mind, and now lacks clarity and directions. As part of my PR company pushing for "consistent messaging" I'd like to make the info section clearer about what Magnatune's objectives are, what we do, why it's interesting, etc. Today /info looks more like a collection of blog postings, so I'll clean that up.
There will be some other content changes, namely with more cross-linking between features, such as the artists pages telling you when that artist is in a "top chart", such as "#6 best selling Jazz title this month", so you can easily look at the best-selling titles in each genre.
Technology wise, the site's HTML is served by Apache and PHP, and is far too vulnerable to denial-of-service attacks, which happen every few months. I'm also concerned that big up-ticks in usage (such as if we get major press) will crush the site. As such, the new rewrite is separating the site into static HTML pages, which will be served by mathopd (the high performance no-frill web server software which serves all our mp3s) and interactive portions (such as buying, searching and licensing) which will be provided by tclhttpd, a solid, and easy-to-program platform I have a lot of experience with, as it is used for Lyris' ListManager and MailShield products, both of which I originally wrote in my pre-Magnatune days.
You should look at Gatling (from fefe.de/gatling/), it is an extremely high performing web server for UNIX from a very skilled author. Mathopd has had security issues in the past and the code is somewhat tangled.
Posted by: Jonas | February 12, 2005 at 06:08 AM