Just pos­ting to inform peo­ple of some upda­tes to my newly announ­ced site http://​artists​.tri​vial​being​.org. The main lan­ding page when you search for an artist has been spru­ced up and a fully fled­ged browse fea­ture which allows you to spe­cify the num­ber of ima­ges per page, oldest ima­ges, newest ima­ges and ran­dom ima­ges has been imple­men­ted here: http://​artists​.tri​vial​being​.org/​b​r​o​w​s​e​.​php

Also large ima­ges are now avai­la­ble if you append an artist image url with &imgs=large

A big fea­ture I wan­ted to inc­lude in my foobar2000 music pla­yer was artist ima­ges, i.e. pic­tu­res of the per­for­mers. If I had the ima­ges this would be pos­si­ble using either the track info mod (which I now favour) or the album art panel. The trou­ble was, unlike album art, there was no ser­vice that offe­red image down­loads and the only web­site that offe­red a com­prehen­sive artist image data­base was last​.fm. My first approach to this pro­blem was to create a local C script that would, in a very roun­da­bout man­ner, obtain the artist image url from last​.fm and then down­load it. This pro­ved rather slow and buggy due to various artist names, timeout pro­blems and image crea­tion, yet it suf­fi­ced for the majo­rity, lea­ding me to a collec­tion of 2000 artist ima­ges which I pos­ted earlier. 

Still not happy, I loo­ked into crea­ting a web ser­vice, based on hydro­ge­nau­dio forums mem­ber Chronial’s efforts and ulti­ma­tely we deve­lo­ped an online resource for down­loa­ding artist ima­ges. I do not plan to make the code public, mainly at Chronial’s request. I have crea­ted this ser­vice here: http://​artists​.tri​vial​being​.org/​?​a​=​A​R​T​IST where ARTIST is the performer’s image you are loo­king for, for instance: 

http://​artists​.tri​vial​being​.org/​?​a​=​the mic­ropho­nes
http://​artists​.tri​vial​being​.org/​?​a​=​b​l​o​n​die
http://​artists​.tri​vial​being​.org/​?​a​=​r​a​d​i​o​h​ead

Ima­ges are first sour­ced from Last​.fm before being cached so as not to cause any undue strain on last​.fm’s ser­vers.

To make things more use­ful you can append the URL with &outputmode=img,
e.g. http://​artists​.tri​vial​being​.org/​?​a​=​b​l​o​n​d​i​e​&​a​m​p​;​o​u​t​p​u​t​m​o​d​e​=​img
and a wrap­per of sorts is avai­la­ble via http://​artists​.tri​vial​being​.org/​p​i​c​/​A​R​T​I​S​T​.​jpg
e.g. http://​artists​.tri​vial​being​.org/​p​i​c​/​b​l​o​n​d​i​e​.​jpg
which can be used on forums:


or in an artist down­load script. I use the URL2File com­mand line appli­ca­tion with this command:

URL2File http://artists.trivialbeing.org/pic/%1.jpg  C:\artistimages\thumbnails\%1.jpg –o 60
00Where %1 is the first para­me­ter pas­sed to the batch file and 60 is a one minute timeout. 

Using a cus­tom run com­po­nent I can call this batch file using foo­bar and a key­board short­cut or but­ton; when pas­sing the artist (%artist%) to the batch file you should take care to replace cha­rac­ters that can­not be used in crea­ting win­dows file­na­mes. Foreign cha­rac­ters work too, as do spe­cial cha­rac­ters such as the artist “Why?” or “Wham!”. 

When using image out­put, if no artist is found the script returns this image:

With regards to copy­right issues, Last​.fm’s uploa­ding policy sta­tes:
Because copy­righ­ted ima­ges tend to be very res­tric­tive about where they can be used we ask that you only upload ima­ges which are public domain, or that are expli­citly licen­sed for pro­mo­tio­nal use. There are a num­ber of pla­ces you can find ima­ges open to public use. First, try to find out if the artist has any pro­mo­tio­nal pic­tu­res on their offi­cial home­page (they usually do). 

