Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum Recital 8 (11/15/07): Call for Submissions

Hmm, this looks really useful. I really don't have any use for it, but it would be fun to try.

Here's the tradeoff: implementation time vs convenience. I can think of 3 ways to automatically fill in the threads automatically.

1) Direct database access. My program would add the posts directly into the Piano World database. This is technically the best solution, security-wise probably the worst.

2) Faking it. I could write a program that pretends to be a user posting to Piano World by hand. Tricky to build but not impossible. Probably the preferred way. Note that it still takes about 30 minutes to fill in the thread this way because the forum uses flood protection so after making each entry there is a 30-second delay.

3) Using a macro/scripting tool like you suggested.

Normalizing the MP3's is one or two mouse clicks. I don't know how Monica makes the ZIP files but that shouldn't take more than a few clicks either. And then there's the copying&pasting which is probably the annoying part. Theoretically I could make a program that would do all of this with a single click. But I'm not going to. :p

We could also consider lumping all the entries (or each 10) into one post, which would reduce the copying&pasting to 3 clicks or so.

Or list all the entries on my site using the software which requires no additional effort at all. But that would be like moving the recital away from Piano World and I don't want to do that. I kinda like the format in which we've been doing it so far.

Anyway, just some thoughts.

Well, no.1 seems like it would be the most efficient, but you'd probably need to work a lot out with Frank. If you're going to be speaking with him anyway, you could ask him to disable flood protection (or give Monica the power to do so) for a 1-minute window while you mass-post the recital.

I don't think we need to over-engineer the process. The copying and pasting probably took no more than half an hour, and I was able to work on it while uploading the zip files. So automating that step really wouldn't save any total time.

And if I were Frank I'd say: "No way!"

True true...

Malhzeit - you've got a good idea there, that I didn't consider. Why not simply lump all the entries into one single long post (or if a limit on a post size exists - make it 10-20 entries per post). That way instead of copying and pasting 50 times, you'd only have to do it once.

One reason is that there is a limit to the frequency of code/gremlins you can use per post.

Good point, Monica. I think there is also an image limit, i.e. for the avatars? I did a quick test with the first 10 entries from this recital and the preview window seemed to swallow it, but that's no guarantee it will always work.

thanks Monica and Mahlzeit for putting this recital together. Mahlzeit that is a really cool program you wrote for the recital. hassle free and easy!!!

I have an itunes question. I loaded the zip files into itunes and then sorted them by time and then by player, and then by piece. So the order is ALL messed up. Is there any way to sort them back into the original order?

Sort by track number. You may need to make that column visible first.

ah ha. thanks.

My Internet unfortunately didnt work for last few days, thats why I couldnt send my piece in.

Ill post them in one of the piano bars. congratulations to all who made it.