If you look to the right, just under Sturgeon’s Law, you will see a new addition — a list of Radio Paradise’s Recently Played Songs. Some helpful soul over on the RP forums created a file that scrapes the recently played page and turns it into a feed. Now all that was needed was a way to display that info on my page.
First I tried the RSSFeed plugin. After a bit wrestling I got it to work, with one bugaboo, the only time it updated (read the feed) was when I rebuilt the index page. Not refreshed, rebuilt, as in posting an entry. This meant if you checked my blog in the afternoon, the songs listed as recently played would have been heard about 20 hours before. I guess if you are a rock, that is real recent, but in human terms that is like so yesterday. And in Internet terms, with recent meaning milliseconds, that is unacceptable.
The second attempt is using another plugin, GETXML that looked promising. It took a little more monkeying that the previous plugin to get going, but I persevered. Unfortunately it exhibits the same behavior as RSSFeed.
Some Movable Type forum searching turned up another plugin that might help either of the first by forcing a rebuild of the index file at predetermined intervals. That would keep the file list updated and recent. But I can’t seem to find it listed in the Plugins Directory and quite frankly, I’m getting tired of messing with this thing that probably has no redeeming value to anyone.*
* But then again that is no reason not to keep going and solve this thing, after all if redeeming value was any criteria for blogging this thing here wouldn’t exist, would it?