Introduction essay for a web service called Statster located at http://statster.info

1. 1
TEEMO TEBEST
STATSTER
1 Introduction
Statster
1 is a web service which provides a powerful way to stat a user's listening
habits. Statster does this by cataloguing the user's listened albums or records.
After some collected listenings Statster can show the user which albums are her
favorite ones. Statster is also capable of helping users nd new music.
2 Statster
Statster was born with the premise that music is published mostly in the form
of an album. For this reason, it is natural to obtain information on listening
to albums. In Statster an album means a musical entity, such as a full-length
album, an extended play or a compilation album. Listenings to singular songs is
not recorded by Statster. This is done by a similar web service called Last.fm
2
and it is the main dierence between these two services.
To use Statster, the user can act as a non-registered or a registered user.
Non-registered users may view statistics which have been created by registered
users. In addition to what non-registered users can do, registered users may
submit their listened albums to Statster and thereby create their own music
1 http://statster.info/
2 http://last.fm/

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catalogue. Currently Statster has approximately 10 active users but the amount
is growing constantly.
3
The principal motivation in Statster and in statstering is generated from the
interest in music and for the desire to get information on how it is consumed.
Statster's main function is to show users information about their listening
history. This information is provided to the user with various visualizations
which have been made quite inclusive.
Statster is mostly based on several main pages which are generated from the user
given parameters. These main pages include artist and album pages, various top
list pages and tag cloud pages. A tag cloud is a visual depiction of user-generated
or system-generated tags or simply words which describe the content of web
sites. In Statster tags are listed alphabetically, and the importance of a tag is
shown with font size and colour. The parameters to each individual view of a
page are delivered with an URI
4 addresses. The URI address can be written
directly to the browser's address bar or more commonly the user can follow
5
hyperlinks . For example tag clouds are generated from various data sets such
as the nationalities of artists and the user is able to aect with URI addresses
which information is shown. The tag itself is also a hyperlink that leads to
another view in Statster. (cf. Halvey Keane, 2007)
3 Technology
Statster makes use of several dierent technologies. All the used technologies
are however compulsory for the system to work. The views are HTML-based,
controlling is done with PHP and data storage is created with SQL. JavaScript
3 Statstering means that you create a stat from something.
4 Uniform Resource Identier
5 Hyperlink is a reference to another location.

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is used to handle some dynamic content.
HTML
6 is the mark-up language for web pages and it is used in Statster. With
HTML it is possible to create structured documents which are viewable with
web browsers. HTML consists of various elements such as headings, paragraphs,
lists etc. In HTML one can also dene links to other HTML pages (hyperlinks).
HTML also allows embedding images and other objects among the text. (cf.
Raggett et al., 1999)
PHP
7 is the main programming language used in Statster. To be exact, PHP
is not a programming language but a scripting language. Scripting language
means that the code is compiled run-time. PHP is a widely-used language that
is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. PHP
handles basically all the functionality in Statster. (cf. Lerdorf Tatroe, 2002,
pp. 1-2)
SQL
8 is a database computer language designed for managing data in relational
database management systems. SQL is originally based upon relational algebra.
In Statster SQL is used as data storage, meaning that all the data that users
send to Statster is saved by using SQL. To be exact, Statster uses one particular
SQL database management system called MySQL. Other commonly used SQL
database management systems are LiteSQL and PostgreSQL. (cf. Beaulieu,
2005, pp. 1-3)
JavaScript is a scripting language used to enable programmatic
9 access to computational
objects within a host environment (on the Internet, the browser is the host
environment). JavaScript enables the possibility to create enhanced user interfaces
which are dynamic and capable to react on user interactions. For example
6 HyperText Markup Language
7 PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor
8 Structured Query Language
9 Programmatic means that objects can be accessed with programming language.

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when the user is using Statster's search functionality, JavaScript is used to auto
complete the given search string (like Google
10 does in its search engine). (cf.
McDue, 2003, pp. 9-10)
4 Conclusion
Statster collects and stores user-given content and visualizes it with intuitive
methods which give the user useful or at least interesting information. Statster
is a modern dynamic web service that uses several dierent technologies.
References
Beaulieu, A. (2005). Learning sql (1st ed.; J. Gennick, Ed.). 1005 Gravestein
Highway North, Sebastopol CA 95472, United States of America: O'Reilly
Media. Available from http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596007270
(ISBN 978-0-596-00727-0)
Halvey, M., Keane, M. T. (2007, May). An assessment of
tag presentation techniques. 16th International World Wide Web
Conference, May 8-12, 2007, Ban, Alberta, Canada. Available
from http://www2007.org/posters/poster988.pdf (ACM
978-1-59593-654-7/07/0005)
Lerdorf, R., Tatroe, K. (2002). Programming php (1st ed.; P. Ferguson
N. Torkington, Eds.). 1005 Gravestein Highway North, Sebastopol
CA 95472, United States of America: O'Reilly Media. Available from
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9781565926103/ (ISBN 978-1-56592-610-3)
10 http://www.google.com

5. 5
McDue, T. (2003). Javascript concepts techniques: Programming
interactive web sites. 22462 SW Washington St. Sherwood, OR 971402,
United States of America: Franklin Beedle Associates. Available from
http://www.fbeedle.com/69-4.html (ISBN 1-59028-203-5)
Raggett, D., Hors, A. L., Jacobs, I. (Eds.). (1999, December 24).
Html 4.01 specication. W3C. Retrieved 12 April 2010, from
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/