DohBell Changes

2021-02-24 14:16:52

Hey, first update in uhhh over 4 years!

Near the top of song pages there's a section where it will show other songs based on this song (covers, instrumentals) or the reverse. I've added a new section, "More songs from the same creators". It matches songs based on having the same people in the same credited roles. It scores some things particularly high (like Arrangement) and some things particularly low (like Vocals). It then ranks them by score, randomizing order where there are ties, and presents the top 5 results. It's also set to not give itself as a result, or songs which would already be in one of the two above sections. It also won't list instrumentals in general.

2017-01-09 15:49:07

New releases and songs added in for the second half of 2016.

Another big add is all the Petit Best albums have been added. Though mostly compilations, since they include remixes, occasional new songs, or songs from other obscure sources not already covered in the database, quite a few new songs were added to the database alongside them.

Yet another big add is I finally went through to fill in more song lengths for songs that were originally added before the current official discography pages were set up. There are still gaps, but where there were over 700 songs without lengths, now there are only 200.

2016-07-25 13:40:51

I've started having the database track birth dates and death dates. Behind the scenes, this is something I've been half keeping track of for some time, but it never ended up in the actual tables used on the site. Now I've got some uses in mind for them, so they have been. HOWEVER, since it's only 3 years after starting the site that I've deemd it important, that means there's a lot of missing data. Hello! Project member birth dates should be pretty complete. If when adding in other people I found a Wikipedia page or something for them that listed a birth date, that is also in. That still leaves the vast majority (composers, arrangers, lyricists...) with missing data. However, since most of my immediate ideas center around the group members themselves, not the end of the world. Death data is much more incomplete; I didn't even have a column for this on my offline spreadsheet. So as of this writing there are only two people with this info in there, though I know there are many more that should.

One of the differences you might notice is in the order by which people are listed in various locations. As far as the database is concerned Seniority is largely based on date of a person's first credit, but in cases of ties (such as when a generation of several members debut on the same single) in the end it would come down to the happenstance of what order I typed them into the database. Now it can use birth date for these ties, which basically matches what they do in the real world. The member order on a group page now also uses the birth date and ignores the larger Seniority value. This prevents situations like Berryz Koubou ordering being out of whack due to members' prior work in ZYX or 4KIDS.

I've tried to make it order properly when multiple groups perform together too. First group seniority, then how the individuals would be ordered within the group. There are always unusual circumstances and it would be difficult to make sure every situation sorts out perfectly, but I've got it working on the extreme case of Busu ni Naranai Tetsugaku so I'm pretty happy for now.

Another addition is that when viewing songs, the list of vocalists will also show their age at the time of the song's release, as well as an average. Of course the songs are recorded earlier than that, but what are you gonna do.

2016-07-19 13:12:25

The Hello! Project releases for the first half of 2016 have been added in.

Behind the scenes, fixed some problems that was leading things like Google search bots to try following thousands of bad links. The links would WORK, but not give what was expected--so basically both a big waste of the processing time and cache for both this server and the bots. Normal end users shouldn't notice a difference.

I haven't mentioned in updates, but I've been testing out ads which you may see come or go. Not that I figure this place is the key to Big Bucks, but if ads could cover the cost of domain registration that'd at least be something. But considering the factors of 1) Few visitors here 2) Ad pay rates kind of suck for non-obtrusive ads that don't require clicking 3) The best rates are from Google AdSense which rejected this site for not enough textual content, I doubt they'll be sticking around.

2016-01-13 16:55:14

The latest update adds in the new singles and albums from the second half of 2015, as well as the member graduations and additions.

As far as page changes:

The general search page will now return Notes that match. So if you search for S/mileage, you'll find the note about it being a past name of ANGERME, and thus still get pointed to that group's page.
The song list page now includes an expandable section at the bottom that lists only the song IDs with # around them. This is, frankly, mostly for me. It's something to help create a playlist from the search results, but since it involves setting up a file that connects these numbers to the location of the sound file on your device, I'm not sure anyone but me would want to spend the time. So for now the tool to actually replace all these numbers is just coded with my own files, but if anyone else is actually interested I can get it going in a more general way.
Song pages will now show miniature versions of the cover of every release they've been in. If it was only included in a Limited B release, you'll only see that cover. If it's ended up in Best albums repeatedly, you'll see them too.

