Tag: Last.FM

Eli Stone

When Eli Stone first aired on Sci-Fi neither Kathy or I really showed any interest in it for some reason or another, maybe we weren’t in the mood or something else was on TV at the same time.

But this past week Sci-Fi has been re-running Series One as a precursor to airing Series Two which starts next week and we’ve been watching it and I have to say that its actually quite good and I think that the person who decided to commission the series went out on a bit of a limb. Its whole premise is different and the show is quite light hearted in places with some wonderful lines and nice little set pieces but at the same time it actually can be quite serious.

I have been doing other things too, no honestly I have

I’ve finally properly released my Last.FM Widgets Plugin for WordPress which is something I’ve been meaning to do for some time and I’m going to try to actively develop it because there are a few things that I had to fudge to get it working properly which could do with tidying up.

I’ve also been coding more bits of the Canalplan integration project and I’m hoping to get some of that released into the wild soon but some of that depends on Nick and his changes to his Database structures.

I’ve upgraded the Pub Night Council Web Site to the latest version of the Wikimedia software. This meant revisiting the code that drives all the added functionality because of the way Wikimedia changed how the parser has to be called which really wasn’t helpful but hopefully they wont change it again.

Last.FM Widgets Plugin

Well I’ve got version 1.0 of my Last.FM Widgets Plugin working. I’ve trimmed some of the extra bits out that Last.FM include in their plugs (just to make things tidy) but retained about 95% of what was there.

It supports all the standard lists and the two standard “Quilts”. One of more of the Widgets can probably be found in the side bars on this blog.

The options page allows you to configure your Last.FM ID, Select the colour (from Last.FM’s limited list) of the plugin and the size of the quilt.

I’ve tweaked it so that the plugin has a transparent background and should always be the same width as your side bar.

Its a normal Plugin so if you are using WPMU you can put it in the plugins folder. I’ve not tested it against standard WP but I can’t believe there is anything odd in there that would stop it working.

Please feel free to try it and let me know if there is anything obviously wrong with it:

You can download the latest version here

Update: Its now V1.6 – I’ve tidied up some of the code and removed some stuff that was no longer used! I’ve also added two Radio Widgets (artist like and Genre) and put these two options onto the general configuration page. At V1.6 I added a playlist widget

Internet Explorer… what a pile of Crap

For a change of scene I’ve been working on a set of Last.FM widgets which will allow you to dispaly Last.FM widgets in the sidebars on the blogs… and you should be able to see one there right now.

It was only during testing this that I found that my blog (i.e. this one) no longer displayed on Internet Explorer. For some reason it was crapping out on the GoogleMaps code. Which was odd as I’ve not got any GoogleMaps embedded in this blog.

The blog displayed fine on Opera, FireFox and Safari but produced half a page on IE 6 and then if you refreshed the page then it went blank.

After much checking of code I found it… During Development of the embedded Google Maps I’d hard coded a javascript tag into the header for this blog. It was still there and for some completely perverse reason having it there screwed up IE 6.

So I’ve taken it out and things are now working.

Well sort of – IE really gets it’s knickers in a twist if you put something into a div that is slightly wider than it should be, Everyone else ignores this but not IE, oh no, not IE.. no it reformats your page and shoves the whole column at the bottom of the page.