Soldier Ant 

If you've looked at Ant Tracks lately, you should be noticing a higher success rate with matching up the album info to something in the Amazon database.

You can tell when no succesful match is found -- the album artwork is a generic Ant, and the links are Google-searches instead of links to the Amazon sell-page. Hopefully these will become fewer and fewer over time, although you'll always have situations where the album is just not available on Amazon (like Miranda Sound's Engaged in Labor) or is out-of-print altogether (like the Bottle Rocket's The Brooklyn Side, which is a shame by the way.)

Anyway, I've been making some very minor adjustments the past few days: the goal is to reconcile some of the CDDB data-formatting quirks with the way that Amazon marks up albums. Basically this involves regular expressions, string comparisons, ignoring a lot of ( )s and [ ]s... But it's coming along.

I even have a volunteer to start beta-testing Ant Tracks on their site, so my next moves will be to get these scripts ready for multi-user use. (Right now they're semi-hardwired to my blog and site.) Another thing that's been bugging me is the poor handling of Soundtracks and Various Artist compilations. I have a feeling that using the Amazon APIs Keyword Search, instead of the Artist Search, is probably the solution to that problem.

And soon I'll be starting a new Change-Blog that'll track the details of my ongoing tweaks. Because I know you're fascinated. (Next up: Trading Cards)