Duran Duran Networks

Most of October has passed since I relaunched this site, and it seems dead again. Not so fast.

For the past two weeks or so, I’ve been working on corralling various REST APIs from Musicbrainz, Discogs.com, Last.fm and iLike to create a discography.

It doesn’t aim to be thorough like other discography efforts, but it does try to bring together data from various sites into one. If I can get this effort to work, I might revisit the Musicwhore.org Archive, which could definitely use some fleshing out.

At this point, I’ve managed to create an administrative interface that allows me to link Musicbrainz and Discogs unique IDs to the Musicwhore.org Archive database. Musicbrainz also includes various Amazon ASIN numbers, which allows me to tap yet another source of information.

Even the Last.fm integration looks promising at this point.

I have the structure in place, but like the Tour History Map, it won’t mean much till I can start populating it with meaningful data.

I’ll be traveling in November for three weeks, so I hope to get something rolled out before then. If not, this site will probably still be a bit barren till the holidays.

Over the years, this domain has been a number of things — a parody of a web portal, a not-quite-kosher streaming server — but mostly, it’s just been a parked domain.

Well, now it’s back, and it’s pretty much a laboratory.

When I first registered this domain in 1999, all you needed to build a remotely decent web site was an FTP program and text editor. Today, it’s all about the frameworks and AJAX and social media and …

I found myself in a position where I needed to update my training. But what was I going to build? Another content management system for a blog?

Nah. Why not combine two interests — Duran Duran and web development — into one? Luckily, I have this domain.

These days, I’m not in any way involved with the Duran Duran fan community. In fact, I’m pretty much a shade of the fan I was in the ’80s and ’90s. But Duran Duran has been the most influential band in my creative life, and they’re also pretty content-rich.

So Duran Duran Networks has returned, this time as a means to experiment and to create.

What better way to start than with a Google Maps mash-up? I’ve entered a few dozen old tour dates from the Duran Duran Timeline into a database, which I then cross-referenced with some cached geocode coordinates from Google Maps. The result? The Duran Duran Tour History Map.