2015-07-20 20:44:05

A ton of changes since the last (online) update a yearish ago. Summing up some:

There are a few dozen single-song digital releases from the Hello Cover series. Fills up the album list for 2010 and 2011 a bit and many of them from the same singer share the same "cover" image, but treating them like any other single/album seemed the most faithful way to handle it.

Sites that shut down or changed drastically (like S-mileage.jp and up-front-works.jp) have had their links turned into archive links. Possibly some of these archive links lead nowhere, either. C'est la vie. With many more archive links in place, I've moved them to a separate line rather than all sitting beside newer live versions. If the site still exists in a new form, new links have been added.

Since the new style of helloproject.com/up-front-works.jp shows basic lyrics/music/arrangement credits for pretty much everything, a lot of double-checking went on. There are still a few cases where there was some contradictory information between good sources, but at this point most of the bad credits should have been wiped away, and a lot of gaps filled in.

Of course there has been a year of new releases, and almost all of them are included.

Between all the new sources for credits, new things to actually give credit for, and new members of Hello! Project, there are about 180 new additions to the People/Groups List. Honestly a lot of these are due to a few cover albums, so a ton of unrelated people who will probably never get another credit in the database.

It's barely used yet, but I've added a system so short notes can be attached to people, songs, or albums. Mostly this is for things that don't have a proper place in the database at this time, like alternate names. Prominently, ANGERME and Country Girls are newly renamed entities that have notes about this. It's weird to have all the old stuff showing with the new name, but that's just the way this database is built.

I'll try to have another update before July 2016.

2014-07-07 08:27:48

I just noticed last night that at least for the last month, the default list order for songs and albums has been messed up--due to some difference in the way a slightly newer version of MySQL returns results in the online server versus the version running on my personal PC, the sorting by date (etc.) was being ignored. Should be fixed now.

2014-06-04 18:22:36

Long time no update! Hello! Project Wiki has definitely taken most of my H!P web time from this place. This is actually one of the biggest updates in a long time, though most of it is behind the scenes.

First off, the latest releases have been added. I usually don't make a point of mentioning them, but it's not usually a three month span covering at least one release by each major H!P group.

Second, the Hello! Project web page went through a total redesign, which broke hundreds of links to there from this site. Most of this has been fixed in two ways. All the old links now point to a version of the page stored on the Internet Archive, and use the site name HelloProject.com (archived). Links to the new version of the site just use HelloProject.com, but not all old artists' releases are covered on the site, so the archived version is as good as it gets.

Third, most of the site's pages have been trimmed a little in size, but not functionality. As one gets more pages doing things the same way (connecting to database, checking for cached version of page, etc.), ways to offload these tasks to a shared file that they can all refer to become more obvious.

Fourth, and the one that will make the biggest difference in the future, is that the site is now largely ready to be multi-lingual... it's just lacking the multi-lingual. Much of the text on various pages is now read from an English language file. Page titles, section titles, column headings. To make a version for another language would require little more than making a copy of that one file and changing the text within it. It's not a perfect solution: some of the English is stored in the database itself, and would require different changes to be made. Also long text like this or the explanation boxes found on the top-right of many List pages is unchanged. BUT I think if the situation were reversed, I'd be able to navigate a lot easier through a natively-non-English site now with English titles and headers. BUT the only other language file beside English I currently have is one for a fake semi-gibberish language just to see if it's loading that text correctly. So from the point of view of an English-reading user, it might just seem like there were some slight wording/spacing/line-breaking changes made here and there.

2014-03-03 09:40:30

Today's addition: Mano Erina. Though there are still (mostly digital) solo releases to add, I believe Mano is the final Hello! Project act with a significant catalog that needed to be added.

2014-02-19 14:12:16

Today, the solo releases of Takahashi Ai and Tsuji Nozomi.

With Takahashi especially here, we're starting to reach people who have quite a few digital single releases. This is a bit of a pain for various reasons. Without a physical release there's usually no official discography pages to check for solid details. No product code used for a release that makes it easy to look for more information with Google. No possibility that anyone has looked at the packaging for more details and put that online anywhere, because the packaging doesn't exist. Just from a site standpoint, it makes things a bit uglier--Takahashi's 5 digital singles released as part of the Hello Cover series have only 2 covers between them, and introduce 5 new entries to the album list, each with a whopping one track. Since they're specifically covers, they also tend to have names that are already in use, so it might help to cause confusion for someone who doesn't know what release they're looking for.