sheepeatingtaz

I’ve added a new plugin to the blog, if you look in the sidebar, It now displays the last few tracks I’ve played on my PC. I tried to use the scrobbler plugin, which is full of AJAXy goodness and auto-refreshes, but because of the way PHP is set up by dreamhosts (and I can’t change it) It doesn’t work. Apparently I need to enable “URL file-access”, and dreamhosts won’t let me. They suggest that I modify the plugin to use CURL instead, but I don’t have the time to work out how to do that so I’ve opted for ez-scrobbler, which does the same, but without the auto-refresh (as far as I can tell).

The only problem I have now is to do with the date that is displayed. It displays the time in PST, which is 8 hours behind GMT. I realise that this is the ‘local’ time for the server where my site is hosted, but both my wordpress account and the audioscrobbler feed (where the recently played list comes from, and the date is parsed) are UTC, which is essentially the same as GMT. For the time being, I have disable the date display until I work out how to display the right date. I have done a bit of research into PHP date formats, and may have found a way to get around it, but because I don’t have FTP access at work, it will have to wait until I get home.

EDIT: I’ve gone back to scrobbler! Florian, the author, very nicely left a comment (see below)  to say a new version had just been uploaded, which eliminated the need to have “URL File-access” enabled. It now works fantastically, with correct times and everything! Now I just need to go through my audio collection (especially compilation albums & soundtracks) to make sure the tracks are tagged right so they all display.