Lee Kelleher’s Weblog

Last weekend, the good folk at Last.fm revealed version 2.0 of their public API:

The new API introduces a user authentication protocol which for the first time allows applications to create user sessions, bringing both read and write services to web apps, desktop apps and mobile devices.

Take our new tagging API’s. Developers can both pull and apply tags to music content from any application on any platform now. The same goes for sharing – developers can build Last.fm sharing support into any app.

There are also new search, playlist, event and geo API’s being rolled out today, with lots more stuff planned in the coming weeks and months.

At first glance, I noticed that there were a couple of key features (to me) were missing - namely the “Get Similar Tracks” - the Last.fm staff reminded me that they are planning to roll out more features in the coming weeks and months! OK, okay… I’ll be more patient!

The new API feels and works like the Flickr API; with very similar convensions of the method/call names and authentication/token process.  This isn’t a bad thing - just that I feel they should be leading the crowd, rather than following it.  (The beta version of the upcoming Last.fm site is being critisised for being a “facebook clone”!)

Regardless of my negative comments, I’m actually a fan of the new API - being more structured and scalable.  I’m considering writing a .NET wrapper library (C#) for it too!  As I’ve got plans for a small iTunes/Last.fm playlist app, that would require it; (all open-source, of course).

Since the new API follows similar Flickr API convensions, it seems to make sense that I could/should base my Last.fm .NET wrapper on it’s Flickr counter-part…. Flickr.NET API.  The library is developed in a decent way - deserializing XML objects into the appropriate classes.  It feels a lot nicer to develop with, rather than messing around with XPath node selections!

Not sure when I’ll get the time to develop the library, as my contract work is as busy as ever!! Hopefully things will calm down in a couple of weeks!

A couple of months ago I’d heard that the BBC Radio Labs had developed a desktop widget that scrobbled the songs you listen to on BBC Radio (currently only available for Radio 1, Radio 2, 6 Music and 1 Xtra) [via Last.fm]

I’m not a big fan of gimmicky desktop widgets -  it’s bad enough that Vista comes with them as default - some people love them, some hate them… I just prefer less clutter on my desktop!

The other day I was listening to a lot of Radio 1… to which I thought it would be nice to have these songs scrobbled on my Last.fm profile.  So I bit the bullet and downloaded Yahoo! Widgets and the BBC Radio + Last.fm widget. (OS X widget is also available)

So far I’ve been fairly impressed with the way it works.  That is, once I’d hidden all the gimmicky widgets - yes I already have a clock in my taskbar; the weather outside is cold and wet… I know this already, this is England after all!

I’ve finally started work on my zeitgeist page. My personal projects have been on the back-burner, as I’ve (obviously) had other things to think about!

Personal Zeitgeist is very easy to get up and running, although I have been making a lot of tweaks - mostly to satisfy my own coding preferences; for example: renaming the *.inc files to *.inc.php - so that nobody else can view the source-code. (That’s been one of my long-term gripes with, the otherwise brilliant, SimplePie).

I’ll most likely do a lot more customisation to the zeitgeist template/theme before I set it as my default web-page.

Here are a few of the things I want it to do:

• Act as my OpenID delegate (I haven’t yet decided who to use as my default OpenID provider - most likely be WordPress.com)
• Display a set of links to all my external web-profiles (i.e. flickr, last.fm, etc.) - along with corresponding favicons, XFN and OPML. (Actually it’s probably easier to store them as OPML in the first place.)
• I’m also considering adding some tag cloud functionality - just to quench my thirst for tagging.
• Develop a few functions; specifically an email obfuscator (most likely lift the code from wp-includes)

Who knows when I’ll be able to do all this… especially when my other commitments are quite demanding!

Hello and welcome to my new weblog (generously hosted here on WordPress.com).

I’ve spent the last year (or so) trying to figure out how to best present myself online. My last attempt was over on at leekelleher.com. I had some information about myself, a linklog and details of a WordPress plugin that I developed.

I found that the linklog became redundant, as it’s easier for me to use del.icio.us for my links/bookmarks.

The Category Cloud widget page is pretty much a mirror of the content hosted over at WordPress.org’s Plugins Directory.

Apart from the tidbits of information, my personal site is somewhat lacking… and definitely overkill to maintain a WordPress installation (with regular updates, patches and security releases - it was becoming too much of a chore!)

So my latest “plan” is to have all my “user-generated content” off-site; del.icio.us (combined with digg & Google Reader) for links, Flickr for photos, last.fm for music-profiling and (of course) WordPress for the content (blog posts/journals/articles).

I started to look at a PHP script called Personal Zeitgeist to pull everything together. It looks decent enough, so I’ll see how I get on with it.