Like many others out there, I’ve chosen to display the album covers of my most recently listened to songs in my blog’s sidebar. It was with this expressed intention in mind that I set up a Last.fm account to start tracking my listening habits.

Present Solution

Right now I’m successfully displaying this information using Dirk’s Last.fm widget which nicely piggybacks Automatic’s Sidebar Widget. Although temporary, I’ve been very happy with this setup and I encourage anyone out there using Wordpress as a blogging platform to consider this plugin combination.

That being said, this seems like the perfect opportunity to introduce myself to API offerings from Last.fm.

Inspired in large part by J Wynia’s article on this same subject; I’ll stick to his approach and more or less follow his example to create the skeletal page he introduced about a month ago.

What’s in the Data?

The data available with the Last.fm API is currently accessible in four formats: Plain text, XML, XSPF and RSS.

XML is available for every displayed data offering while the other three are more sporadically available; because of that, we’ll stick to XML in our examples.

Before working with the data, you need to take a look at it of course. To do that, simply append “?wsdl” to the end of the XML URL (e.g., http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/jrob00/topalbums.xml?wsdl) and your browser (I’m using Firefox) should nicely spit out something similar to this screenshot.

Feeding PHP

Let’s take a look at a simple script to get this data into PHP. First assign the URL… Read More »