For those without foobar2000, I give an exam­ple of an alter­na­tive use. I took the recently pla­yed tracks RSS feed, pla­yed with it a little using mag­pierss and create a page that shows recent tracks along side artist ima­ges, an exam­ple can be found here:
http://​fofr​.tri​vial​being​.net/​p​a​g​e​.​p​h​p​?​p​=​n​o​w​p​l​a​y​ing

Here’s a collec­tion of artist ima­ges collec­ted from last​.fm:
Artist Ima­ges (1890)

Last night I finally had the oppor­tu­nity to change over to the new blog­ger sys­tem and it’s asso­cia­ted impro­ve­ments. My main rea­son for shif­ting was the inc­lu­sion of labels — finally I can cate­go­rize my posts and pro­vide easy access to cer­tain topics. The lack of labe­ling or cate­go­ri­za­tion had temp­ted me to migrate to Word­press but alas I have stuck with Blog­ger and I may make it through this dif­fi­cult tran­si­tion period also. My first pro­cess lead me to check tem­pla­tes loa­ded OK and blogs could be fully published as usual. This lead me to a few discoveries:

• Upon migra­tion the URL for archi­ves was reset so all upda­ted archi­ves lin­ked to a 404. I quickly fixed this once my ser­ver, that has been up and down a bit lately, allo­wed me back into the FTP.
• Pre­vious Post links have stop­ped wor­king, the con­ven­tio­nal tag ins­tead of pro­vi­ding a list of the 10 posts prior to the post being vie­wed now shows only the ten most recent posts. This makes navi­ga­tion of the older pages less fluid and to find old posts you need to visit label pages or archive pages with the aim of fin­ding a spe­ci­fic post. 
• The uploa­ding dia­lo­gue for blog­ger has also been twea­ked, it now shows the suc­cess­fully uploa­ded files in a list and when errors occurs it tells you them. A nice addi­tion to this would be a sug­ges­tion on whether or not to per­form a repu­blish based upon the seve­rity of FTP errors. When I see the errors I ask myself whether or not all the files uploa­ded ok — the last thing I need is a corrup­ted page that I don’t know about. One caveat of this new sys­tem is the remo­val of the per­cen­tage uploa­ded indi­ca­tor, I like to know how far through the pro­cess is and whether or not con­nec­ti­vity is good or bad, taking away the only indi­ca­tion seems wrong to me. Hope­fully it is just part of the ine­vi­ta­ble blog­ger beta ftp teething stages. 

Moving onwards, once I had con­fir­med files could be uploa­ded and my tem­plate would not be utterly des­tro­yed I chose to add labels to my posts before publishing the blog again. It is now that I dis­co­ve­red the new tem­plate sys­tem blog­ger has deve­lo­ped and is imple­men­ting, one in which blog style edi­ting is made easy for those that do not know code, html or css etc. Sim­ple colour pic­king sche­mes etc. Howe­ver in doing this they seem to have com­ple­tely aban­do­ned the tem­plate tag tech­ni­que which I like to use to fully cus­to­mize my tem­plate design. Back­wards com­pa­ti­bi­lity remains yet under my exis­ting html tem­pla­tes I can­not add the new shiny fea­tu­res. Blog­ger also pro­vi­des no tem­plate tags for these fea­tu­res, ins­tead opting for defi­ned wid­gets and sec­tions. After publishing I also noti­ced that labels were auto­ma­ti­cally appen­ded to the post body in a sepa­rate div with the name “blogger-labels”. The text “Labels:” can­not be alte­red in any­way and I have had to use abso­lu­tely posi­tio­ned CSS to shift the labels into the com­ments bar where I want them and alter the hyper­link for­mat. Here are a few other pro­blems I noted: 

