Music Beta: Linking Artists To News
Post categories: music
| 19:27 UK time, Friday, 7 November 2008
It's all been a bit quiet on the BBC Music Beta front recently while the team has been crunching data and tweaking designs behind the scenes. What's currently got us busiest is working out how we can provide more complete data of which artists are played in which programmes. (Here's some detail about why that matters.) Most of the work in this area involves building tools for producers to be able to update this data in a way that's easy & effective, and can also generate brand-based views of the data like tracklists which offer links to artists. Which all takes time.
But I digress - because the good news is we also have a nice juicy new piece of content to announce. One of our developers, Patrick Sinclair, has found a very smart way of automatically including links to relevant BBC News stories in our artist pages. The gratifying thing about this is that we've found a way of rewarding good web citizenship. Patrick explains it all much better than I could.
Matthew Shorter is Interactive Editor, Music, BBC Audio & Music Interactive.
© MMIX~RS~q~RS~~RS~z~RS~17~RS~)
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in ie8 the artist gateway page appears as a blank page.
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Looks alright to me Darren and I'm on IE.
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U on IE8 or IE7?
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Any chance of making the URL's more user friendly, for instance being able to type http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists/The_Killers instead of http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists/95e1ead9-4d31-4808-a7ac-32c3614c116b.
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#4: Absolutely! We are implementing the same A-Z system that is used on /programmes. When you type http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists/The_Killers you will be redirected to the correct artist, or to a disambiguation page if there is more than one matching result.
This should go live in a week or two.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists/killers seems to redirect properly, but not http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists/The_Killers or http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists/thekillers
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@andrew646: the full artist name will redirect but, counter-intuitively enough (and contrary to metade's comment), you have to use spaces, so the correct URL in this case is http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists/the killers. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists/the%20killers will also work.) We'll be making these URLs a bit easier to hack soon, by allowing them to work without the space as well.
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Thank you... http://www.gelsesli.com/ sesli sohbet
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