xset

Another one checked off

// July 14th, 2005 // Tech

There are certain bits of functionality that I’ve wanted to have on this site for some time. The move to the mac has meant looking at different ways of doing it all and some of them have been really tricky.

The latest is on my side bar for all to see.

Yup, it’s a now playing list. Now I know that this in itself isn’t very impressive but wait till you hear what I had to go through to get it working.

There are loads of cool plugins that will take your info out of iTunes and FTP it or save it locally. But I can’t FTP from the Mac. So 99% of them immediately don’t work.

Instead I looked at a HTTP post solution but that was no longer supported and didn’t seem to like my being behind a proxy server.

In the end I settled on AudioScrobbler which is quite a dinky tool in its own right. I managed to find a really decent PHP script that would do the transform from plain text to HTML (I was trying to write an XSL to work with the RSS feed but couldn’t be arsed to get it working properly) and hacked it about a bit to get the output just so.

So I finally have what I’m listening to displayed for all to enjoy. It does remind me that I need to clean up my tags though … I’m pretty sure Pink Floyd didn’t write a song called 2*

Oh and you’ll only see it on the Harboured Sunset theme.

*but Blur did … very odd