trisweb.com

I’ve been working on a playlist database app in PHP for the last couple days to replace the antiquated BlogAmp. It’s turning out quite nicely, so I thought I’d share. The basic premise is that the Now Playing Plugin for Winamp sends song information to the PHP script in the form of a POST request. The PHP playlist program takes that and puts it in a database, and the display functions allow you to print views for most recently listened-to songs, most listened-to songs, top artists, top albums, song details, and more.

Take a look at the app so far and tell me what you think. I know there are a few things wrong with it: it needs better navigation for one, and there are some bugs with the paging functions I need to fix, but other than that, it serves its purpose well. I’m also planning on adding all of the features I bragged about above (top albums/artists are not yet implemented) as well as album art from google images, so it will look all nice in your sidebar and in the album/song/artist detail screens.

My question is this: would there be any interest if I released this as a WordPress plugin? Or even if I released it standalone (with the ability to integrate it as a WP page)? I imagine current BlogAmp users should be quite interested. Let me know and I might work faster. But don’t expect anything before midterms. Those always come first, of course… usually.

Whew! That was nerve-racking.

In all honesty though, I can’t imagine a company I’d rather work for, that’s more suited to what I love to do and who I am. And no, I’m not just sucking up because my web site’s in my resume. I love this stuff, it’s what I do.

Wish me luck!

With WordPress 1.5’s new Pages feature, I’ve finally been able to start updating the main pages (aka, the cool looking links on the right).

The first one is the Music page—I’ve begun to add some of my compositions and recordings, just random stuff. I’ll soon add more about my digital music collection, including a thourough analysis of music formats, and a list of my record collection (yes, those big black frisbees).

Along with the music page comes a neat little applet called “BlogAmp”, which shows the songs I’m playing in WinAmp in real-time. I don’t like the interface very much though—it’s in JavaScript and doesn’t have any hope of database integration. Fortunately there’s a plugin that seems to be better than BlogAmp. BlogAmp users take note—you may want to switch. It’s called the Now Playing Plug-In, simply enough, and it can send current song info in POST format to a web script so the page can do anything it wants with it. This is a much better solution than the upload-a-javascript-file-over-FTP that BlogAmp does. I’ll be trying this out sometime soon, hopefully integrating it into a complex database that will track all the songs I play over a very long time. It should be cool, and I’ll make it available for those who want to use it once I’m done.

I was reading an article in the SF Chronicle this morning about a blogger Justin Hall (links.net) who had been blogging for eleven years (in some form or another). That’s quite a feat. I’ve been going for only three, and while I don’t feel like a newcomer anymore, man, eleven years I can’t even imagine at this point. For thousands of people, blogging is a way of life; we share details of our lives, link the internet together inextricably, and share knowledge to no end. But someday you have to stop. Like life, blogs can’t go on forever. So the question is, when do we stop? And what happens to our blogs when we do?

After at least 4 years of heavy use, my left mouse button finally ate the dust. It won’t click unless I really click hard (and forget double-clicking), and thus is dead for all intensive purposes.

It was a Microsoft Wheel Mouse Optical, and I liked it, especially the scroll wheel. Anyone have any suggestions for a good replacement?

I’m also in the market for a new keyboard. If only IBM would just sell a desktop keyboard taken right out of their ThinkPads… apparently this is basically that. As long as I’m getting a new mouse… right?

I added a gallery for photos from Tellefsen Hall from the last few months. Included are Fall Formal, casino night, and gingerbread houses. I’ll continue to keep my personal photos separate on the photos page. Enjoy!

You may have noticed that this site has been flashing a little lately. I just realized this tonight, and I finally found out the problem was in the character endoding—it wasn’t being sent to the browser in the HTTP headers. Wordpress is supposed to take care of this, but I was compensating by using a meta http-equiv tag, which, when loaded, made the page flash. Annoyed the heck out of me.

It’s an easy fix if this is happening to you. Ideally you don’t want to change the code, but until they fix it this hack will work: go to line 118 in the file wp-blog-header.php and change it to read:

@header('Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8');

Of course, replace utf-8 with your preferred character set, even though that one is probably best. Et voila, no more flashing, and a nice and legal content-type.