Saturday, November 18, 2023

chart-o-tron!

I love making bespoke web applications as part of the Independent Web. Six years ago I made "chart-o-tron" for managing sheet music for bands. (Many bands get by with Google Files or Wordpress, but those tools are often clumsy in terms of browsing, preserving metadata, and mobile-friendliness.)

Chart-o-tron met several UI/UX goals:

* Easy upload of PDF and other files

* Keep music organized by category

* Allow bands to have private or public archives

* Capture metadata such as Lyrics, Key and performance notes

* Friendly URLs for a band's landing page

* Mobile-friendly UX, letting a musician scramble to a chart they need on their phone in a hurry

(Later I added an ability to create "setlist surveys", allowing bandmates to indicate what songs they'd like to have for a rehearsal or performance. I do love democratic empowerment!)

"Chart-O-Tron" has proven its value to my band over and over again, so I figured it was time to move to a proper domain, chart-o-tron dot org ( not sure if LinkedIn will eat the link: <https://chart-o-tron.org/> )

Also I made a major UX improvement: a shared password for each band, rather than the individual account system it was using. This was mostly to work around the challenge of adding new accounts and authorizations; most of my band's chart-o-tron page access is done anonymously sans login. Having to setup a hierarchy with other bandmates "blessing" a newcomers account to grant admin privileges was just a constant piece of UX friction.

(Also although I made it years ago, it was gratifyingly easy to pick up on the homebrew MVC system I set up to handle the routing, and have pretty URLs like chart-o-tron/band/bandname )

Usual plug: I continue on the jobhunt grind, so if your company might be looking for a React/TypeScript wielding UI Engineer with demonstrated fullstack bonafides (and full UX!) let me know!

Resume: <https://kirk.is/resume>

Portfolio <https://kirk.is/portfolio

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