My colleagues over at Lydverket published a great festival guide today, and I have been thinking of ways to enhance it.
We recently made a page that fetches artsts info from several websites, like imeem, youtube, last.fm, flickr and wikipedia, for use together with NRKs radio playlists, and I wanted to miks Lydverkets guide with this aristinfo service.
The easiest way would be to simply link each artist in their festival guide to the corresponding arist page, but the first problem is that the layouts are quite different. To solve this we changed the artist info page to take a folder id as a paramter, so that we can change its layout dynamically. And is so happens that we have a folder that has no layout at all, which means I can do something like this:
http://www2.nrk.no/spillelister/LaatInfo.aspx?artist=Santogold&ppfolder=p3
This gave me the sudden urge to just insert an iframe dynamically under each artist name in the festival guide, so that you can simply click on an artist, and get a ton of information, music, videos, etc, but the problem with this is that there is simply TOO MUCH information.
Luckily, the artist info page is build up of several smaller, freestanding pages, placed in the artist info page using iframes (mostly). This means that I can break it all up, and perhaps create a tabbed interface for each artist in the festival guide, which I will work some more on tomorrow.
But until then I want to test a few other things:
A few minutes ago I went through the list of the 17 bands that are scheduled to play at the Hove festival (www.hovefestivalen.no), seached them all up on youtube, and placed them in a standard youtube playlist. I then created a custom player, that looks like this:
Hove – Day 1:
Hove – Day 2
Perhaps it could be as easy as this? I you are reading a festival guide, what else do you need than a fast way to check out each artist? Is one youtube video is for me enough to tell me wether or not to see a band live? Perhaps.
I think I will insert this little youtube player in the page and ask around tomorrow if it works or not, and then I will do some tests with the youtube api to see if a can extract my playlist as xml and present is as I wish.
