Rechts in de balk (lees je dit over 4 maanden in het archief dan is het vast weer anders) staat de bijna affe, nieuwe versie 1.4 van mijn cd hoesjes systeem: het laat zien naar welke cd’s ik de afgelopen periode (week, 3 of 6 of 12 maanden of alles tot nu toe) het meest geluisterd heb. Iedereen die net als ik een weblog met behulp van Wordpress bijhoudt kan het gemakkelijk installeren.

Ik heb er nu wat javascript-wondermiddelen aan toegevoegd: de plaatjes verschijnen als uit een mist en worden in 4 seconden compleet zichtbaar . Ik ben benieuwd hoe dat zich houdt. Trouwe lezer, wil je in het commentaar vertellen hoe het eruit ziet en of het netjes werkt? Zo niet, dan graag met welke browser en op wat voor computer. Dank u!

Download widget

This is my latest widget for Wordpress. If you use Last.fm to remember the music you listen to, this widget finds the cd covers for the music you listen most often to. I already had a widget that did this, but it used an XML-feed from Last.fm that never updates, so you always saw the same cd covers.

How to show your favorite cds on your wordpress weblog:

• Make sure your version of Wordpress is 2.0 or higher
• Make sure your template is widget-ready
• Download Run For Cover version 1.4 here
• Extract the file and ftp it to the wp-content/plugins/widgets folder on your server
• Configure this widget under Presentation » Sidebar Widgets

You can choose where the images link to: Last.fm (default) or Amazon. If you choose to link to the Amazon product page, please note that this includes my associate id for Amazon.

The way it works for those interested:

• it opens an HTML page at last.fm
• filters the source of that page and finds the data for the cds
• writes the data to the javascript file
• browser sends an Ajax request to the server to find the cd cover image from Amazon
• adds the image to the page

version 1.4

• the period from which to use data is configurable now (last week, last 3 months, last 6 months, last year, all)
• check for new version is no longer automatic, version can be checked by clicking on a link in the config
• couple of small bugs fixed
• you can easily check for a new version of this widget

version 1.3

• added ‘Loading…’ text which is configurable, it disappears when first image is loaded
• added ‘No images to display’ along with the necessary checks — this text is also configurable
• single quote in artist/album names is replaced with ` to avoid javascript errors
• widget now starts loading images after page has finished loading

Earlier versions:

• you can specify in the options if you want to link to Amazon or to Last.fm (Last.fm is default) (version 1.2)
• changed to weekly feed (version 1.1)

Let me know what you think!

Version 1.0 RC 1 of the Associative Dictionary widget has just been released. Two new functionalities:

• option to start with a random word (only works if you have more than one word in the database)
• option to cancel the form that adds new descriptions

You can download the widget here.

NB. It seems the dictionary gets a permission denied in IE when the url in the bar differs from the url in the wordpress settings, i.e. when one contains ‘www.’ and the other doesn’t. Anyone else notice that?

Version 0.9.1 of the Associative dictionary widget has been released. It now has an RSS feed, nicely announced in your favorite RSS reader as

<< weblog title >>: << widget title >>

.

Update: this widget uses an XML-feed from Last.fm that doesn’t update regularly. I have written a new widget: Run for cover. It uses a page at Last.fm that updates every week. More information here.

Turned my bit of PHP for displaying cd covers into a widget for Wordpress. It reads the top-albums feed for a last.fm username and displays the covers for the cds.

1. Download version 1.3 Go here for my new last.fm covers widget.
2. Extract, drop lastfmcovers.php in /wp-content/plugins/widgets and configure it under the “sidebar widgets” tab in Wordpress.

Settings include:

• title: displayed at the top of the widget
• username: last.fm username to display cd covers for (no password needed)
• max displayed: number of images to display
• description for count: text used in alt/title-tag of the images, % will be replaced with ‘count’
• image size: pixels for image width and height. Set this to zero to use img.lastfmimage in your stylesheet

What it needs:

• check if username exists
• sample stylesheet code
• suggestions

Update: last.fm changed their “no_album” image, so if you see little grey circles in your sidebar, please install the current version — version 1.3 is now really 1.3.00001.