CG-Whattunes display
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I just recently discovered CG-Whattunes and got it installed on my website (slipperyamoeba.com) relatively pain free. My question now is, what file do I need to edit to change the appearance of how the
song info is listed on my webpage (such as changing the font or
completely removing the name of the album from the page)?Specifically, I’d like to only have the album cover image and the time the song was played displayed under the “Now Playing” header. With mouseover popping up the song tile and album @ Amazon (instead of just album @amazon as it currently is).
Hope that wasn’t too confusing. Just looking to get pointed in the right direction.
Josh
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Cool! Looking good.
BTW, when you want to discuss it, you can change your “This album…” link to actually be an embedded, live amazon link within the text — CG-Amazon + CG-Inline.
Some people hate that I don’t combine everything into one (I’ve seen a number of Now Playing things that have an amazon album retriever ‘built in’). Until they see that there’s a half dozen other cool things that are enabled now that pieces of CG-PP have been activated… π π
Ok, solved the xhtml error. It was my fault. I had the above function enclosed in my own set of [li]’s. I took these out and the problem disappeared.
Last question (I’m pretty sure!)
Currently when you mouseover the album image the popup text displays (album name @ AMAZON). Do you know where I would look to change the popup text to (song name, album, artist @ AMAZON)?
Thanks for the great service David. I think you’ve hooked me into using your powerpack for as long as it’s around. Good stuff, even for someone like me who’s just bumbling his way through the code.
What exactly are the advantages of an embedded, live amazon link within the text? Or, I suppose, what is the difference between that and what I have now?
Hmmm… Changing the popup link text is a tricky one, because it’s embedded down deep in CG-Amazon.php (and if you ever wanted an update to CG-Amazon, you’d lose any such minor mods…). Lemme think if there’s any easy way that I could roll into a next version, where you wouldn’t have to hack up the code.
As for the second Q: not much if all you want is a text link. A raw CGA text link ends up with the product name (if not overridden), so if the name changed, your post would eventually reflect it.
But, instead of just a simple text link, you could easily have a cover-image link instead. And, instead of having to generate the long-form linkage, you could just do my CG-Inline form:
<!--amazon:SOMEASIN:SmallMedium-->
… or something like that. Of course, if you turned off CGA or CGI, the link WILL disappear. It’s a blessing and a curse! πI’ve considered doing the embedded-link-info as a QuickTag like WP-Amazon does — but the moment you do that, you lose the flexibility to, say, change the default image sizes across your site, or how they are styled/positioned, etc. Stuff like that. Certainly the moment you want to display things like Pricing, Availability, etc., you’ve got to be using dynamic links (bc without being dynamic, and updating every x days, using any such information beyond a certain time limit is in violation of the Amazon Web Services license agreement… it’s a pain, and part of why when you start showing things like prices you need to do things like show the amazon-disclaimer thing I package in…).
-d
OK, really, the questions never end I suppose. If no Amazon album image is available is there any option to call a designated “no artwork/image” image? If not, no biggie. Just wondering if I’m missing something.
David, since you are prowling around here… what files are necessary to run your old CG-WMPBlog.exe with Windows Media Player? It runs on one computer but not on another so I figure I must be missing a dll.
Oh, and the Google links to all my old “details on… ” no longer brings up the details on that item, but displays the catalog. Is it history? You can get an idea of what I mean by looking at the Google cached page here:
http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=gold+-+john+stewart&meta=Edit: Nevermind on the Google question, I think I just have to wait till Google gets the new way CG-Amazon works.
David, don’t worry about the popup link text if it’s going to be a hassle. I honestly can’t imagine too many other people actually being interested in playing around with this. I’m just sort of a sucker for a simple looking design and was looking for a way to tuck away the song info without actually having it take up space on my sidebar. Definitely not a big deal. Thanks for looking into it though.
1. The WMPBlog.exe thing requires the WMP blogging extension thing microsoft had released. I just found my original email to you, forwarding the zipped file again…
2. the p= thing has a quick workaround until I can release it. Go into cgaindex.php, and find the code:
else
$p = 0; // blank it out so we don't do weird things with text...
Change it to (removing the else and changing the line):
$p = stripslashes($p); // security tweak...
3. ‘missing album’ artwork. Hmmm. Never thought about it. Basic answer is: not at the moment. It obviously wouldn’t be hard to hack it into the ‘no album’ case in getWhatsPlaying… Create the matching sized icon with a ? or something, and add a IMG added to the output with your local path.
-d
You know David, if it weren’t for you, half or my sidebar wouldn’t be possible. Thanks for a wonderfull tool…. All of it….
I’ve got a few anomalies with mine…. but I think it’s due to some missing info in the ID3 tags in the music files themselves (odd things happen when the artist isn’t available — Imagine my surprise when I was listening to Ace of Base’s “The Sign” album… since the artist wasn’t sent, all it had to go on was “The Sign” — so I eneded up with the Amazon link going to Prince’s “Sign the ‘O’ Times” …. not quite the same…. but it only happens on some files, and is fine on others.
I do have one question though…. when I’m listening to a Shoutcast Stream, I get the stream title just fine…. but then I get three empty divs right below it…. where do those come from, and 1) how would I get right of them, or 2) fill them with other information about the cast?
Tg
Tg
A little experimenting shows that yep, it’s my mp3 files. If I’m playing the CD directly, then the right album info gets pulled.
This is so sweet!
Tg
*toddles off to see what else he can find in CG-PP*
Beel, if you’re still in the neighborhood, I really like your trackhistory.php page (page showing last 20 songs played). I’m guessing you somehow pulled the code from WordPress Tunes admin page. If this is the case, would you mind telling me where I should look to find this and if this was a tricky thing to do? Thanks in advance!
I will post the code as soon as I find the site to do that (hint-hint, somebody π
Nevermind…. found it….
Well, it wasn’t that long so I could have posted it here, I guess but:
http://paste.uni.cc/7504tracktunes.php has code built-in to show the song history. If you use something like CG-QuickPHP, you could likely call the function from within a Page if you wanted one for your ‘Recently Heard’ list. To do it with full amazon stuff would be a more complex undertaking. π
Gnome-y! Not sure why blank divs would show up. If there’s nothing to go on, you shouldn’t be getting anything from Amazon. I wonder if there’s a tag in the ID3 POST data somewhere to identify streaming audio, and not even bother doing the amazon lookup? (since it’ll fail every time, and I don’t know if it’ll cache the failure or keep trying…).
-d
Yeah, I did a page for track history but I need to work on how my pages are displayed – look too much like posts and I haven’t figured out why “_wp_page_template:” shows up as a meta tag. π
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