A Little Music

As I was playing around with the new layout of this blog, I added a Last.FM widget to the sidebar. It looks like this:

(May not render if you're reading this from a feed reader.)

Great. Now I can listen to trance from the blog. Trance is good for coding. So that's ace. But I couldn't stop there, could I?

Widgets, Widgets, Everywhere!

I made this page with 30+ gadgets in all sorts of genres. This is good for those times when I'm not coding and want to listen to something else. Being in the cloud, it means I can easily listen to whatever I feel like when I'm in an internet cafe or the such like. So even more ace.

Make Your Own Jukebox

In the spirit of sharing, you can easily make a page containing your own favourite music. The URL for the default music page resolves to something with a ridiculously long list of genres:

... which means you can hack the URL and make your own jukebox with your own genres and bookmark it and it will work and live on in the cloud and you too will be able to listen to your favourite music anywhere you go.

For example, you might be a more passionate fan of contemporary Japanese music than myself, in which case you would concoct the following URL and save it to your delicious bookmark manager to enjoy many years of musical gratification:

http://softwareas.com/music?tags=j-ska,j-pop,j-punk,j-hop,j-rap,anime

Add A Player on the Fly

One other feature is that you can add a new player on the fly. This again is great for travelling around as it will let me easily listen to any genre I care for without even having to edit the URL.

(Unamusing trivia: I actually caused a bug at first by using "gray" as the colour name here. I'm used to working with American spelling for programming of course, but then last.fm is a UK company and the name you want is actually British spelling, i.e. "grey".)

Obligatory Wishlist I'll Not Really Get Around to Implementing But it's Cathartic to Braindump it Anyway

If I was going to do more work on this, I would:

• Make it into a widget-like portal which lets you add/remove/layout etc and save settings within a hackable URL (using Unique URL. You could argue the whole thing is useless as you could achieve the same thing in iGoogle/Shindig, but sometimes a specialised interface, tucked neatly inside a separate tab, works best.
• Provide more flexibility on layout
• Add support for bands, not just tags
• Run it on a separate page without the blog layout
• Keep the loldog