The Assignment:

A long time ago, almost 20 years ago, I built a music rating website in PHP as kind of a practice project. Just about a year or two ago I found this old project and fired it up. It was ok, a little clunky, but did what it was supposed to do basically. Then I looked at the code and yikes! It was pretty messy. So I decided I would redo my music rating site with some upgrades and modernization and Brandywine Music Review was born.

I had just finished overhauling Audioproz and was feeling like I wanted to apply some of the things I did with that to the new music rating site. So, other than the database, I scrapped the whole thing and started fresh. I expanded some of the functionality and improved the UI a bit, extracted the data form the old database and wrote it into a new cleaner db.

I used a little more Javascript to improve the UX and the end result was a pretty decent music sharing and rating website with rating, commenting, user profiles, messaging, and a variety of comparisons and stats.

PHP is nice for building websites because it was specifically written to do just that, and it has a lot of built in functions to make things easier. I go back and forth between Django and PHP, but in all honesty I would have to say that I prefer PHP for websites. It’s just very good at the thing it was specifically designed to do. Go figure.

So here are some images of Brandywine Music Review.