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2003-09-30

The ubiquitous blogging widget

Following Sarah and Mark’s lead, I had to make my own version of the ‘ubiquitous blog widget’.

I’d been looking for a way to display what I'm playing in iTunes on my blog, and I stumbled across Kung-Tunes, a cute little AppleScript that queries iTunes and formats your recently played list as XML (or OPML, if you take the time to teach it the right template), and then uploads it to your web server. It was simple enough to hook the blogging widget on to the OPML file, but I wasn't satisfied with the ‘skinning’ of the widget. It clashed with the look of my blog. I spent a few hours fiddling with Photoshop to create some new art, then adjusted the layout to handle my slightly different requirements. I tried to make the interface cleaner, and in the process lost some of the Laszlo promotional material. So I stole my prototype cyberlogo from my Site Toc demo and implemented some crude tool tips.

I hope people don't get too upset at the Apple-centricity of my implementation. Clicking on the song links will tell iTunes to search its Music Store. Sorry Windows users.1

1. The only reason I say "Sorry Windows users" is because the title/artist/album links are itms: scheme links. If you are running on a Mac with iTunes, clicking on the links will tell iTunes to search its Music Store for that title/artist/album. When iTunes is available for Windows, presumably it will work for Windows users who have downloaded iTunes too.

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