Discord In Office: Mostly Finished Project

Because the monitor on which I was demonstrating the application was running at a very small resolution, I've decided that I should probably post some images of what the site looks like at the resolution it was designed for. While I realize that my design is not ideal for the majority of end users, at this point I don't mind. It can be changed with CSS, I just have to get around to it...

Speaking of getting around to things, I'm working on refining my regular expressions to account for failures I've encountered since submitting my final project. I have already adjusted my Yahoo! Music function so that instead of relying on the Google function to return the biography 100% of the time I only assume that Google has returned either the main artist page or the biography page. From there, regardless of whether the correct page was found, I strip the artist ID number from the URL and construct manually the bio URL with another regular expression. This has solved all issues with finding the correct bio page, but there is still a point of failure I need to solve.

With my current regular expressions, if there is no explicit artist image my expression will simply return an erroneous picture that we do not want. I'll need to examine the source code of the Yahoo! pages more in order to truly refine the function.

I've never used regular expressions before this project, but I can say even though they are extremely scary and esoteric, they are really fun to work with. If you are interested in learning how to use regular expressions or find yourself using regular expressions often, I would suggest downloading Regex Coach. It is an awesome piece of software that will provide information about your expression as you write it and how it will behave on a test string.

Finally, I'm thinking about adding some features. I'm working on finding lyrics for the top tracks (if they are available) from LyricWiki. Also, I would like to use the Yahoo Maps API to chart a tour of a band across the States. It would more than likely use GeoRSS to plot the concerts in chronological order (before I start implementing that feature, it would probably be nice to refine the Upcoming function so that the displayed items are only those of the band that is searched for though...).