jan oberst .com

Muxfind is a little side project I started in May '08.

Muxfind finds different tastes in music by analyzing the Muxtapes of thousands of people. It extracts the music taste that is hidden in a playlist by comparing the the artists on that playlist. The goal of Muxfind is to help discover new artists and bands by analyzing a user's playlists. By analyzing the query semantically it can provide more than just basic google-like keyword search.

Muxtape.com was a provider for online mixtapes. Sadly they had to close shop in August of 2008 because of copyright claims, despite not having distributing any MP3 files. All access was limited to listening to a compilation.

Ligageschichte is still in the makes..

It crawls and analyzes data about the German Soccer League (Bundesliga). It's a project Stefan and I worked on for an HPI seminar from April to July '08.

Foren-City is one of Germany's biggest provider of free Internet forums. In May '07 we relaunched its brand identity.

We relaunched Foren-City after I joined them in May of 2007. The new interface features a prominent registration form along with clear lists of functionality Foren-City has to offer. I designed the new brand identity using minimalistic typography and a sketched city as the new logo.

Mindquarry was a company founded by three graduates of the university I'm visiting. I took an internship there during Spring Break '07. As of January '08 Mindquarry is no more. They didn't get another round of funding and had to close up.

They developed open source collaboration software, and they had already finished a first version of it when I started. My goal was to speed up the whole front-end rendering process — I solved the problem by loading pages asynchronously via AJAX.

So clicking a link wouldn't follow the URL but instead fetch the whole page in the background and display it's contents. This way we could limit the changes to the already finished pages to an absolute minimum and still speed up loading times from 2 seconds to right about 150 milliseconds on an average computer. I implemented those changes using Apache Cocoon and XSL work.

I also designed a nice front-end selector using my Javascript and AJAX skills. We started from the idea and paper prototyping to UCD queries with test groups until it was finished mid-May '07.

I was asked to manage the time measurement for a running event by a local youth welfare organization in '06.

The event consisted of 8 different runs for different age groups. So it had to be possible to register new runners while the first kids already finished. It had to measure the time for each of the runs, too.

The complete systems runs in a browser, so only a wireless network connection to the computer which holds the data is needed.

Once the two computers would lose their connection all the run timing would have to stop. That's why I ran two database servers which did all the synchronization work between the two computers.

Using flickrgrab.com one can access literally hundreds of pictures from flickr.com at the same time. Finds 250 thumbnails on one page for a search query, or for user's profiles.

I built this for my own API client implementation using PHP. It uses my API class along with a javascript and ajax-based HTML frontend.

This little side project of mine combines Amazon web services with lastFM.

It's quite easy to display a cover image of the latest CD i've bought using a picture from Amazon. What's not so easy is to do that with a single track, because you usually don't know the CD it belongs to.

I combined a lookup on lastFM to find out on which CD the song was published and queried Amazon to cross-check the data and get the actual cover art.

Sad story: Amazon shut off version 3 of their AWS. So it doesn't work any more...

My own CMS software is at version 4 right now. Object orientated from top to bottom, modular and even with a little generic HTML forms- and table abstraction tool to create new pages in a few minutes.

I used my very first CMS for some online gaming teams in '99. Version two was used with Alice-Salomon-Schule and featured file uploads and pictures. I started the third version for orangeGaming.net. The fourth and final version was needed for a literature quiz I worked on with two of my school teachers.

orangeGaming marks the latest and very best team I joined in the e-Sport universe that has been growing since '99. In collaboration with another team member we designed and coded the whole state-of-the-art website which is now the basis for the third version of my CMS.

We ended the project in 2004 when most of the team members started college.

Alice-Salomon-Schule was the first contract work I did. It features some basic features of my CMS. The news page uses thumbnails and the corresponding PHP upload form. Articles can have up to ten thumbnails which are rendered in larger size in a lightbox. The gallery is the most simple part of it all and consists of just an upload screen with a title field. The simplicity of the site has been the most important feature from the beginning, since back then desktop-like ajax appliances weren't popular yet.