HOSTING SERVER PROBLEM.... NOW FIXED

[thereallyniceman]

Our hosting server was having a problem.

 Some of the site's features had disappeared.

During a server upgrade to PHP 5.5 a few software glitches caused the sever to throw up error messages. These should now be fixed, but if you find that any parts of the site are not working correctly please contact me.

Ian

[Chris Cioffi]

Oh...well, that must be my problem in life.....

[thereallyniceman]

Hi Jody,

I had a word with my son (the site software developer) after you asked about retaining  a playlist as it sounded a sensible idea...BUT there are snags.

Here is his reply:

Hi Jody, 
 I agree that it would be a good idea if the jukebox could remember your playlist while you swap pages but we are faced with one usability problem and one technical problem: 

 1) Due to the nature of how web pages work, changing pages would cause the music you are currently playing to stop. This is why the other player, Banjo-DJ, opens in a popup-window. While it is theoretically possible to keep the music playing while swapping pages by using some very new and modern javascript and background-content-loading, this is unfortunately not an option for us as our actual web-pages are loaded from the Ning servers and not from our own webserver, so we are unable to make the necessary modifications to our code. 

 2) The jukebox page is loaded from another server using a technology called 'json-p cross site scripting'. Cross-site-scripts have very limited access to cookies on the pages from which they are accessed (this is a security measure of web browsers to prevent external servers stealing personal-information stored in cookies). This prevents us from maintaining 'state' between page changes and would make it very difficult, if not impossible to save the playlist when you leave the page.  In order to keep the player playing and to maintain your playlist, your only option currently is to open a new tab/window by CTRL-Clicking (or CMD/Apple-Clicking) the jukebox link. That way, you can leave the extra tab open and continue browsing the site with the other. 

  Regards  Dave

Jody Stecher said:

Oh my goodness,  you are providing this fantastic free resource and you are apologising!?  Certainly no need for that!

What you describe is exactly how the jukebox works/worked for me both before and after the upgrade, with one possible exception. Is the playlist meant to last? The playlist appears when I click the icon. If I click it again the entire list of jukebox tune options appears. If I select another tune and then click the icon my playlist appears once again with the new item added. Well and good. "But if I should leave the jukebox area of the website and go to any other page when I return to the jukebox my playlist has vanished. There is no apparent way to save the playlist other than keeping that page open and creating another window from which to visit the rest of the website. Is this how the jukebox is supposed to work?"

[Jody Stecher]

Thank you, Ian and Dave. I wasn't looking for an improvement. My question was part of the ongoing test to see if the whole site was now working properly. I'm glad that it is.