I am happy with the way the Discogs Album Release plugin is coming together.

Version 1.0 does what I need it for now.

Version 2.x has new features I want to add. The main feature is adding an audio preview of each album so that you can listen to the tracks directly from my site. This will only work if Amazon has the album on their database, thought the majority of albums I’ve come across are on Amazon.com.

Using code from this site and this site, I’ve made a php script that searches the Amazon.com database for a keyword (artist + album) and returns the ASIN # (This is the unique number given to each amazon item).

If I don’t get a number back, then the album doesn’t exist. If I get a number back then I can add a music player that pops up so the viewer can listen to the Amazon previews of the tracks and maybe buy them.
This check needs to happen every time the page is loaded, so that if in the future when the album is added to amazon.com it will show up. On the other hand, is the complexity of doing this worth the work, considering I doubt many people will be looking at month old releases…

Another thing for 2.x is to build some sort of widget that shows a list of the latest albums. Maybe have it update every time the page is loaded and display the latest releases. This brings up the question of the necessity of the daily digest version of the album releases…

I also signed up for a merchant account so if a user buys the album, I get a cut of the actions. Wohoo!