• Labels with a gap in there name e.g. “My Life” would link to a labels page: “labels/My Life.php” without subs­ti­tu­ting the space for a ‘-’ cha­rac­ter or remo­ving capi­ta­li­za­tion (e.g. labels/my– life.php)
• The labels direc­tory is not cus­to­mi­za­ble and is fixed to the “/labels/” default.
• No pagi­na­tion occurs on the label pages, des­pite the num­ber of posts — one of my labels has 33 posts and they all load to create a mam­moth scro­lling fiasco. 
• When labels have a gap in their name they do not show up in the labels sec­tion on the indi­vi­dual post page — I noti­ced this and tes­ted it to check it had uploa­ded correctly. All pages that I had applied the label “My Life” to did not show any labels, though others did. I have since chan­ged the label title but it is an issue that needs fixing. 

Finally I deci­ded to post something new. The inc­lu­sion of a quick switch bet­ween html and rich for­mat­ting is an exce­llent addi­tion that is very handy. Pos­ting via a 1280x reso­lu­tion the blog­ger post box seems very small. I like a large area to play with and it would be nice if the box could expand to fill the whole screen, much like in Gmail.

The inter­face is all very fluid and fast, quickly pulling up 160 posts and labe­ling them was not a daun­ting task as I had expec­ted. The dash­board makeo­ver also impro­ves usa­bi­lity, I now only need one click to reach cer­tain regu­larly visi­ted sections.

I now have one plea: Please do not aban­don the tem­plate tags scheme. I love it and use it suc­cess­fully to create my blog exactly how I want it. Please main­tain these tags and add res­pec­tive ones so that us power users can con­ti­nue using blog­ger and its new fea­tu­res in the same way we always have done. We do not need to uti­lize sim­pli­fied tem­plate edi­ting tech­ni­ques and whilst two sepa­rate sche­mes never seem wise I don’t know why they cant run side by side — lea­ving the tem­pla­tes tag as an advan­ced yet main­tai­ned option for those with a little more knowhow.

This is still in beta so I can remain hope­ful for chan­ges, it is nice to finally see some chan­ges and I do feel that Blog­ger is moving in the right direction.

Given my new found web space and band­width capa­bi­li­ties I have deci­ded to turn the music sec­tion of this blog from a sim­ple “review and list” pos­ting of my favou­rite albums to a fully fled­ged mp3 blog with inline flash strea­med mp3s and music videos via You­Tube. My ins­pi­ra­tion for doing this comes from the well ver­sed Spi­ked Candy for which I am a regu­lar reader.

Howe­ver the “Radio Blog” flash script used there seems too cum­ber­some for my liking, so I searched around for an alter­na­tive flash strea­ming audio pla­yer. I found two options — both by Jeroen Wije­ring, the first was very simi­lar to Radio Blog, it has a list of songs and you can choose to play them; whilst very nice and highly cus­to­mi­za­ble it did not suit a post by post situa­tion. So I opted for the second, a con­cise pro­gress bar which allows colour and size mani­pu­la­tion (but has no text dis­play), per­fect for my needs.

To check out this neat little script I sug­gest rea­ding the latest posts in the Audio / MP3 blog sec­tion, I have put up three posts so far inc­lu­ding Lulu Jackson’s pre-war blues rarity “You’re going to leave the old home Jim” and a video of Moham­med Rafi’s “Jaan Pechechaan Ho” per­for­med for the Bolly­wood film Gum­naam.

My satis­fac­tion with this script has also lead me to inte­grate it into the forums so that any direct link to a file with mp3 exten­sion is par­sed to gene­rate an inline pla­ya­ble ver­sion and an option to down­load the track. This modi­fi­ca­tion is amongst the many I have added lately, inc­lu­ding the abi­lity to post You­Tube and Goo­gle­Vi­deo inline from the reply box. Now I only wish I could somehow apply these to blog­ger so that I don’t have to add the html every time I want to post something dynamic.