Writing a last.fm plug-in for Wordpress – Part Three: The Plug-In
This is the third and final post describing how to write a plug-in to last.fm for Wordpress. In the first post, we looked at the last.fm API. In the second post, we took this information and made a PHP application to create a weekly Album Chart using the API. In this post, we use the PHP appication as the basis for a Wordpress plugin.
Writing a last.fm plug-in for Wordpress – Part One: The last.fm API
last.fm is an online music listening and recommendation service that began life as a University project by one of it's cofounders, Richard Jones. In addition to generating custom online "radio stations", users can create a profile that keeps track of the music they listen to. This process is called scrobbling and is used as a baseline for generating recommendations and custom playlists. To keep the data flowing, last.fm provides an easy-to-use API based on passing XML over HTTP.
This post is the first in a series of three exploring this API, and showing how the API can used to create a Wordpress plug-in for displaying information from your last.fm profile on your blog. In this first post, we'll take a look at the last.fm API, and create some simple PHP scripts to test out the API. In the second post, we'll turn our simple scripts into a complete PHP application. In the third post, we'll create a Wordpress plug-in that leverages our PHP application to display our last.fm data on a blog.
