to whom it may interest...

I have been coding on wikiloops for two weeks now, doing a lot of things I had waiting. There is nothing to be seen on the version you are looking at right now, so dont be surprised you have not noticed :)
I am coding on a seperate version which is right now only installed locally on my home laptop, so there is not much for you to look at right this moment.
To me, coding is always a pretty complicated process of making changes, working on the looks, working on functionallity and wondering if all of that really improved the whole thing.
That is not always the case :)

So, after doing a whole lot of work, I'm trying to sit down with myself here and get some aspects straight, and of course I am looking for people who'd like to think along and maybe help do beta testing whenever the new version is online.

Let me break things down for you:

First, the WHYs:
- sad to say, many people have told me, the basic concept of wikiloops is great, but the looks of the site are so crude one won't stay long enough to understand whats going on. Besides people I know, I have read such comments in Forum posts where people talked about the 'loops. So, a cleaner and more 'state-of-webdesign' interface is one of the major concerns I have.
- there are several aspects within the coding of old wikiloops that just became outdated by html5 - to non coders this may not be relevant as long as everything works, but since the community is growing and traffic is rising, I better keep things as slick and clean as possible, otherwise I'll have to upgrade servers all the time just to keep up with the serverpower wasted by old code.
- I'd like to allow higher quality uploads so we wont loose so much by converting to bad 128k .mp3s. Now this is the good news for you right there :) For me, that goal comes along with quite a lot of issues, for I'll need more server harddisc, more traffic and scripts to handle mp3 formats... that again will basicly cost time and money.
- one last WHY is my impression, that with time and growth of the community, it will become harder to keep track of things on wikiloops. While the search engine and the jam pages offer you ways to dig into this huge collection of music, your personal experience and interaction are the second aspect (now resembled by your wall & friends-list). This personal aspect will become increasingly interesting, for you will want to narrow your horizon to things you like. To give an example: Just imagine looking at the "latest uploads" on youtube or facebook - that just wont make any sense, for there is too much content there.

So lets move on to what has been done so far...

By now, I have redesigned the jam-page interface for a cleaner look and better newbee understanding (lord, i hope its better).
Currently, I am working on the profile page, where the former "wall" will become much more prominent and act as kind of news feed thing that keeps you informed on things relevant to you.
All of that is now powered by AJAX, which I am finally starting to understand properly, which should use less traffic than the framework wikiloops uses in its current version...
To be honest, I have made quite some effort to reserve space for adds in the interface, too. I dont really feel great about this, but in order to improve the server to a level that will allow the better quality file handling, I really need to get some cash together... thats just the way it is, I'm affraid, and I dont want to bug the same twenty people for donations all the time. Looking at sites like Looperman.com, I have gotten the impression my bad feelings about adds may be wrong if the rest of the site works well. Please let me hear some feedback on this, and if you are interested in joining the beta-testers-team, let me know and I'll invite you to check out the new interface once its online!

now back to the code...

yours