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Progress on Drupal Last.fm module

Thu, 2007-07-05 12:12 — elliot

I had another issue with my Last.fm module the other day, which is why it's currently turned off. I think it happens if the Last.fm feeds are unavailable; causing the module's HTTP requests to time out; which in turn causes the whole of Drupal to time out as it waits for the response; which means my whole site falls over.

I've been using the drupal_http_request() function to run my HTTP requests, but unfortunately you can't adjust its timeout setting. So I dug around in that code, and have submitted a feature request and patch which enables you to customise the timeout when using this function. I then rewrote my module with shorter timeouts when making requests to Last.fm, which seems to do the trick.

Hopefully, if this patch makes it into Drupal, I will be able to release the new version of my module, complete with timeouts, so it won't cripple my site or anyone else's. It also adds a Last.fm recent tracks listing to user profiles (if they've set up their username) and has a block (only for one user - I just put it in for myself, really). It still needs a bit of work, and only handles recent tracks, but it's coming along fine.

Comments

Tue, 2009-10-20 17:23 — Leanne (not verified)

Cool

I hope to see the new version. I was inspired to help my brother with the site he's building. :)

Tue, 2009-08-25 02:06 — amber (not verified)

interested in finding out

interested in finding out whether theres been any progress on this?good post, thanks

Mon, 2009-09-28 15:17 — Data Lists (not verified)

Me too, I'd be interested in

Me too, I'd be interested in finding out whether there's been any progress.

Fri, 2009-06-12 06:35 — Learn to play casino craps (not verified)

Nice Article!!

I must update that i have dropped my website. it was just becoming too much of a pain. almost a week of dealing with my last host, backing everything up, transferring, encountering this issue, and other little things, seems a bit of a waste of time for me. i loves drupal and everything it does, but it really sucked up a lot of time this week. instead, i'm going to use other sites which host photos and blogs, this way i can really concentrate on photos and material instead of database issues and php memory.

Mon, 2009-04-13 03:34 — Garden DIY Directory (not verified)

Commenters below, this

Commenters below, this plugin has been out for sometime on Drupal! (since Drupal 5).

Wed, 2009-04-08 09:33 — Diamond Looping Blades (not verified)

If you could get this data,

If you could get this data, think of all the reports you could extrapolate from the playlists - most listened to bands from visitors to your site, most listened to songs etc.

Tue, 2009-04-07 07:01 — Graffiti On Canvas (not verified)

Would be cool if this patch

Would be cool if this patch can be introduced to Drupal. I've discovered so much new music form other people's playlists.

Thu, 2009-04-02 09:49 — motocross helmets (not verified)

Any progress on this?

Very interested in finding out whether theres been any progress on this? Had the patch made it onto drupal? Thanks

Fri, 2009-04-03 21:22 — elliot

I think something similar is

I think something similar is being considered for Drupal 7.

Mon, 2008-03-24 20:30 — Locke (not verified)

Drupal is working on a major

Drupal is working on a major update soon, so maybe will be fixed then. For the time being I will use your module.

Thanks for the work. Also I couldn't install the module from the reply method.

Locke.
Content management

Thu, 2008-04-17 23:17 — elliot

Would be nice if it could be

Would be nice if it could be fixed. I've handed the module over to someone else now, but hopefully they'll benefit from the fix.

Fri, 2007-08-17 11:43 — kenjiru (not verified)

an official last.fm module

A lot of people are interested in a last.fm module. So I think it's a good idea to host your work on drupal.org. It will be easier for people to find it and watch the evolution of the project. If you already posted it on drupal.org, please send me the link.

Thanks and keep up the good work!

Sun, 2007-07-08 21:23 — Brian Wood (not verified)

Bugfix revision 0.6 of Brian's code.

...is here: http://bria.nwood.org/system/files/lastfmdev5.x-0.6.tar.gz

BUG: If click Save Configuration on the admin form you will get a blank page...

Fixed. Silly... My debugging output was thwarting the header() in includes/common.inc line 311. I have implemented simple debugging output in the bottom of the block for developer convenience.

BUG: Track times: They are probably incorrect for you.

Fixed. _lastfmdev_adjust_server_time() now calculates the offset between the Last.fm server's timezone and the date_default_timezone set in the Drupal installation.

Since it is possible that Last.fm could decide to host this service on servers in another timezone, the module's Admin Settings now includes a timezone select menu to change the Last.fm server timezone. The default is the server's present location (USA Eastern Time).

BUG: Updated timestamp (showing the "freshness" of the Last.fm data) was poorly implemented.

Fixed. Now using format_date($update_timestamp, 'small')

Fixed. $table was not set for db_lock(). Presently hard-coded to 'cache' - probably should be flexible.

Do a diff against the old file (lastfmdev.tgz) to see other minor stuff. I will use revision numbers going forward.

Fri, 2007-08-17 15:46 — elliot

Hi Brian. As I currently

Hi Brian. As I currently don't have too much time to work on this, would you be interested in becoming its custodian? If you want to maintain the project, I'd be happy with a quick mention as one of the originators of the code. The licence was never mentioned (I don't think), but I'd be happy with the GPL. It would be good to get it onto the official Drupal CVS server if you're so inclined.

Fri, 2007-08-17 16:18 — Brian Wood (not verified)

Sure

I'll see if I can get it into drupal's cvs.

Could you send me the most recent version of your code. It sounds like you've implemented some good features that I don't have.

By all means I'll list you in the credits. Email me your full name and any other info you'd like in there. GPL is fine.

It may take me two weeks to get to this, but I'll follow through.

