vgm.hcs64.com (frontend and upload form for xxx.joshw.info) update and feedback thread by datschge at 12:27 PM EDT on August 16, 2017
vgm.hcs64.com is a frontend for xxx.joshw.info, meaning the sets are still uploaded to, managed on and downloaded from the many different joshw.info sites. If you want to talk about sets on there please refer to the xxx.joshw.info Music Archive thread of awesome. vgm.hcs64.com's purpose is to offer added value on top of all this.
Thanks to Josh fantastic cooperation vgm.hcs64.com can update every 10 minutes, offering full text search across all sets names and an endless update list if one want to catch up with all the changes. On top of it filtering by system/subdomain is supported.
Search is also included as OpenSearch description that, among other things, allows one to start searching directly from Chrome's omnibox. Searching on the site itself offers instant word completion. And like with any decent fulltext search this one also allows to specify search terms using additional modifiers like wildcards, quotes, circumflex and hyphen.
Thanks to hcs' nice cooperation we not only may use the vgm subdomain but are also able to use this forum's accounts for authentication on the site. These will be used for the upcoming tagging system that I hope will make it even easier to browse and manage the whole treasure trove.
Just randomly started this now so I have a place to dump useless info. =P
Latest tiny changes were sorting the word completion list alphabetically (was random before. I'm not really satisfied with either approach, sorting by commonness would be ideal but I couldn't achieve that without a whole additional query), and offering a direct link to the search result if it contains only one result.
@bnnm - option to add platform to the download name as it's hard to keep track otherwise (maybe not possible if they are just direct links). They are just direct links indeed, this is just a frontend after all. =) Looking into it HTML5 appears to have introduced a "download" attribute for suggesting different file names on client side. But this works only for same-origin so the attribute isn't applied in our case. =(
file types in the set (for devs, ie.- me). Even a simple txt list would be nice, could be updated when new sets are uploaded. As I mentioned in other threads Josh is looking into that (though he seems swamped atm). I'm also waiting for this as it'd come with checksums which are much nicer for linking tags to than the current reliance on fragile file names.
tags signaling defects in rips: re-rip needed, transmogrified (good --like any ww2ogg, or questionable --like any Alpha23's XMA), unsupported/unplayable, etc Tags will be completely freeform as folksonomy. Later on public visibility likely will depend on popularity, ie. how many agreed putting a specific tag on the same set.
GET queries for easier linking/skipping pages. And/or an input near the pagination so I can go to page N directly. Hm, what would you want to link to? Search results already can be linked. Pagination can change anytime depending on how many results are shown per page. And I would hope people pare down the amount of search results instead wading through dozens of pages. Will consider adding an input.
I see a # link with the query but only when there is one result? If I want to copy results to a txt or post it here, it's faster/standard if it's already in the URL (I see it uses AJAX but there is always the history API I think). Plus my own belief that searches (=no server change) should use GET :)
For pagination, if it's for perfo I understand, but for example the other day I was trying to find unsupported "Electronic Arts" streams, which gives lots of results, so even filtering by platform took a while (I realize this is not common).