thegistofit /

It’s a minor achievement, in the greater scheme of things, but I’m happy.

I got the “recent tunes” display in the sidebar working the way I want. I spent quite a bit of time looking for something that would work the way I wanted, and nothing quite fit the bill. The WordPress plug-ins I tried either hadn’t been updated to work with v. 2.0, or didn’t work at all, or in the case of last.fm, required that I keep a client program running on my Mac to upstream my titles to another server, to be grabbed by my blog. Way too convoluted.

Also, being the latent control freak that I am, I didn’t quite feel comfortable with music that I’m listening to being automatically updated on my site without my intervention, or knowledge. So what I have is something that takes two steps on my part.

1. I select a smart playlist in iTunes that has the 10 most recent songs I’ve listened to and I export that to an xml file (recent.xml)
2. I run an Applescript from my iTunes menu that automatically uploads the xml file to a directory on my site using curl.
3. then some PHP magic happens behind the scenes
4. I use the iTunes XML parser for PHP to process the recent.xml file into a nicely formatted list in the sidebar.

It doesn’t take more than 10 seconds of my time, and the sidebar is updated when I want it, with what I want. sweet