Friday, February 10, 2006
Geeky: Auto Formatting Playlists
Why can't adding a new playlist to my site be easy?
Well this morning, I decided to spend a nice chunk of time exploring ways to make posting iTunes Playlists to the web as easy as creating them. I love music, and I love sharing my musical likes and dislikes with people. Admittedly, it’s a selfish endeavor, I do it mostly because it general gets me recommendations of even more music, and since I don’t listen to radio keeping abreast of new music takes effort.
That said, I was starting to be dismayed with the amount of effort it took for me to share information. Typically, I’d export a song list from iTunes, the music player not the store, then I’d have to take it into BBEdit, add table code, and otherwise clean up the file. It looked okay, but I was never totally satisfied with them. So today, I said “F@#k It!” Break out the XML and PHP books, and let’s do some searching for pre-built XML parsers. Here comes the geeky stuff, so be forewarned.
As it so happens, through my search, I came across iTunesXmlParser by Code Triangle. See as it so happens, Apple happens to allow you to export playlists in three formats: 1) Plain Text; 2) Unicode Text; and 3) XML. I was originally using “Plain Text” because I didn’t have time to delve into the issues of working with XML. XML is wonderful, but you really do have to learn how to extract data from it properly. Whereas, you can do whatever you want to plain text, so long as you have the will and the time.
Anyway, Code Triangle, allowed me to skip the heavy coding of creating a XML parser, and jump right into getting the parser to work with my website. Now, I use Expression Engine as the backend of my website. It’s a PHP/MySQL Content Management System (CMS), that rocks. I’ve been continually amazed by what I can do with the system. So my goal was to get iTunesXmlParser working with Expression Engine. Basically, I wanted my future life to be as simple as pie. I wanted to create a system where adding a new iTunes Playlist to my site, was as easy as creating a new post in my CMS.
So now, I am the proud parent of a XML playlist processor, that allows me to just create a new entry into CMS, specify the XML file, and walla, my post, and a formatted table displaying the playlist, with links back to iTMS (using the search function), so you all can listen to clips of the music if it’s available.
Take a look at the old posts which I’ve updated to the new system: Wide-Eyed: Playlists. Since the new system is in place and working, I hope to post a new playlist at least once every month or so, that’s about how frequently I add new playlists, these days.
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Categories: Music •Technology •
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