Any Website Makers here? Question...

37637598 on 8/9/2008 at 04:46

So I want to add a page on my website with a list of songs. I want a drop down menu with the following options:

Sort by:

Name
Genre
Newest

Upon clicking one of these choices, I want the list of songs to re-arrange accordingly so if one was to click 'Name' in the Drop-Down menu, the list would re-arrange and sort the list of songs alphabetically.

What code do I need to learn to achieve this? is it CSS? Java? Javascript?

Also I would like to create a flash song player that will change songs upon clicking the text... Do you guys (and gals) know of a place online that might have a tutorial that will allow me to do this and use a player design that I made??? In other words, I already made the player 'graphics' and layout, now I just need the code... Everything I've found makes you use their pre-made player and it has their stupid link on it...

Any help is much appreciated!!! Thanks!

if anyone is wondering, I'm FINALLY making a portfolio of all of my music so I can have an online reference of my projects to show to people... Hopefully it's a huge step forward in my future career as an un-graduated composer! :joke:

Nameless Voice on 8/9/2008 at 18:09

If you have your songs listed in a table, with headers, then use (http://www.kryogenix.org/code/browser/sorttable/) SortTable, it's pretty cool and easy to set up.

Flash audio players:

* (www.radioblogclub.com) RadioBlogClub (IIRC there are a few different styles available here, but it's been a while since I played around with it).
(It looks like their website is being worked on right now, but there's still a working download link there.)

* (http://musicplayer.sourceforge.net/) XSPF Web Music Player (IIRC this one's quite simple, and fairly easy to set up, but has fewer options / skins than RadioBlogClub above)

37637598 on 8/9/2008 at 19:09

Wow, Sortable looks like EXACTLY what I need, Thanks!!!

As for the flash player, I need a flash player that I can embed on my website, that can accept commands when I click text within a table. Basically the table will list my songs. When a song within the table is clicked, I need the flash player to load the song and play it. Is there a command that will let me do this within Dreamweaver? Right now I'm using the Windows Media player, but I prefer flash because it's more widely accepted by browsers...

Thanks for the help Nameless!!!

Nameless Voice on 8/9/2008 at 21:50

Check the documentation on the flash players I linked to to see what they can do. I didn't really experiment with embedding them like that, since they handle the whole playlist themselves.

37637598 on 9/9/2008 at 02:30

I'll do that! Thanks!

Also, do you know if there is a way to make a table read contents from a text file? So I can just have a text file that I update whenever I upload a new song, and the table will automatically make a new row and add the information I type in the text file... The closest thing I've found is "Import Tabular Data", but this doesn't allow me to set the colors of the table...

:D

Nameless Voice on 9/9/2008 at 02:44

You need server-side scripts for that.
How to do it depends on which technologies your server supports (e.g. PHP, ASP, JSP, etc.)

37637598 on 9/9/2008 at 03:29

Well it seems PHP is a simpler route to ASP, but either would work.

addink on 9/9/2008 at 07:46

Quote Posted by Nameless Voice

You need server-side scripts for that.
How to do it depends on which technologies your server supports (e.g. PHP, ASP, JSP, etc.)

No, you don't. Javascript can read xml* both synchronously** and asynchronously ('ajax' being an example of the latter).

It'll take some basic javascript skill though.

[indent](http://scriptasylum.com/tutorials/xml_javascript/xml_javascript.html)[/indent]

*) It doesn't have to be xml that's read. It's in fact just reads text string that is optionally parsed as xml.

**) the javascript code pauses on the load function until the file has fully loaded. Makes the script somewhat cleaner.

Nameless Voice on 9/9/2008 at 13:52

Well, true enough, but using server-side code would be better.

I was thinking more along the lines of reading in the files themselves and working with their filenames, which would need server-side. When I was playing around with web radio, that's what I did - I wrote a simple PHP page to generate the playlist for me based on the available files (and sorted by date) rather than having a manually-created playlist.

Doing it with a playlist file and client-side scripting would work, but it's messy IMO. Of course, for a flash media player, you need to use client-side scripting anyway...

addink on 9/9/2008 at 15:14

Strangely enough a lot of people discard javascript as being messy. Sure enough a lot of the examples out there are. But it's just a matter writing clean code and having a clear way of how to deal with the DOM and event notifications.

I've been involved in a number of projects where multiple authors worked on different sections of a javascript application. Keeping the stuff manageable basically boils down to writing clean code, document well and setup clear interfaces for the different parts to interact. So it's basically not any different from what you'd do in any language.