Click here for Details on the Change Request # 32

Comments:

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Click here for Details on the Change Request # 31

Comments:

Technical Info: Tagging is required. We would also need a way to submit these two types without overwriting each other

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Click here for Details on the Change Request # 30

Comments: Aligned the names and photos and provided a darker background for the architect section

Technical Info: Better formatting is required

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Click here for Details on the Change Request # 29

Comments: Will provide an option for removing this from the edit screen for Admins

Technical Info: We can either not commit the comments real time or find a way to remove that

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Click here for Details on the Change Request # 28

Comments:

Technical Info: sort query bug

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Click here for Details on the Change Request # 27

Comments: There is a behind the scenes effort happening to categorize songs by Genres in addition to several other efforts. This is undocumented still since not all songs have been tagged accordingly

Technical Info: http://malayalasangeetham.info/secure/MalayalaSangeetham/php/createSongIndex.php?txt=Comedy&stype=genre&txt2=&stype2=song_start&txt3=&stype3=song_start&txt4=&stype4=song_start&txt5=&stype5=song_start&submit=Find+Songs

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Click here for Details on the Change Request # 26

Comments: 14 out of 3975 movies had this problem you reported ! All of these have been fixed. Let me know if you encounter this again.

Technical Info: Ran syncUpYears.php

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Click here for Details on the Change Request # 25

Comments: Multi-level AND search has been implemented. Hope to implement OR soon ! Thanks for the request

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Click here for Details on the Change Request # 24

Comments:

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Click here for Details on the Change Request # 23

Comments:

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Click here for Details on the Change Request # 22

Comments: This needs updating the current code.

Technical Info: The probability of occurrence is very low. However this needs to be fixed

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Click here for Details on the Change Request # 21

Comments: Undocumented options are published

Technical Info: Instructions to do so is posted in the AboutUs.org link from the MSI page

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Click here for Details on the Change Request # 20

Comments: For users who wants to download data, the static pages are more convenient

Technical Info: Dynamic song search pages currently spit out thousands of results in some cases. This is highly inconvenient for most users

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Click here for Details on the Change Request # 19

Comments: This could be used for syndication purposes

Technical Info: Static Pages can include comments from key contributors etc

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Click here for Details on the Change Request # 18

Comments: The challenge here is to figure out what should be included for subscription

Technical Info: Implement XML files for simple syndication mechanisms

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Click here for Details on the Change Request # 17

Comments: Oct 25,2007
Preliminary move has been completed. More to follow

Technical Info: Consider moving the help and descriptive texts from various parts of the site to somewhere similar to AboutUs.org

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Click here for Details on the Change Request # 16

Comments:

Technical Info: Static file creation utility to be updated to include this request

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Click here for Details on the Change Request # 15

Comments: dear Ajayettan, Do you have the details of Drama songs like Ponnarivaal, bali kudeerangale..etc if we can provide that details in the near future, it will be nice ?!! what do you think? will it be a difficult task for us?

Technical Info: This is to be transcribed from the book on KPAC Songs (Which I have a copy of)
Oct 25,2007
First pass of this is completed, where the names of the plays and the songs in them are currently available from the homepage. We still need the year of origination and the singer names. So I'm keeping this item open

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Click here for Details on the Change Request # 14

Comments: A more meaningful logo that brings together music, language, artists etc. need to be in place

Technical Info: First version created and pages are updated

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Click here for Details on the Change Request # 13

Comments: Real database nu vendi ingane cheythaal nannaayirikkunnu Release aaya chithrangalkku Year kodukkaam Release aakattha chithrangalkku Year nte sthaanatth NR (not released) UR (un released) enno mark cheythaal ............ Mattonnu State record l dubbing movies kaanaarilla varshatthil 10 to 15 dubbing chithrangal varaarundu Ithinaayi (D) enno matto mark cheythaal kollaamaayirunnu Ithu verum abhipraayam maathramaanu.

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Click here for Details on the Change Request # 12

Comments:

Technical Info: Obtain information from active contributors and provide a link for easy access

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Click here for Details on the Change Request # 11

Comments: I have a suggestion.
On the lines of what have been added on the awards front,can t we bolster the information content of the site - taking it to the next level,in a way.
Say,one could start off by providing categorised information on the personalities, featured on the gallery.For a singer it could be something like - first film,first song,first duet,year,movie, trivia etc. There is an abundance of information - interesting, insightful, hitherto unkown at a broader level - floating in media,books, web etc.This would be an opportunity to collect them at one place as we come across them,verify the information we already know with others and eventually get at a source of reliable,validated info.
One could seek inputs from our members (have come across an amazing cross section of knowledgeable people here - Shakeeb,Suresh Warrier,the gentleman from Bahrain - can t place his name,and other esteemed contributors to this site..)
With time we could aim for a one stop shop for CONTENT relating to music at MSI. My sense is,this will also promote a more vibrant participation and discussion from our members and would turn out to be an enriching experience for all of us creating the best info database in existence today.

