Print

[Louigi Verona]

Dear friends!

I am happy to inform you that my long-planned project is online as public beta: www.disc-shelf.com

A lot of time went into the development, and now it is there for everyone!

Disc Shelf is a service which allows musicians to upload their music and beautifully present it to their listeners in form of albums: singles, EPs, LPs, audio books, promo discs and WIPs (work in progress). Each album receives a unique URL for distribution.

The whole idea of the project is to allow you to link to your musical works and offer your listeners a wonderfully designed album without ratings, comments, some weird menus and without it looking like a web page. Instead, it looks more like a virtual compact disc.

So, to sum it all up.
Why use Disc Shelf? There are so many similar resources on the Internet...

However, Disc Shelf offers several unique features, such as:

* Disc Shelf offers a concept of a virtual compact disc, something which looks more like a record rather than a web page with a playlist
* the ability to highly customize the look and feel of your album
* cd booklet
* the service is very easy to use, it is not bloated with unnecessary features
* the ability to embed your album into other websites (coming soon)


So guys, you are among my first musician audience to test the service. I invite you over to www.disc-shelf.com

Register, try it out and tell me what you think - your constructive advice may be of much help because I want the service to be really useful to all of you!

Louigi Verona.

[m0d]

http://www.disc-shelf.com/?album=9

[barryvan]

Spammage, eh?

http://www.disc-shelf.com/?album=10

[Louigi Verona]

updates:
-we now have a simple catalogue
-lots of small bugs fixed, including booklet and bbcode - now urls can be colored
-the amount of albums one can add went up to 7
-file size limit went up from 30 Mb to 50 Mb


Barry, very nice album. I like Rebellion.

And also spammage:
http://www.disc-shelf.com/?album=11

[barryvan]

(Um, LV, should I be able to edit your album?)

[Louigi Verona]

barry, thx a lot for reporting this - bug fixed.

[m0d]

Hmm

Speed seems to be an issue when loading the site's front page. Not sure what your hosting is like but it's dreadfully slow sometimes (30 seconds loading time) and I know it's not my end.

Suggestion: The slowest loading aspects are the graphics. The thumbnails of the albums are quite large filesize for what they are. I've seen one that was 168kb, although now that one has cycled off. I don't think you're generating thumbs of the images at the moment, perhaps that might be an option to investigate since I can only imagine your host is going to get busier and busier.

[m0d]

Security issue:

It is not appropriate to return a different error for "Wrong username" and "Wrong password", as that enables a hacker to determine and verify a login name that exists. It is more appropriate to return a generic error for both invalid username and invalid password.


Forgotten password:

I've forgotten mine, and I don't see a way to create a new one. I do hope that you aren't storing passwords in plain text in the database. If you need to do password recovery the best way to do that is to generate a new one into a temporary table and then request via the email address the user registered with to activate that password, which in turn then is hashed and activated.

[Louigi Verona]

Thanks for all the input!
I am going to be using GD library for handling the pics, hopefully will do that during weekend. Will make the login error generic, thanks for suggestion, and this weekend will create the recovery password system passwords are not stored as plain text)
Since this is an important issue, I will try to do the pass recovery system asap, maybe even before weekends.

[Saga Musix]

also, don't stick to md5() for creating password hashes. use sha1() together with salts, it's more secure.