Slipmat

Live

Summary

Slipmat is a near-faithful clone of Discogs, the Internet's largest database and marketplace for audio recordings. Slipmat replicates most of the core functionality and UI components of Discogs's inventory and user systems. The main difference is that Slipmat is designed from the ground up as a single-page application.

Languages:

• Javascript
• Ruby
• HTML / CSS

Frameworks:

• Backbone
• Rails

Libraries and Technologies:

• jQuery / AJAX
• jQuery-UI
• paperclip / AWS
• pg_search
• kaminari
• figaro
• jbuilder
• omniauth
• friendly_id

What can I do on this website?

You can:

• Securely create an account
• Log in using Facebook or Google
• Edit your own profile
• Add records to your wantlist and collection
• Contribute new records to the database
• Contribute information about records, artists, and labels
• Update, sort, and customize tracklists (using jQuery sortable UI)
• Tag and sort records by genre
• Comment on records, artists, and labels

Slipmat provides an robust interface for browsing, searching, and sorting records, artists, and labels. It features:

• Live search results in the header search bar
• Global, weighted search index for records, artists, and labels
• Stackable category filtering for records
  • Sort by year, genre, or country
• Tabbed and paginated index for records, artists, and labels

API

Slipmat is powered by a RESTful JSON API.

I took great care to ensure correspondence between Backbone routes and API endpoints. If you're on a page that displays data, you can replace the # in the URI fragment at any time with api to see what's being served up for a given view. This includes search and sort results.

Many API responses handle nested data and associations. I made extensive use of jbuilder to manage these. Nearly all Backbone models override the parse method to keep track of nested associations.

I used Rails's counter caching and eager loading to optimize data retreival. API responses are structured to prevent N+1 queries. I used model scoping with find_by_sql as needed to minimize database fetching and keep controllers slim.

I structured user comments and contributions as polymorphic associations in order to prevent bloat. This greatly reduced the overhead for my Rails models and Backbone views.

Slipmat.Import

Slipmat features a super handy import utility, Slipmat.Import, for constructing seed data based on real Discogs releases.

For my own convenience, I've bound it to a Backbone route. Visit #/import/(discogs release id) if you want to try it out!

Here's how it works:

• Import#import takes Discogs release ID provided in the URI fragment as an argument and fetches the release data from the official Discogs API by making a GET request to the release's API endpoint.
• On success, the payload is passed along to Import#parse. This parses the Discogs data into Backbone model attributes, sets them on a new instance of Slipmat.Models.Record and saves the record. This includes nested associations, e.g. tracklist, genre taggings, artist and label.
• On success, the persisted model is passed along to Import#fetchImage, which makes a separate GET request to the Discogs search engine, sending along the artist name and album title as parameters.
• On success, the payload is scanned for the first associated thumbnail URI, which is passed along to Import#patchImage. This updates the persisted model by assigning the thumbnail to the its image_url attribute and saving it.

N.B. - under the hood, the Rails Record model doesn't really have an image_url attribute. Instead, we override #image_url= like so:

def image_url=(image_url)
  self.image = open(image_url)
end

This intercepts the thumbnail before saving the model and delegates the file contents to Paperclip, which politely stores the thumbnail on AWS for us and displays it normally (i.e. without image leeching).

Future polishing touches (TBD)

• User activity / feed
• Git diff / wiki like updates for records, artists, and labels
• Comment on comments
• Multiple formats and releases (CD, Cassette, Reissue, Deluxe, etc.)
• Buy and sell records
• User messaging
• Ratings for records (5 star scale)
• Add records to lists (Best Reggae records of the 90s, etc.)

License

Slipmat is released under the MIT License.

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Developed by Chris Sloop