Billy-Corgan.com was the first public web site I ever created and ran. I first started playing with it (and web techs) in 1998/99. In 2000, I moved it from GeoCities to its own domain name. The site had it’s golden age in 2003/2004, with up to 4 million page views / month. I believe that is a rather high number for a non-popish fan site. Back then it was a PHP/MySQL driven site.

In 2005 I decided to stop maintaining Billy-Corgan.com due to various reasons, the most prominent ones being a lack of time and a decreasing level of devotion (esp. with regards to the online community and drama that follows).

For the last 5 years the site has therefore contained little to no information. Up until 2 days ago, it did only contain the Machina II MP3s (Smashing Pumpkins released this album on the Internet, for free, back in 2000!). At the same time, there have been hundreds of daily visitors (Google Analytics stats). And the old MySQL database has been kept intact on my backup devices. Therefore, I recently decided to re-lauch the site with some of the “static” content (lyrics, discography, photos + MP3s as before). No need for it to remain empty, right?

Moving to Topic Maps

So: what to do when putting some old database content on the web? I did not want to create a huge new web site and spend a lot of time writing (plain) PHP scripts and SQL queries. Didn’t have time for that right now.

Well, obviously I chose to create a Topic Maps based web app, with Ontopia being my preferred Topic Maps engine.

I started by creating a couple of new database views (to make for a simpler mapping) and a few stored procedures for “sanitizing”  some of the data (used in the views’ SQL). From there, the remaining tasks were pretty simple:

1. Create an LTM file (my preferred format) containing the ontology (concepts like Song, Person, Composer-Of, etc.). ~100 lines of LTM.
2. Write a DB2TM mapping file, specifiying which columns are mapped to what Topic Maps concepts. 136 lines of XML.
3. Write JSP files — as discussed in my previous post on Web App Development with Ontopia. Ended up with 10 specialized JSPs.

UI Functionality

I also wanted to add some “fun” functionality by creating an Ajax enabled photo gallery. I did explore some pre-built galleries such as Galleriffic, but ended up building my own using a combination of jQuery and jQuery cycle. The album degrades gracefully by not requiring JavaScript support — all links work without JS (example: 1979 vs. Zero).

Further, I implemented an audio “player” for the MP3s based on the HTML5 <audio /> element. At this time the browser support is very limited, though, as these are MP3s and not e.g. OGG. In the lack of MP3 audio support I fall back to using Flowplayer’s audio plugin (Flash based). I’ve also played with some CSS3 properties like border-radius, as seen on the index page (granted your browser supports either -webkit-border-radius, -moz-border-radius or border-radius (why so many?)).

The result can be viewed at Billy-Corgan.com.