LeadSingle Blog

It’s been quiet for a while here. There is a reason for that. I am still the sole developer on LeadSingle, and I love it very much. I see a bright future for it. One that will not be here soon, but will come eventually once everything is ironed out and we have learned from our mistakes. I’m eager to reach that. However, I’m also studying for university at the same time, and this spring semester in particular has really been taking all of my time, and thus I have been and will be too busy to work further on this site until summer arrives (in the Northern hemisphere, mind you).

With that said, there’s not a whole lot left, though. For the most part, LeadSingle is getting closer and closer to the ideal site I want it to be. As soon as the remaining features still stuck on my dusty metaphoric drawing board (along with help pages, etc.) are out and ready, all that is really needed from an engineering perspective is server related business. I believe that with the couple of extra features missing, along with a hardware boost, LeadSingle can finally be where it strives to be.

But it’ll have to wait until summer.

A long-awaited feature, badges that reward you for all you’ve done on LeadSingle are now live on the site. These are little accomplishments that are found on your profile, made to show off how much you’ve helped making LeadSingle happen and expanding the database.

Although there are one-shot badges, most badges are part of a badge scale that gets you “upgraded” badges of the same kind if your statistics subsequently increase. For example, at the moment there’s a badge scale for the amount of edits you’ve done, and one for your placement on our leaderboard. Whenever your stats in any one of these increase, the relevant badge will automatically upgrade to a newer one if you cross a certain milestone.

To get information about any given badge and whatever badge may be coming next for you if you work hard, simply move your mouse over the badge to get more information.

This is just the beginning. In the future, badges will be more central to your user profile, and there will be a lot of additional types of badges.

Here’s an example of a user page with badges.

A lot of us on LeadSingle are geeks. And as geeks, we are fascinated with numbers. We’re especially fascinated with statistics.

Well, the LeadSingle stats page just got a visual boost and now features graphs picturing the progress we’ve made with the database content so far. It’s a joy seeing those numbers growing every day, and now we can look even further back in time and see the total growth so far.

It’s been a while since this blog was created, and now it’s time for our first legitimate update. This doesn’t mean that we haven’t been doing anything for 2 weeks, though. LeadSingle, in its beta state, is always iterated and improved upon, although the differences may not be immediately visible all the time.

In that spirit, there’s been quite a few database tweaks over the past couple of weeks, to ensure the data is as streamlined as possible.

However, a visible change has been happening! We thought it was a bit weird that you can only like and follow people and releases on their respective pages. We want it to be as easy as possible to take actions on items found on the site—even if you’re not visiting the page for them. This is why we’ve added Like/Follow buttons around in the most places where items are mentioned on lists. The hard part was to make sure not to add too much visual complexity to the clean design we like to think users really like. We think we accomplished this, though.

You can even call this a part of a grander scheme: Lists of items (releases, tracks, artists, users) found around on the site aren’t very informative—or particularly sexy—at the moment. We’re trying to make all lists (because they are an important part of what you can view on the site) more informative, space-effective and less bland.

The most visibly reinvigorated list so far is the list of most followed artists. The page before was incredibly boring, and now it’s full of life, energy and information. And you can click Follow directly on a list item. We think you’ll like it!

It’s been exactly a week since LeadSingle launched. And what a launch! I want to thank you all for signing up, checking out and following various artists and bands, anticipating upcoming stuff and liking releases you’ve listened to for ages. You rock.

If you haven’t heard about the site before, LeadSingle is a new music site that aims to be the most flexible, intelligent and up-to-date crowdsourced database of music releases. There are many places on the internet where you can listen to music, but not a whole lot of places where you can learn about music. And amongst those that are there, none of them are perfect. This is what we’re trying to change. Every part of the site’s tech backend is built up in order to ensure the most flexible browsing of a vast collection of music releases. And every part of the site’s frontend is all about making all the data make sense to you personally, which is why you can follow your favourite artists and your friends, keeping track of all news that’s related to you.

However, even though the site has gone through a year of development already, it’s only in a beta phase and there’s a lot missing still. Even now, there’s a lot that’s feeling empty, and a lot of potential still out there. Thus, this blog will be the place where you can stay up to date with the newest developments, and watch LeadSingle becoming more and more complete.

If you want to spread LeadSingle to your music-interested friends, remember that we’re on Facebook and Twitter. And we want to hear your thoughts.

We look forward to many great times of making this site even better, for everyone’s benefit! Thanks for being a member and following along!