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 Two: The PHP Application
This is the second post in a three part series on writing last.fm plug-in for Wordpress. In the first part of this series, we explored the last.fm API and wrote some simple PHP scripts to demonstrate two of the last.fm API methods. In this post, we'll create a complete PHP application that creates the last.api widget. This application will be generic enough to use in any web page. In the third post in this series, we'll convert the generic application into a Wordpress plug-in.
Before getting started, we should decide what we want to the widget to look like, and what information it should display. Since we'll be pulling in the weekly Album Chart, it makes sense for our widget to display the top five albums that the user has listened to over the past week - that is, the first five entries in the Album Chart. Once we have the list, we'll pull in additional information about each album. This will allow us to display a little thumbnail image of the album's CD cover if one is available.
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.
Now Running Wordpress 2.7
Upgraded the site tonight to Wordpress 2.7. I've been running Release Candidate 1 on my test server since it came out, and have been putting it through it's paces - so I don't expect any issues.
Wordpress Upgraded to 2.5.1
I upgraded Wordpress to 2.5.1 this morning. Seems like a pretty big upgrade, although the upgrade itself went smoothly. If you see any problems, or if you notice the RSS feed is broken, let me know.
