Alan's Projects: MediaTrack

Alan's Media Track Project

Media Tracking Database

Concept -- Specifications -- Work Needed -- Downloads -- Installation Instructions -- Contact Info

Concept

For years, I've been looking for the "Ultimate Media Tracking Database". This would be a web front-end to a back-end database. The system would be a CDDB client for adding tracks (if given Album and Artist) for CDs, would track VHS, DVDs, Playstation games, Nintendo 64 games, etc.

It should also have a Mac, PC and Linux client interface, which would basically implement a CDDB lookup on an inserted CD and enter it into the database.

Specifications

Goal:	To provide a centralized Media Tracking database for organizing what CDs, Movies, Video Games, Books, etc. are owned, where they are (e.g. "Filed", "New", "On Loan", "Wanted") etc. Also, a nice printable interface will help keep from duplicating purchases.
Scope:	1) Web-based User Interface for data entry & retrieval. 2) CDDB-type platform specific client for automating entry of CDs. 3) Advanced reporting functions?
Prerequisites:	1) Apache. 2) PHP (3.05 or greater). 3) PostgreSQL.

Work Needed

The current tasks needed are:

Design and Provide access control to the appropriate functions (htaccess is fine).

Improve the End User Experience. The package is easy to use, but extremely plain.

Provide feedback on the package as a whole.
Re-code the Loans module to work with any media type, rather than only with Movies.
Suggest new functionality which should be added, preferably with sample code if possible.
For example, which pages should have links directly to other pages, rather than going through the menu bar? See the "Add Game" result page and the "New Person" link on the "Add Loan" pages for examples.

Downloads

The current version of this package can be downloaded here.

Installation Instructions

The package should be installed into web-space, e.g. (assuming a standard Red Hat installation):

Download package from http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~aland/Projects/MediaTracker/mediatracker.tar.gz to, for example, /tmp
cd /home/httpd/html/
As root, tar xzvf /tmp/mediatracker.tar.gz
This will create the directory mediatracker
Make sure that the user your web server runs as (typically either "nobody", "apache" or "httpd") can access your Postgresql database system.
As user 'postgres', type createuser webserveruser, replacing webserveruser with the user name that your web server uses to run - you can determine this with the command ps aux | grep httpd
Create the database structures by running the following command as a DBA (Database Administrator, typically user "postgres").
psql < /home/httpd/html/mediatracker/documentation/pg-structures.txt
This will create the database and related database elements required for MediaTracker to work.
Run your web browser, connect to http://yoursite/mediatracker/ and start filling in the data!

aland@cs.brandeis.edu
"Need bandwidth, will code."