Artist cloud

Today I went back to do some Google Gadget hacking for Amarok Atom Syndication.

Amarok Atom Syndication Reader is fine for knowing what I have been recently playing on my Amarok, but enlarging the list does not make it look neat, so in the end, I am just showing the latest 7 entries of my play-list.

I wanted to have a look of what I have been recently playing with a glimpse of an eye. So, I thought of the convenience of tag clouds and came up with the idea of an artist/band cloud. Pretty easy, grabbing the Atom xml file of my recent tracks played, grab nodes by tag name, count them, assign them an style depending of their relevance and fill up the html view via DOM.

Every band links to Seeqpod. I find it very useful at work when I do not know what to listen to, I grab the list, peek at what I listened to the day before (lately I tend to tune last.fm tag radios), and create a playing list in Seeqpod.

More on Amarok Atom Syndication

Finally, after a couple of weeks of hard work I managed to tune up Amarok Atom Syndication and release a new version (V0.2.0).

Amarok Atom Syndication lets you share your music taste with your friends by syndicating (Atom file format) the music you are currently listening to the net.

It uses Google Page Creator to store Atom files.

In combination with a web aggregator you can consume, later on, this file and let your friends know what tracks you have been recently playing in Amarok.

Amarok is popular music player for KDE (GNU/Linux OS). On this version, I added a flash new GUI setup menu. No longer edit and setup text files, which seemed a nuisance for non-experienced users. A GUI interface is something I was longing for a long time ago. While we are still waiting for the perlqt-bindings for QT4.0, I used the perlqt-bindings for Qt3.0.

In the run that has been from the 0.1.0 release to this one, I have been basically polishing code and fixing bugs, thanks specially to some users who gave me feedback. I think that's key part for an open-source project, since most of them start as a need for scratching your own itch, feedback makes software evolve and mature, turning in something useful for other users.

At this moment, I think there are little features I could add to AAS in the future, since this project is quite small and the functionality it tries to comply is clearly defined. So, for the future I just expect to keep on fixing bugs (when reported), and once the code becomes pretty stable release a definitive 1.0 version.

Related links:

• Introducing Amarok Atom Syndication
• Amarok Atom Syndication Reader

Amarok Atom Syndication Reader

Here is Amarok Atom Syndication best friend: Amarok Atom Syndication Reader!!!

Last week I saw on a blog a Last.fm gadget for showing what last songs have you recently played on Last.fm. I use a RSS Reader widget from Blogger to do that with my syndicated Amarok track list, but I was not totally happy.

Google implements a policy on Google Reader for only refreshing caches every hour, the same applies to the Blogger's RSS reader widget. So I made my own widget this weekend using Google Gadgets. It was great fun! I tried Google Gadgets last April and it was good but documentation and work environment are much better now. It is very easy to pick up if you got some knowledge on HTML and Javascript. In addition, Google API provides lost of stuff already implemented like XML reading and easy DOM manipulation.

Here is the result. The best feature is that now contents are refreshed every ten minutes. There still other features I want to add but would do it later. Now I got to publish this on Google Gadget Repository or find a way to make this available to other users who may be interested.

By the way, there is a new version of Amarok Atom Syndication available (now even easier to set up)