What's all about

The widgets offered by Last.fm are not really customizable. The latest Flash-based quilts are literally flashy and the image-based charts are quite unconvincingly to design. So I sat down wrote a small ASP.NET control to be used as Last.fm Widget with the goal to use it within my dasBlog installation. For that reason I made usage of the data feeds provided by Last.fm.

Prerequisites

1. You need a Last.fm account which you can create here.
   
   
2. You might want to download any media player plug-ins from here to scrobble your music.

How to install on a ASP.NET Web Application

1. Download the .zip file and unpack it's content into your web application's directory.
   
   
2. Add the following line below your page tag to register the control with your ASP.NET web page:

   <%@ Register Src="LastFmControl.ascx" TagName="lastfm" TagPrefix="uc" %>

3. At the place where you want to add the control similar to

   <uc:lastfm 
     id="Lastfm1" 
     runat="server" 
     Url="http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/aheil/recenttracks.xml"
     User="http://www.last.fm/user/aheil/">
   </uc:lastfm>

4. Change the username from aheil to your username unless you want to display my recently played music on your site.

How to install on a dasBlog installation

1. Download the .zip file an unpack it's content into your dasBlog installation directory.
   
   
2. Open the hometemplate.blogtemplate file of your dasBlog theme and use the ASPNETControl makro to add the control on the page.

   <%newtelligence.ASPNETControl("LastFmControl.ascx")%>

3. Open the LastFmcontrol.ascx.cs file and change the username at

   private string _url 
     = "http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/aheil/recenttracks.xml";

and


private string _user 
  = "http://www.last.fm/user/aheil/";

unless you want to display my recently played music on your blog.

How to Customize

The control makes heavy usage of several CSS div classes to be maximum customizable. The classes used are

.lastFmMain {}
.lastFmHeader{}
.lastFmItem {}
.lastFmItemTitle {}
.lastFmItemArtist {}
.lastFmFooter {}

Simply modify and add these div classes in your CSS file to make the control look seamless integrating into your web page.

The classes are used as following where the lastFmItem is reapeating.

Download

• Download .zip file (3KB)

Some Comments

I did not spent much effort into this control. Writing this entry took longer that writing the control, not only since the pre-release Windows Live Writer versiopn I am using crashed twice. There are several improvements, which could be done to this control, including reducing the paramters to only the user name, adding the Last.fm icon etc. If you are looking for a more sophisticated dasBlog makro, you might have a look at Alexander Groß' Last.fm makro, which I was pointed to wafter I had written the above one.

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"GORT, KLAATU BRADA NXTO"

Seen in Tron at 26:16 on Alan's office wall.

I just surfed on Geekpedia. I did not have a lot of time to look though the site, but is seem as there are tons if interesting articles and information about cool stuff there. So if I find I will seek though their archives for some useful tips and tutorials

Source: http://www.geekpedia.com/

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Today, I installed the Social Bookmarking Tool for WLW by Rahul Soni. So I am just starting to add social bookmark links on my future blog entries. 

After installing the tool you have to restart Windows Live Writer. Then you'll see a additional option in the insert pane on the right side of WLW.

After publishing your entry, you have to copy the link as well as the title of your blog entry and insert it into the Social Bookmarking Tool dialog. That's all, just publish the tool again.

Source: Rahul Soni's blog

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Serenity is one of the few science fiction movies available right now on HD-DVD (in Germany). Furthermore, Firefly the series around the spaceship seem to be available on DVD as well. However, today I just surfed on Universal HD's Firefly page were they announce to show Firefly in TV in HD - which could mean that the series could be available on HD-DVD soon... so I'll wait with the order.

Source 1: http://www.universalhd.com/Firefly/
Source 2: http://fireflydvd.com/

I've just uploaded a author version of the paper LCARS - The Next Generation Programming Context, presented on the at 23rd May 2006 the International Workshop for Context in Advances Interfaces in conjunction with AVI 2006 in Venice, Italy.

Source: http://www.aheil.de/research.aspx

Today, my permanent ACM membership card arrived. Cool, though.

I just surfed on this website where you can find a whole bunch of cool movie related TrueType fonts for download.

Source: http://www.typenow.net/themed.htm

I just spend some minutes this evening updating the LibraryThing Widget CSS styles.

The DIV classes used by LibraryThing are as follows:

.LTwrapper
.LTheader
.LTitem 
.LTprovided

LTwrapper is for the whole widget, LTheader only for the "Random books I have" line, Ltitem for each book and finally .LTprovided for the footer "powered by LibraryThing".

However, to get some more flexibility in the layout you should make usage of the cascading property in CSS and define the .LTitem img class to position the images. It could look like the following then:

.LTitem img
{
  float: right;
  margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px;
}

Again, I start writing a new paper and again I realize how hard it is to stair for hours on an empty sheet of paper respectively an empty screen. Therefore, I am glad about Simon Peyton Jones hints about "How to write a good research paper". Thanks to Simon you always have a good start...

Source: http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/papers/giving-a-talk/giving-a-talk.htm