UPDATE: NO LONGER SHOWING RECENT LISTENINGS ON THIS BLOG no FTP support … and no desire to figure out another way for now.
Today is December 7, 2004, and it’s been a few months or more since haven’t had “recent listenings” going. Thanks!
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I’ve been working on getting a recent listening from my computer list on this page. If you are using IE as a browser you’ll see my most 10 recent under “Recent Listenings” on the right-hand side, mid-ish-way down [of my main page]. I’m still working on how to produce it to look nicer. In Netscape, it doesn’t show up. That’s why there is a link “10 most recent tracks” opens a pop-up window. That info is coded from someone else, and it links tracks to Barnes and Noble looking up the Artist and Title for the album to buy. Most of my CD’s are older, and some don’t link correctly, some not at all. Also, I listen to mp3 sermons often, and they don’t link to anything on B&N, of course.
When I’m better at writing PHP stuff, I’ll see if I can’t get things to link better, how I want, depending on what the thing is that is listed.
My goal for now though, is to get a normal non-linked list to show up in either IE or Netscape.
What I’ve done:
I am using Windows Media Player 9 for Win XP. There is a blogging plugin which puts lots of info for what you are playing output to WMP9’s interface. Songwriter is another plugin for WMP9 which allows you to output and upload XML &/or TXT files of Meta data for each track listened to. There are many options on how to make that work then, on your site.
All I’m doing right now is using a dataisland kind of coding to place the data on this page. [That is XML info which is pulled from/into datafields, XML to a TABLE midst other HTML/PHP code.]
The pop up window data uses a PHP script. I’ll study that later to see how I can use that to write the info I want on this page.
I was using SonicStage, which comes with my Sony Vaio, and it uses OpenMG as a way to load music as smaller files. I have some stuff like that already on my ‘puter, and since WMP uses a different file-type I have to burn those OpenMG files to CD’s and then copy the CD’s to WMP’s Media Library.
Once loaded via Media Library I can add more info to tracks. WMP9 is rather nice. Not perfect, of course. SonicStage uses a different service to recognize music … and it works better at that than WMP9’s version. For instance, I listen to Cecilia Bartoli, and via WMP the info doesn’t include her name at all, and so on linking with that popup window, you can’t find the CD that the song is on, and there is no reference to her at all written to my site. On the other hand, if I play those CD’s in SonicStage, they are recognized correctly.
I could load all my Bartoli CD’s onto WMP Media Library, but I sure don’t want to load all the music onto my hard drive. I’ll have to figure out what to do, fooling around with loading it, fixing the data, then burning new CD’s, will that fix it, or not. Ah, the trouble of non-standard compliance. Older CD’s recognized fine in Sony application, but not in Windows XP application. It has to do with the services they are attached to, but really, it’s plainly annoying. If I could have plugin capabilities for SonicStage usefullness online, I’d use it, but so far I haven’t found it. 🙁
Using WMP9 w/the Songwriter XML output, if I insert a new CD it sends info out for “not known” immediately, which messes up how the pop-up window reads the XML file. Also, the entries that IE shows, shows a messed up entry for that “play” but the next track shows up fine, as once the CD is in for a few moments it is recognized, but WMP9 insists on sending out “not known” data … which I’ll surely stop if I can figure out how to do that.
Well, that’s that for now!
The XML (songout.xml) file
The HTML file that I use to pull the data to the main page, how it looks before main stylesheet is applied