Dan Kingsley .com

I have been working on the back end of my website for the last couple of days in the few spare minutes that I have had. I have added a couple of cool little features.

1. I have added my status update – imported from Facebook and Twitter. My status is normally the same in both of the these places (as explained in my previous post), and so I thought it made sense to have this imported alongside my blog for those of you who don’t have Facebook or use Twitter!

2. Music Currently Playing. I started using last.fm ages ago, but I have recently (last week) installed a couple of plug-ins to allow the music that I play in iTunes and Spotify to be added to my profile at last.fm. This creates a list of music I have recently listened to. I therefore also thought it made sense to have this displayed on my blog. I will automatically update every 2minutes. I had to do a bit of editing of the code for this last.fm plug-in to enable it to display exactly as I wanted on my site. For example I needed to add a small amount of code to check if last.fm knew the album, and if not, then not to display the it.

3. I also added a random photo generator to display six random photos from my collection.

So if you haven’t already heard about this, you seriously need to look into it. Spotify has recently officially launched in the UK (about 2 weeks ago – 10th February 2009) so you no longer need to have an invite to use the free version. All you need to do is head over to https://www.spotify.com/en/get-started/ create an account and download the software. It really is that simple.

OK so what actually is it. The video I have embedded above should give you a simple idea. But to summarise, it is a small program that you download, which then allows you to listen to near enough any music! Their library is huge, and growing on a daily basis by about 10,000 tracks per day. You can’t download the music, but you are able to create play-lists and just search for whatever you want to listen to. This is great if you’re just sitting at home and want to listen to some music.

Whats the catch…? Well, it works in a similar way to how a radio station would work, apart from you choose the music to listen to. They play advertisements which gives them some income – but they currently only play 15 seconds worth of ads every 30 minutes, which to be honest is no problem whatsoever – that’s like 30 seconds of ads to listen to a whole album!

If you really love the service, but don’t want the ads, they are offering a premium service for £9.99 a month which has no ads – but when you put it like that I don’t mind listening to a few ads to save myself £120 a year!

Seriously check out this service! Download, and enjoy.