User:OliverCharles

Hi!

My name is Oliver Charles and I've been interested in MusicBrainz since the start of 2006. Around April 2007 I'd entered about 600 edits into the database, and decided to start also taking in intrest in the development in MB. On this page you can find out some of the stuff I've done (until I become a major contributor and there's too much to list. Hey, I can wish!)

Contributions

• PythonMusicBrainz2 Label Support: A few days after label support was added, I wrote a fairly large patch to add label support to PythonMusicBrainz2.
• PicardQT Cover Artwork Plugin: I rewrote the amazon cover art plugin to use CoverArtLink relations, and degrade gracefully through different types of album artwork.
• MixEngineerAlias: A mini database of alias that mix engineers write on the runout etchings of vinyl.

Current Projects

• Drum & Bass Cleanup: One of the first major uses of MusicBrainz for me was to tag all my vinyl as I ripped it. Now that all the ripping is complete, I've learnt more about MusicBrainz, and a lot of the data was lacking in some aspects (mainly relationships). Now I'm going through my collection, making sure every release has as much information attached as possible.

Future Projects

Stuff I plan to do in the future, but haven't yet got round to doing (as I have current projects that take priority) include:

• Hacking on MusicBrainzServer: I'd like to start contributing code as I love programming... just gotta take the leap in and get started!
• Funkadelic Cleanup: Shouldn't take much, I just plan to go through and make sure it is all as clean as it can be (inspired by BrianFreud's Nirvana effort).
  • http://www.duke.edu/~tmc/motherpage/albums_funkadelic

• High Contrast cleanup: It's not very bad at the moment, but it could certainly be better.

Hacking

I'm new to hacking on MusicBrainzServer, so I'm doing so simple tasks at the moment:

• XHTML Cleanup: The pages are pretty good since the XHTML 1.1 transition, but they are still lacking. They are also using a lot of semantic elements for layout (hell, the whole site is based in tables!). Here's the status at the moment:
  • Validation: The first step is to make sure every page validates in validators. http://htmlhelp.com/cgi-bin/validate.cgi is being used as the validator.
  • Semantic Elements: Changing elements for semantic equivilents to help text-to-speech translators, screen readers and mobile devices parse the website better.
  • CSS Cleanup: Clean the CSS of redundent definitions, make sure it is valid, and make sure the above new elements are styled correctly.
  • Re-validate: Make sure it still validates!

(If you know of or find static server content that has migrated to WikiDocs and thus doesn't need to be XHTML, please add them to the list at DeprecatedStaticPages).

Talking to me

I can be reached on IRC most of the time - aCiD2 is my alias, and I'm often in the MusicBrainz channel.

Other junk...

The following is probably not much use to anyone except my self.

• Lamb - What Sound: Need to finish adding the huge amount of relationships to http://musicbrainz.org/release/874df485-2202-4fc4-bbae-2b7a48444882.html|this release