Aggregator websites offer many benefits besides just sending update to your friends. For example:

• It feels great to keep all your news in one place.
• It’s easy to start conversations around music. Your feed visitors are likely to notice if you have some interesting and non-trivial music in stock.
• It’s easy to find soul friends - nothing talks about a person more than his or her music feed.
• and let’s not forget about the cool factor.

Fortunately, there is an easy way to automatically send your CD collection updates to your social network buddies. The instructions below are for the added albums feed, but you can also do it for the rated and played albums as well.

Note: this will not work if your Racks and Tags collection is private or friends-only! Private means private, we take it seriously and don’t show private information to anyone - not even to friendly websites. So before continuing, check your collection privacy status here and make sure it is public.

Then click Your Collection link in menu bar to go to your profile page. Right-click the Added tab on the right, and select “Copy shortcut” from the popup menu. (Tip: this menu command is called “Copy link location” in Firefox.) Then go to your FriendFeed page and click “Share something” on top of your feed.  Click “Import your stuff”,  select “Blog” and paste your link. The resulting URL should look like this:

http://www.racksandtags.com/<username>/?m=added

Finally, press “Import Feed” button.

Now, when you add new album to your collection, the update will be immediately posted on Racks and Tags RSS feed. Shortly FriendFeed will detect the change and display it in your personalized feed, ready to be seen and commented on by your friends.

This was the first in Weekly Tips series of blog posts that I plan to publish regularly. If you discovered some cool and non-trivial way to use your Racks and Tags, have a suggestion for the future tips, or would like to add something to the current tip - please comment or send e-mail to webmaster@racksandtags.com.

So, welcome to Racks and Tags.

Besides the name and design change, there’s a number of smaller changes here and there:

• There are new user profile fields - feel free to add info about yourself. It’s entirely optional of course.
• Now you can actually upload your photo or avatar, and it will be displayed on your collection page.
• Front page has got a recent updates display. Whenever you add something new to your collection, link to it pops up on the front page for other folks to see.
• Album pages display photos of users who own, rated, or play that album.
• Now you can search artists in your collection from any page, not just the artists page.
• User collection pages display recently added/rated/played album covers and ratings. Pretty neat.
• Friends page has also changed - instead of viewing friend updates one by one, you can see them all together, in one combined feed.

That’s all for today. Don’t forget to update your bookmarks, and have a great weekend.

In addition to new features, album and song list rendering performance has been dramatically improved. It may be not a big deal for most folks, but it should be immediately noticeable to users with huge collections. I know there are few collections with 20K+ albums uploaded, now you can actually browse these heavyweights with little or no performance lag.

To access our new FreeDB mirror via HTTP, paste the following URL in the “CD info download URL” box in View - Preferences, Internet tab:

http://freedb.mygenres.com/~cddb/cddb.cgi

Access via CDDB protocol is also available using the hostname freedb.mygenres.com and port 8880. (Note that HTTP access is still the recommended way to use FreeDB.)

If you are using a different FreeDB-aware application, you are also welcome to use the new mirror. Check with your software documenation on how to re-configure it to use a different FreeDB server.

Update 5/19: Diagnostics complete, performance issues fixed. The website is operating normally.

Oh wait. That’s not a regular search box.

You can type first few letters of artist name in the search box, and in few moments, another box will appear underneath, displaying the list of possible artist matches. For example, if you typed ‘rad’, it will display Radiohead, Radio Massacre International, and all your artists with names starting from ‘rad’. All you have to do is select one match (either by pressing Up and Down keys on keyboard or using your mouse) and hit Enter. You can see a working example here.

Stay tuned for more cool features this coming weekend.

I have reasons to believe that the issue is resolved now with release of new OrangeCD 6.1.1. If you experienced any of the following symptoms, I recommend upgrading to version 6.1.1:

• 507 Invalid or expired session ID;
• Timeout error;
• 506 Another synchronization session is currently in progress.

The most recent version of OrangeCD Suite can be downloaded here. If the symptoms persist even after the upgrade, please shout because right now I am not aware of any reoccurences of the problem!

Other than that, I am busy preparing new features for public appearance. As you may see on the start page banner, MyGenres.com database passed 100,000 albums mark - of course these are not unique albums yet. Still, the number is big enough to allow me to draw conclusions about website demography and feature preference. (It is always hard to choose a feature to implement next, because so many possibilities exist. Knowing what users want helps a lot.)

1. Classical albums display clickable composer link.
2. Compilation albums display clickable links for artists and composers of each song.
3. Privacy checkbox is supported. Albums that were marked “private” in OrangeCD Catalog are hidden from your collection website visitors. To see your private items on the website, you have to logon using your username and password.
4. Artist web links are uploaded to the server and displayed on artist page below the list of albums.

Due to nature of some changes, your albums may display inconsistent track listings until you synchronize your local database with new server software. To refresh track listings, and to see web links on artist pages, you have to synchronize your database once using Tools - Upload to Mygenres.com menu command in OrangeCD Catalog. 

And, speaking of synchronizing databases again, I would like to ask beta testers what are their opinions on current synchronization speed. Is it acceptable and tolerable on your Internet connection? Please comment.