World's largest MP3 store launches

PayPlay has just launched "the world's largest MP3 download store" -- a store selling more than 1.3 million indie music tracks, with a search engine that allows you to search for your fave artists and get similar indie artists in the catalog.




We managed to give MP3s before iTunes. Great.


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JS/CSS caching in Rails 2.0

In order to remove extra HTTP connections because of small files, we use Asset Packager plugin. It makes one big JS or CSS file from all your assets making it faster to load for clients.
Bad thing is that I had to reset all HTML cache every time after deployment because svn revision is added to name of base.js. I bet it can be easily changed, but I had no time to check.

I've just found that this behavior will be standard in Rails 2.0 - if you are in production mode just add :cache=>true to javascript_include_tag. That's cool.
Plugins are great but it is always better to have it out of the box.

feeds VS emails

Last week I "burnt" some our feeds on feedburner.com
Great service that can give you some nice stats about your feeds for free. In two days we had about 40 subscribers for one of most interesting RSS - Customer Reviews

They have thing that instantly captured my attention - almost everything is a feed. For example, they don't send you emails about strange site behavior - you should subscribe to your FeedMedic RSS.

What I thought about was a way of displaying system logs. When you have big system with a lot of users, many actions are being happened: user registered, someone put money on his account, someone requested some service, etc. All these actions are logged of course - directly like payments or indirectly like user signup.
Feed of these events sometimes can be more useful that statistics.

And error feeds also have their advantages - you don't need to rely on mail server, you don't need to maintain list of developers to send them errors. Just one (or several if you need) feed, maybe protected with password for security. Opera Mini supports feeds so anyone with cellphone can read it.

The bad thing is a limit of items in RSS. So if your system is overwhelmed by errors only latest events will be accessible. But in such case you'll get notified anyway =)

1'000'000 tracks and even more short news

PayPlay.FM finally reached very remarkable milestone - it officially has 1'000'000 tracks in WMA format! We have another million in MP3 and it scares me to count all these terabytes =)

Another great news - PayPlay.FM is now "Certified Windows Media Player 11 Online Store". It means if you open Windows Media Player and go to music stores - you'll see red icon of payplay.fm )
I didnt believe we'd pass all tests but we did.
(I would would be even more happy if I had Windows ;)

Even more - we support Google Checkout now. I tried to find something already written on ruby but there were only shopping carts (which are 5minutes task to write) and huge modules for Drupal/OSCommerce on PHP. All I need was simple integration module and I did it myself. If you need something to begin with and that is small but works - you can find it here http://gcheckout.rubyforge.org/

PS. Thing I need to do when I had enough time - extend ActiveMerchant to add Google Checkout support.