TL:DR version: Visit Intones!
So remember a while ago I mentioned something about a new project that was nearly finished and was going to be ready soon(I am quickly learning soon for means up to several months )? Well today it’s officially out. And while I still have some tweaking and fiddling left to do I’m proud to announce that Intones has been made live!
I remember a long time ago being frustrated that I missed some new releases from some band I was in to at the time. At that time I thought it’d be nice to have someway to be notified when new cd releases were made by bands that I liked. I wasn’t quite sure how to do it then, and so I sort of left the problem at that. Last year I decided I wanted to learn python and use Django to make something cool when I was reminded of this problem. I thought that surely there was someway I could get new cd release information without trying too hard (ie researching/inputting new releases automatically.) Sure, enough there are several ways to go about it. I finally settled upon using Amazon and their store APIs to figure out what new information is and thus a site was born.
Of course, it took longer than expected. Not because of any difficulty, but the birth of my first child, holidays, and etc all means I’ve been pretty busy these days. It’s been fun though. Now on to some bug fixing, and planning out the next project 
Neat project; I’d been wondering how to best go about that myself, but with more of a TV/anime angle.
A few thoughts:
* Probably you want the admin interface on a less obvious url? And secured by SSL?
* Why not use slugs for URLs instead of numbers (ie /artist/stone-temple-pilots/)? It’s not like you handle multiple artists under a given query gracefully. That’ll reduce load.
* If the purpose isn’t to sell direct advertising to users, why not just generate RSS feeds per artist? No more email, no more passwords, and less server side processing to merge collections. This would also solve the user RSS privacy problem.
I think this could easily be extended to do movies and books, just have to tell amazon to search for different things. Anyhow to respond to your points:
1) This does need to be changed, I simply hadn’t thought too much about it yet. SSL would be nice, though I’m not sure it’s absolutely needed.
2) I’ve been wanting to do this, though it probably won’t reduce load since I believe most users will use the search either way
3) While currently there is no direct advertising, I could see it being in place later if the site gains a sizable audience. However, being able to create lists is important since I want one RSS feed with all the artists I care about and not individual feeds for each artist. I also don’t think RSS privacy is a problem, so that is not something I concerned about at this moment. I could see per artist rss feeds being useful, so I may add that in the future as well.
Thanks for the suggestions!
On 2):
Granted, I don’t know your schema, but it could reduce joins / queries by using natural keys.
I wouldn’t be so quick to assume the bulk of your load will be search. If 1 percent of searches result in an RSS subscription, you’ll quickly find that the automated polling of feed readers will outpace searches in network traffic. Perhaps you can define an analytics goal to see how many searches convert to a subscription. Maybe 1 percent is absurdly high or absurdly low.
On 3):
My feed reader supports hierarchic subscriptions via a folders mechanism. I can make a folder and place the artists I care about within it, or delete them should I stop caring.
Finally, you should look into an Amazon referral program. I guess Amazon has dozens of ways to handle referrals, so you might already be doing so. If not, think of it as a way to cover the cost of hosting and SSL certs
Their referral rate is like 4 percent of completed sales, which ain’t shabby.
Back to forcing Apache to trust our shitty LDAP server.