Technical Info:

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Click here for Details on the Change Request # 10

Comments: Adarsh is already doing some pages like this. Would he be interested in bringing this under the MSI umbrella?

Technical Info: How about raveendran.malayalasangeetham.info and similar pages to provide an in depth analysis of life and works musical greats

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Click here for Details on the Change Request # 9

Comments: Please include muslim devotional songs & Mappilappattu albums also released by Tharangini

Technical Info: Updated Sep 29, 2007
Shakeeb has been adding several of these albums. Will keep the item open for some more time

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Click here for Details on the Change Request # 8

Comments: Several of us have books that talk about various musical trivia and such. Provide a database of that for easier reference
A reference section has been added, but this contains only about 30+ books. Will keep this item open until we have a better handle on the item

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Click here for Details on the Change Request # 7

Comments: - Ability to add comments: We could really integrate popular standard wikis or bulletin boards right along with a song to capture details that could make the whole thing more easy to use. Specific ideas on how to do that are quite welcome. - Data redundancy in movie names....: Yes. This is indeed true; primarily because of 2 reasons (1) I'm not a database designer :) (2) More importantly, the data evolved in this database over time and my preference was more data to move it closer to our goal of being a "comprehensive database" over efficiency whenever I had to do a trade-off. This led to a situation where the movie database and the songs database were separately built and hooked up using some scripts. I'm in complete agreement that the time has come for us to remove the redundancies and the make the databases work as it should. I don't expect this to be too difficult - Selectable values for the fields such as Singer/Musician ....: The reason for not implementing this for the Songs (Though we still have that feature for Movies Search) is because we have 1749 unique singers,350+ musicians and about similar number for lyricists. Typically it is not considered to be very convenient to load up drop-down menus with this much data. Some browsers break with simple html implementation and efficiency will be compromised if we dynamically load up the page (server side scripts like php) from the database every time one loads it. I have kept the "Movies" and "Songs" implementation different primarily to spur the thought of usability among users and find out if they have a preference for one over the other. An efficient implementation these days could be using "AJAX word completion" (http://ajax.asp.net/ajaxtoolkit/AutoComplete/AutoComplete.aspx) type features that would provide a more context sensitive searches. Unfortunately that particular technology is beyond my capabilities and we need some tech-savvy folks to be involved in this to make that kind of a change. If I don't get any help in that area, the soonest I will get to it will be Spring of 2008. If we can find someone who has time and essential skills to do this, that would be the most ideal situation. Sometime in the near future, I will post my Todo List here so that any of you who are interested can recommend your priorities. I will bump up the priority of removing data redundancies to make user visible issues such as different spellings for movies in Movie DB and Songs DB go away

Technical Info: Well, even if it doesn't make that impression, MSI is actually meant as a collaborative site. means, if you don't find an information there which should be there, then you can submit it on your own. just above the song listing there is a link saying "Click here to submit a missing song". i think this collaborative feature could be something to enhance further, like a wiki. would be nice if people could submit things more conveniently. by the way, one thing i noticed: it seems the data that is visible in the songs view like especially movie name, isn't the same as the one visible in the movie view. seems there is some kind of redundancy in the data. like for example it is "Kalippattam" in the movie view, but in songs view for one of the songs (Mozhiyazhakum) its "Kalippaattam", with double "a". aren't the songs and the movies linked at a conceptual level? i mean if you click on the + in one line, then isn't it possible to take along the attribute "movie" to the next page (song view) and place it under "Movie"? or is it because of the submit song feature that both of these things (movie and song, but also composer, lyricist etc.) are uncoupled? like is it the mistake of the person who submitted it? wouldn't it be possible to offer the existing music directors, lyricists etc. names when submitting something instead of letting the people write it on their own? with a drop down box? then you could get rid of these mistakes i think. but somehow it sounds too simple that i think you have good reasons why you didn't implement it like that. :)

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Click here for Details on the Change Request # 6

Comments: I'll take a look at this as soon as possible and fix them. My guess is that the last round of cleanup of spurious entries in the database didn't necessarily get reflected on the portal pages (since these are static pages created to make it more conducive for search engines). A couple of notes though: "Vani Jaya" is a different singer than Vani Jairam. 13 AD is a band that played for the movie Daivathinte Vikruthikal. Rest all looks to be errors that I need to fix
PP, All the identified infractions have been rectified. "Nayidin" apparently is how that singer prefers to be idenified, "Rehna" is AR Rahman's sister, who now has a consistent spelling in MSI. I'm continuing to look as time permits; when you come across more, don't hesitate to forward them.

