I'm very pleased to announce a website I just launched:
I'm calling it "a portable record player for the Internet" because I'm a record collector myself and listening to as much music as possible has been the best way to expand my collection. Yep, I'm one of those guys who goes to record conventions and brings a portable record player.
There are a few places to find used vinyl online — since 161,783 records are for sale on eBay right now, I'd say the Internet is a good venue. The problem is that you can't always listen to a record before you buy it and it's impossible to find great music by name alone when there is so much to choose from. I'm hoping to change all that with this site.
As you can see, it's still in very experimental stages and leaves a lot to be desired. eBay is the only marketplace supported so far but I plan to integrate Music Stack next. If anyone knows of another marketplace, please let me know. Also, if you have a friend who buys records then please send on the link (I'm interested to hear feedback from record buyers).
It took me about 6 months to get the data in order (doing all this in my spare time) so it is very exciting to be able to release an actual site now. The data pipeline is home-grown ETL and uses the eBay API + the super speedy and tolerant lxml.html (contrib by Ian Bicking), the excellent SQLAlchemy, and other tools. As I take the data pipeline to the next level I really hope to start using the very cool SnapLogic ETL framework for Python.
On the UI side this has been my first chance to really dive into Dojo. I like Dojo because it takes semantic HTML seriously, namespacing seriously, unit testing seriously, and object oriented JS seriously. It's a bit monolithic and I still haven't figured out how to build a custom minified version but so far I like it. Also, I really wish the Dojo API reference was more comprehensive. On the backend UI side, I'm using Pylons since I like how well it integrates with 3rd party Python libs. I don't like some of the magic it inherited from Rails but that is pretty easy to work around. Oh, I almost forgot to mention SoundManager 2, the ultimate javascript/flash mp3 player.