The neverending awesomeness of Indiepop Eyespy

Days have past, hundreds have died elsewhere in the world, but still I keep on hammering away at my keyboard. I keep on pushing, keep on fighting for something I believe in, something I've fought for for years, and that is Indie Eyespy.

Here try this
London Indiepop Eyespy

What you've got there may look pretty basic, but under the hood I've pushed the envelope of my skills. Its got html, JavaScript, php and MySQL.

It even looks pretty good when you view the source.

The list of bands and band members comes from a database that's 5 Normal Form, so the same person can be worth more points depending on what band they're in.

Now I just need to add a few more bands, and use the magic of CSS3 to make it look pretty.

And also do something slightly different for dealing with scenesters, promoters and DJs who aren't necessarily in any bands.

And then maybe I can work on adding a highscore table, and maybe a page to add new bands and band members, and then a special thing that looks up how many listeners each band has on last.fm and splits them into divisions based on how popular they are.

Order of the day

I've given some thought to what order to have the bands on the London Indiepop Eyespy website, this is another form over function problem.

Its got to be easy to use, easy to find the scensters that users want to claim points for.

This suggests alphabetical order for all the bands. This wouldn't be a problem if there were only two pages of bands. But if we're listing band members, that would be less than ten bands in total.

Besides, from my experience with the Skilmo site, people don't really want to work through a long list of bands, it puts people off using the site, their attention wanders and I've lost a scenester.

Back in the dusty days of Glasgow Indie Eyespy, the hundred or so bands of the Glasgow indie scene were split into about half a dozen divisions based on popularity, so in the premiership you'd find Franz Ferdinand, the Belles, the Obscuras, the Mogwai, in the first division you'd find the Felt Tips, The Plimptons, Wake The President etc. Scenesters could intuitively know where to look for the bands.

Which divisions the bands were in was a carefully calculated algorithm based on last.fm, technorati and MySpace data, but those vectors aren't really appropriate this decade for the twenty or so London Indiepop bands.

Sure I could work out some kind of popularity rankings, but having bands in divisions doesn't look nice if all the band members are listed. Alternatively, the site could list the bands and then expand to list the members once you've clicked on the name, but that's not very satisfactory.

I'm having real doubts about the viability of the website at this stage, I can't envisage people using it.

Doubts aside, if we look at the sort of sites I'm hoping to ape, like Last.fm and Songkick, they don't have alphabetical lists of bands, they intuitively know what band names you want to see, they don't have lists that you have to wade through.

So, with the tools I have available, what would Phil Cowans and Gideon Bullock do? What would Russ Garrett do?

​Something like this?