Technical Info:

A glance through the Portal section for solo singers throws up some
strange names and duplicate entries.This scetion needs a sanity
check.

I am sure one can attempt to rectify this quickly as this would
involve minimum surfing throught the database,if one does it from
the portal.

Some such entries :

- There are multiple versions of the same name ( KJ Yesudas,KS
chithra,Vidyasagar..)Yesudas appears in various shades all over..

- Splelling mistakes (Sathessh babu,Vani Jaya)

- Strange names (M,13 AD,duet,chorus..)

Request you to take a look,please.

Hi ASM,

Thanks for your quick response;and the 6 long hours of boy
scouting :-)

Its all fine now (there s just one, one and only yesudas there now)
barring a few odd cases,one came across.

-----

Some duplicate entries :

Kanjangad Ramachandran - Kanjangadu Ramachandran

Meboob /Mehboob

P Leelam Santha P Nair ( this can t appear in a list of solos,right)

Madhuri, P Madhuri

Periyanayaki, PA Periyanayaki

Rahana / Rahna (are they different)

Santhosh Kesav / Santhosh Keshav / Santosh Keshav

Salma George / Selma George

Seerkazhi /Sheerkazhi Govindarajan

SP Balasubramaniyam /manium

V Dakshinamooorthy/V Dakshinamoorthy

Chorus,Instrumental

Nayidin - One couldn t understand this.

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Click here for Details on the Change Request # 5

Comments: First of all let me congratulate you for your efforts for creating such a vast database of Malyalam movies. My name is Paayal & I just want to request you to also add the name of the Music Publishing Company of available movies. We should not forget their contribution. You can ask the data from the various music companies who publish the cds & cassettes.
More info from Paayal on Aug 8:
I know some Music company names which can provide you the details required for your database.

The List is as follow :-

Gramophone companies pvt. ltd

Satyam Audios

Ranjini

Tharangini

Audiotrack Music Company

Geetham

These are the few music companies which I know. I can help You in getting some data from Saregama (Gramophone) but the process will take time.
With warm & musical regards,
Paayal

Technical Info: Excellent idea. We will be more than happy to add those names. If you know of some specific music companies who are active now, that will be a great start

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Click here for Details on the Change Request # 4

Comments: Register at the Google site and get the analytics ID

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Click here for Details on the Change Request # 3

Comments:

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Click here for Details on the Change Request # 2

Comments: 1) I believe you're using some database to store these details. Not sure why you have to add to/create your own dictionary when some databases like Oracle provide functions like "soundex('string' )" which will take care of small spelling mistakes ('th' vs 't', 'a' vs 'aa' etc.). 2) Again, due to perhaps data being in a database, I feel you're missing a lot of search hits. I just did a following search in google. site:www.malayalasa ngeetham. info "oru vattam" It returned no hits whereas it was very well there in the system. I don't think any search engine "crawls" databases. One suggestion to get more hits would be to create pages, perhaps in a batch mode, which will list all, or atleast most searched, details. For a person who knows this site it's not a problem. But for someone who doesn't, he's missing a lot. Could you please think over this.

Technical Info: First off, I have considered using Soundex function (..and we used to have it in the first version in 2003) but this doesn't make a lot of sense in several cases due to the fact that the words are transliterated from malayalam. I will try to put these back and use in conjunction with the built-in dictionary and see if that helps further. Stay tuned

Updates: Aug 2007
Significant strides have been taken here. Typical monthly usage of the site has shot up from around 50,000 hits to 5 times that amount. However there are still some unresolved issues. I am going to leave this open for now.

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Click here for Details on the Change Request # 1

Comments: I don't know the technical feasibility, but it'd be best to convert everything to unicode so that "Sounds Like" won't be needed at all. The Unicode Consortium hasn't finalized the encoding for malayalam yet , I think, but that'd be the general direction to move. My suggestion would be to use a standard transliteration scheme like 'Mozhi' for the time-being and when Malayalam encoding has been standardized, convert everything to unicode with existing apps like varamozhi or hack up something for our purpose. Admittedly it'll take a lot of work, but if there're enough volunteers, I guess this can be done, albeit gradually. Please everyone voice your views on this.

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