A piece of coding genius some might say… well I’m the only one to say that so far.

Here’s my latest project I’ve been working on. It’s not fully on the Original 106 website yet, but hopefully that shouldn’t be too far away, but I thought I’d give my blog readers a sneak preview.

The Original 106 website is quite good in that it tells you what song we’re currently playing. The problem is, it only tells you the current song. Not what we played 15 minutes ago. If I were in the kitchen listening and liked a song but didn’t catch the presenter saying its name, by the time I had logged online to check that track listing would have been long gone.

But not any longer thanks to this page here!

This page displays the last 10 tracks we’ve played. Theoretically it could display the last 100 tracks we’ve played, but 10 seemed a more manageable number. As well as the name of the track, there is some album cover art and some useful information for the track we’ve played. If I haven’t put any details for the artist, it will automatically display similar artists, however in the case of every time we play Amy Macdonald, for example, it will tell readers that she is playing the Aberdeen Music Hall on the 25th February.

The backend to the script is quite clever. Every 2 minutes the server calls the Original website, and checks what we’re playing. If it’s a new track (and by new I mean it wasn’t the last track we played - as if it checks every 2 minutes it’s quite likely it will see the same artist and title as it did 2 minutes previously), it inserts that data into a database along with the time the track was played.

If we’ve played the track before it will sit at peace. If not, it will then go about checking Last.fm or Amazon for the album cover. If it can’t find the album cover it uses a standard Original 106 logo instead (and I can manually put the album cover in at a later date). It also uses listener data on Last.FM to work out similar artists.

Then when you view the page above, it displays all that information in a nice format.

It can also send listening data to last.fm. It doesn’t normally (as I suppose the entire playlist would be commercially sensitive information), but we are doing it for the Sunday Showcase.

http://www.last.fm/user/SundayShowcase

The Showcase’s Last.FM profile has only been on one week, but after a couple of months I’m sure that listening patterns will have some interesting information.

David

A round up of what I did on Wednesday then…

I started as being Shetland correspondent for Original.  I say correspondent… I filled them in on Up Helly Aa.  I think I managed to explain it to the best of my ability without giving away the fact I absolutely hate the festival.  I went once as a “Fiddle Box Carrier” and never again.  Every year I get asked by someone “don’t you wish you were in Shetland today?” and I quickly answer with “No!”.

For the purposes of the radio I gave my unbiased view.  But this blog isn’t unbiased. I hate Up Helly Aa.

Other excitements yesterday included using ITunes on my IPod Touch for the first time. Sorry to keep banging on about the IPod Touch but it really is brilliant.  ITunes on the IPod allows you to download music wherever you are (providing you have a wi-fi signal).  Then once you get back to your computer it all syncs back up nicely so you have the track on your computer just like you’d purchased it there to begin with.

The song in question was a song called Best For Last by Adele. It’s a brilliant song which comes off her moderately good debut album 19. I’d had the song stuck in my head all day but I was miles away from my computer, so it was time to give ITunes a whirl.  Easy… very easy. Infact it was so easy I almost thought for a second it hadn’t worked because it was very quick and very painless.  Certainly the future.

Oh, and I’ve only heard Adele’s album across an office floor… maybe it’ll grow on me. Music often does.

And yesterday evening was surreal.  A trip to the music hall to see soul legends Eddie Floyd and Geno Washington.  Combined, Tom and I must have been the youngest people there, but it was still interesting to see. Although being top of the bill, Eddie was on first… so we actually missed him. But Geno was on top form and as well as good music he was having good banter with the crowd.

And then on my walk home I walked past three seperate buskers on Union Street who were all equally spaced out by at least three minutes walking time, and they were all playing Wonderwall by Oasis.  Saying that, even I can play Wonderwall by Oasis on the guitar. Possibly says something about the quality of modern day buskers.

And that was Wednesday.

David

I did something for the first time yesterday which may seem a little bit basic to some, but to me it was quite a big event…

I took a bus trip in Aberdeen.

Why is that such a big event I hear you ask? Well in Shetland there is just one bus that goes one way every 3 hours… it’s pretty simple to work out the timetable, and you usually know the bus driver. In Aberdeen that is not the case.

There’s numbers and different routes and different fare structures. It’s all just a little complicated.

But hey, I think I’m winning…. it’s certainly cheaper than a taxi!

Here are some Tweets from my Twitter profile.

• 19:59 at Pittodrie for Falkirk v Aberdeen. Its cold. #

Emma and I were back this morning from an excellent weekend in Shetland.

On the way up on the ferry I did wonder exactly why we were heading up north. This thought was mainly fuelled by the force 9 gale we were steaming through. Once every 5 minutes Emma would slide from one end of the cabin to the other. I think she too was wondering “why?!”

All that was made up for when we arrived in Shetland. The weather wasn’t spectacular, there wasn’t much happening and there was hardly anyone around… but I still got a couple of days to show Emma the ’sights’ (including my local pub), and take plenty of photos.

Completely knackered now though. Amazing, even after 9 hours sleep (that’s about 4 hours more than normal) on a perfectly calm ferry, I still feel totally zonked.