Andrew Wilkinson

In order to get my photos from the Editors gig I went to in Camden last night onto Last.fm I had to sign up for a Flickr account. I've been annoyed at my own home grown gallery script for a while, so I thought why not see if Flickr is usable to store all my photos.

My photo album program, KPhotoAlbum, has a Flickr export plugin but I discovered that it mangled the tags. If you tag a photo with a single multi-word tag in KPhotoAlbum it appears as multiple single word tags on Flickr. A quick download of the svn, create a small 10 line patch, test it, place it on KDE's bug tracker and less than five minutes later it gets applied to their subversion repository. Open source software at it's best :-)

In other, Last.fm related news, I'm through to the second round of jobs interviews there. Keep your fingers crossed.

Some guy, while working for the BBC on 6music hooked up a custom Last.fm plug in to the radio station's automatic playout system. A year and a half later and it's collected 57751 tracks that have been played over the radio. You can find 6music's profile here. The fact it has the user name 'sekrit' says to me that the guy may not have had permission to do this...

Despite listening to a lot of music that I first heard on 6music I don't appear on the neighbours page. whoatherepickle does though.

Someone on the Last.fm 'Feedback and Suggestions' forums wanted to be able to calculate a chain of friends that would like to users, six degrees of separation styleee.

How could I refuse an request like that? I couldn't.

Yesterday I was moaning that traffic to my site went down quite significantly over the past month. There's no point sitting around waiting for something to happen, it's time for action!

My first thought was to turn IndieGigs.co.uk into a cross between a live music listing site and a pr0n site as clearly pornography is the only way to make money on the internet. I'm not sure any of the girls I know would be happy standing naked next to bands, even if the bands themselves would probably be quite keen. On to plan b then I guess...

The IndieGigs.co.uk on Last.fm Greasemonkey script!

Those of you who don't use Last.fm can probably switch off now, but those you who do can now see all the upcoming gigs for artists right on their Last.fm page!

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Hopefully I can now plug my site without seeming like too much of spammer...

I pay to rent a virtual server from Linode.com to host a couple of websites. The main website is, of course, my IndieGigs.co.uk gig listings website¹. Secondary to that I have also written a GreaseMonkey script which displays chart changes on Last.fm. As part of the script I store copies of previous charts for each user of Last.fm and this generates around 15,000 hits a day. The script has been growing more popular over time and it had got to the stage where the load from my script that worked out what chart to return to the user was crashing the server. Clearly this was no good as it rendered my main site unusable. I tried a few band-aid solutions, including caching the correct filename in a memcache server, but nothing seemed to make much of a difference. In the end my script was regularly listing all 115,000 file that were stored in a single directory and this was just too much for it cope with.

Yesterday I rewrote the script to store the charts in a MySQL database. The difference is amazing, the server now uses less memory and everything is running silky smooth... at least for the moment.

¹ This is going pretty well, and I'm getting a nice stream of emails from various up and coming bands asking me to list gigs for them.

I've written a GreaseMonkey script for Last.fm (formally Audioscrobbler) that adds chart position change information to the weekly charts. My first release was last weekend but the html/css was quite broken so it didn't look right, also my graphics were rubbish. Fortunately a friendly Last.fm-er has fixed it and drawn some new graphics for me! While it might not be the biggest open source program in the world (it's only 190 lines of JavaScript) it's always nice to receive a fix for broken code.

If you're a Last.fm-er and use Firefox visit here to download it.

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