Ko-fi Update

https://ko-fi.com/hannahguo

This project is now accepting Ko-fi donations! ☕

All coffees will go directly towards funding hosting of a Starter instance of Ranked Records on Render.

Background

Ranked Records currently runs on a free instance of Render.

⬆️ The upside of this is that it is free
⬇️ The downside of this is that a free tier has it's limitations. The biggest one is that the site goes to sleep after inactivity and is spun-up whenever it receives a new request. This leads to load times of around 30 seconds.

The Purpose of Ko-fi

The site is fully functional on the free tier, but I can see the load time being annoying for some users. That's why I'm opening Ko-fi to fund the Starter tier on Render for this project.

This costs $7/month, and will allow Ranked Records to always remain running without needing the service to spin-up. Basically, the service will have infinite uptime (unless Render goes down).

Ko-fi donations will always go towards funding the Starter tier. If less than $7 is accumulated for a month, I'll wait until it accumulates to that amount.

I always want Ranked Records to be a free service, and regardless of Ko-fi donations, it will remain running on the free tier.

References

• Render docs on free web services
• Render pricing

Ranked Records v2 Release

Welcome to Ranked Records v2!

It's been a long time coming. The original v1 site went down when Heroku stopped its free tier, and now Ranked Records is finally back and better than before. I've rewritten and rehosted the project, which is now hosted with Render and is available at https://ranked-records.onrender.com/.

**✨ Some snazzy new features: **

• Multiple artists are now supported!
• The app now uses Spotify's artist recommendations to recommend artists when you search.
• The usual playlist creation with filters

**📦 Some retired features from v1: **

• The app can no longer be used without logging in to Spotify - originally I supported viewing a list without playlist creation but the complicated the flow and it turned out most people were logging in with Spotify anyway.
• Creating playlists with an incremental number of songs is no longer supported (the feature wasn't used and it's possible to do this manually through Spotify anyway).

** 📝 Some dev notes: **

• The app is now written in Typescript, though it doesn't take fully take advantage of it yet in some places
• The original v1 version can be found on the v1 branch.
• The store now uses Redux to manage state because the original app was just a giant array wrapped in a useState hook... which was a (very) poor design because I didn't know what I was doing back then. Now I know more about what I'm doing, so now the state management of the app is much better.

Ascending/Descending Sorting

What's New

User Features

• Due to popular request - ascending/descending sorting has been added for chronology and popularity. Simply click the arrow above the table heading to adjust :)

Bug Fixes

• Fixed bug where the app wouldn't work if a user didn't have a Spotify photo.

Misc

• Improved label for adding custom filters.

Welcome to Ranked Records

I know that it looks weird to have the beta be version 1.x.x and for the release version to be 2.0.0, and I know there's proper tagging suggestions, but the "beta" was only a beta because of Spotify restrictions while the app itself was fully functional.

Now I'm so happy to announce that Ranked Records was approved by Spotify, and that anyone can use the app now. If you don't have a Spotify account, you can still view the lists, but playlist creation will require one.

I've set up a contact form here.

Thank you for checking out Ranked Records. It means a lot to me that people find my project helpful ❤️

Ranked Records Beta

What's New

User Features

• In addition to sorting songs by popularity, chronology is also available on both table-view and playlist generation.

Misc

• Footer redesigned, linking to What's New (release page), made more friendly to use with smaller screens
• Added more prominent Spotify logo for better chances in getting approved for a quota extension
• Added LICENSE and contributing section on README

Ranked Records Beta

Welcome to Ranked Records, the beta version.

This is a web application using the Spotify API that retrieves all songs from an artist and sorts them by popularity.

Current Public Features
The following features are available WITHOUT authenticating with Spotify.

• Searching for an artist
• Loading and listing all songs from the selected artist ranked by popularity
• Links to all songs on Spotify

Current Beta Features
These features are implemented, and they work, but due to Spotify's development policy, users need to be manually added to the application. I hope to submit a request to get out of development mode soon, but if someone reading this release would like to give it a try, feel free to contact me.

• User authentication to generate playlists
• Filter out songs for playlist generation (e.g. don't include songs with "instrumental")
• Playlist generation for an artist's songs (options of all songs, or in increments of 50)

Please note that the site may take a while to start up initially (due to Heroku's free tier).