iCcessories

I've seen a lot of techo-savvy weblogs adding "Listening To:" squibs to their pages, usually pulling the latest tracks played out of iTunes or whatever iTunes equivalent people choose to run. Seemed like a neat idea, but I never put much thought into how I could pull it off. The trick, you see, is to make it as automatic as possible, because who wants to hand-code "I was listening to the Pet Shop Boys" everytime they update.

There's a fine edge where I fall off in my understanding of programming, and most of the iTunes-to-HTML scripts seemed to be on the far side. But I figured I'd give it another go last night. I started here, which led me to here and then finally to here. (On an unrelated note, I also started out here and ended up here.)

What I learned (aside from how to dress up as Final Fantasy characters) is that you can exploit Movable Type's Trackback functions to get data from Point A (your home machine) to Point B (the front page of fourhman.com.) I've never played with the Trackback junk before, largely because I only have the faintest notion of what it is. But between the offered AppleScript from one site and the scripting tutorial from another, I was able to set myself up with a script that grabs the Top 5 tracks and the Last 5 tracks from iTunes and dumps them here.

Some of the more interesting scripts added in pictures of the albums and links to buy them on Amazon, but that's a bit more than I'm willing to chew right now. My script seems a little off. I've caught it grabbing the wrong songs a couple times, but overall it's been okay. Also, since it forwards the data to fourhman.com in a specially-coded URL, it can't handle Japanese characters. Probably not a huge deal for anybody else, but I have several CDs that are partially named in Japanese. I've always loved that OSX and the iPod display text in proper Japanese characters without me having to force/ask it do to so, so that bugs me a bit.

I've been thinking of another site redesign lately, so we'll see if my iTunes stuff sticks around. Most weblogs seem to embrace the minimalist gray-and-white look, which fourhman.com most certainly does not. I don't know if I'll go that route (seems easy enough...) but I think I could use something a tad hipper looking.

Other iNews: bought a Belkin FM Transmitter for the iPod. Works fine. Strikes me as staticky, but that could just be because I'm working with poor to average quality radios.

And, given how much I complained about it, I would be negligent if I didn't bring up my new SightFlex. It's a segmented metal cable designed to support and position the iSight. Holy jumping cats, it's about time. That little dandy solves half of the problems I have with the thing (the other half being software related.)

To celebrate, here is my Miniature Gallery of Modern iSight Art.