You can now add new performances directly

You can now edit the site's data directly in the site itself!

Since launching this site nearly a year ago, the data (albums, songs, shows, and performances) has been hard-coded in JavaScript files that live in the codebase.

The advantage of that approach is that it made read operations on the data simple and helped me avoid incurring any data transfer costs for traffic to and from a database. The total amount of data is small enough to easily fit in memory, even on heavily constrained machines, and this gave me a lot of flexibility when iterating on the site in the early stages.

At this point though, the site is getting enough usage that it's become too tedious for me to update everything and add nominated performances on my own, especially when each update requires code changes and a new deployment.

To start solving that problem, I've added a handful of forms for adding and editing different types of data directly in the site itself. Most importantly, this mean that any user can now add performances directly, rather than just nominating them for me to add.

There remains a lot of work to do though! Here are a few specific things I have in mind:

• Make it easier to get the Bandcamp and YouTube IDs for performances. Right now it's fully manual and it's the slowest part of adding new performances to the site. It's almost certainly possible to automate this, but I haven't found a good way to do it yet.
• Improve the voting experience. I've got a handful of ideas here. The problem is that as the number of performances on the site grows, the amount of time voters will need to spend comparing uninteresting pairs of performances will grow exponentially. Here are a few ways I could improve that:
  • Allow voters to filter a voting session down to a specific album or song.
  • Add an explicit "skip" button to the voting page.
  • Tune the logic for generating pairs of performances to vote on to show performances with higher scores more often.

Thanks for following along! If you'd like to contribute, you can email me, or check out the code on GitHub, or add some performances.