Fri, 2007-07-06 07:41 — Brian Wood (not verified)

I've been working with your code

Hi Elliot,

I've been playing with your code for a few weeks. Since I see that you are working on it again, I wanted to make my modifications available to you... I had this dream of squashing all the bugs and sharing some pristine code with you, but here's an alpha version so you can see what I've done. If you would like to work together on this, let's talk. Here's the status:

Implemented:

  • Use drupal_cache_get/set functions.
  • Admin option to show timestamps for when the tracks were played
  • Admin option to display a last updated timestamp on the block, so we can see how fresh the data is
  • Admin option to Override Refresh Interval (Always get Last.fm data.). Maybe this should be removed. My thinking: The admin wants to turn on an option like track timestamps, or change the number of tracks. They want to see the block update immediately - they don't want to wait for the cache to expire. Changing to "no caching" doesn't expire what is currently in the cache...it could, that might be a better way to go...
  • drupal_add_js calls lastfm.js test function works.
  • drupal_add_css calls lastfm.css

Bugs:

  • If click Save Configuration on the admin form you will get a blank page. (This is probably related to the bug in your post above.). Work around: Don't reload the page (this resubmits the form data). Just click in the location bar and hit Enter to get the same URL again. You should see the page and the block should be updated with any changed options.
  • Track times: They are probably incorrect for you. I haven't adjusted the timestamps from the XML correctly yet. The "UTS" attribute is seems to be based on the localtime zone of the Last.fm server (USA: EDT). (UTS...? "unix time stamp"???)
    • Note I'm not using the textcontext item because in order to do date arithmetic on it, I'd have to use strtotime() and there are bugs that will make the time appear as "12:00". During certain hours. I haven't looked into this. Using the uts attribute, might not be necessary...

Ideas/Plans:

  • Data should be updated by cron, not triggered by user page load. At least there should be an admin option to do it that way.
  • Find the best way to truncate the artist-trackname to maintain a reasonable width. Right now I'm just truncating the string. A slightly better option is described here: http://www.computing.net/webdevel/wwwboard/forum/1919.html See javascript_truncate_table_POC.html. Ideas welcome.
    • onHover show full artist-title
    • jquery to make the artist title scroll like the Last.fm widget
    • jquery to make cover art popup on mouseover

Installation:

I renamed "lastfm" to "lastfmdev" so that this module could be installed along side your file-based-caching version. Right now I have your file-based block available to all users and this dev block available only to the administrator.

(You'll notice some broken stuff on my site. Style sheets broken in IE. Some images need to be fixed too.)

Hope this work and dreaming is helpful. I'll probably have some time to get back to this on the weekend.

Fri, 2007-07-06 15:32 — elliot

Brian, that looks very

Brian, that looks very interesting. As I'm in the throes of rewriting it (again), would it be OK if I folded your changes into what I've been doing? I particularly like how you've done caching: I'd been using it, but my approach was less elegant by far. The other thing I want to do is make it possible to retrieve data from other parts of the API, so I want to refactor the code (e.g. to give _lastfm_fetch(), _lastfm_parse(), _lastfm_render(), _lastfm_cache() functions). I've also changed my approach slightly, so that I'm using theming properly for HTML generation, and am showing Last.fm recent tracks on a person's profile (which requires a new database table), as well as providing a block to do the recent tracks for a particular individual.

But I could definitely do with some help, and also liked the idea of being able to show the time when the track was played. As mentioned in my blog entry, my main issue is with timeouts wrecking my site: so I may redo the fetch functionality to use raw sockets rather than drupal_http_request() (which I'm using currently) or CURL; and I may redo the parser to use the Drupal approach, compatible with PHP 4 (the DOM stuff isn't). I'm quite enjoying messing with it at the moment, as you can probably tell :) Someone else suggested committing it to the Drupal project properly and getting it into CVS, which would perhaps be a good idea now there's some interest.

Yes, the cron thing. I never particularly liked the idea of Drupal cron. Seems a bit nasty, though I suppose it's essential. I guess my thought was that the data might need to be updated more frequently than cron to be relevant (if you have long gaps between cron calls). Perhaps an option to use cron would be useful, though I think it's over-complicated for now.

So, to summarise my rambling, I'd be happy to collaborate, but at the moment I feel I need to rewrite the core properly so I can use it across the whole Last.fm API, and want to sort out this HTTP business too.

Thu, 2009-01-08 03:18 — David Peterson (not verified)

What is the status of this

Hello, I am keen to see some files, but nothing is available. Can you fill me in on the status of this project as it sounds great. I am more than happy to lend some code time as well if necessary.

Fri, 2009-01-09 08:10 — Brian Wood (not verified)

Use the activity stream module

http://drupal.org/project/activitystream

Fri, 2009-01-09 21:35 — elliot

Hello again Brian. Thanks

Hello again Brian. Thanks for pointing that out to me: I hadn't come across it before.

Wed, 2009-01-14 18:19 — Guest (not verified)

Alternative to Activity Stream

And I just came accross this:

http://drupal.org/project/lastfm

Fri, 2007-07-06 17:42 — Brian Wood (not verified)

Excellent!

By all means. Incorporate any of my code that you like. I'd be really happy if my efforts help to push this along.

Yeah lets get this into CVS so that we can get the latest versions of each other's work. Or if you're pressed for time, email me your latest code and I'll try to get it in there.

I'd be excited about collaborating...we can divide and conquor on some of the features... I've can also test on XP/Ubuntu Feisty/MacOS 10.4 and corresponding browsers. I'll try to watch here, but feel free to email me directly too.

Tue, 2009-05-12 22:53 — shinn (not verified)

testing

I don't think you need to do rigorous testing for any new release/plug-in from Drupal. Most of these improvements are platform and browser-independent. What you need to test against is security...

Fri, 2007-07-06 17:44 — Brian Wood (not verified)

Site5

Hey, I happen to be on Site5 too. Just noticed the sidebar ad.