After com­plain­ing about alpha­bet­i­za­tion in music libraries for — wow — almost a year, I’ve decided it’s time to do some­thing about it.

I know very lit­tle about JavaScript and XUL, but that is going to have to change. My goal is to com­plete the add-on described here, an Artist Web media view, or per­haps “Constellations.”

To make the task appear less daunt­ing, I’ve bro­ken it up into many mile­stones of mar­ginal improve­ments. If I fol­low this time­line, the plu­gin will be usable and released to the pub­lic as Con­stel­la­tions v0.1 on July 27.

I’m going to cre­ate a sep­a­rate blog to track my progress on this, for sev­eral reasons:

1. Threat of shame. If I empha­size pub­licly that I am going to do this, and I fail, I’ll be kind of embar­rassed. Hope­fully that will moti­vate me to actu­ally com­plete the project.
2. Geeks love prov­ing that they’re smarter than you. If I’m hav­ing a tough time with some rel­a­tively ele­men­tary code, maybe peo­ple will mock me in the form of writ­ing the cor­rect code them­selves. I’m cer­tain that what I’m attempt­ing could be done in no time flat if I’d been for­mally edu­cated in things like JavaScript. Maybe the bit­ing sar­casm of peo­ple who need to demon­strate their intel­li­gence will show me where I’m going wrong.
3. To encour­age pla­gia­rism. Look, I’ll admit that I’d be proud if the add-on that comes out of this bore my name. But ulti­mately, I don’t care. If some­body sees what I’m doing, likes it, wants it to be their own, and knows they can beat me to it, then great. At least we’ll have the add-on.

If you feel like mock­ing me or encour­ag­ing me you can email me at topdownjimmy@gmail.com, leave/follow com­ments on this post, or visit my ded­i­cated Con­stel­la­tions blog to see where I’m tak­ing this and how quickly I fail.