I absolutely love the intersection of geek and music.
Recently, I wrote a tiny little app that does for me something that is irritating to do manually, sharing my favorite music at this moment. Essentially, it tweets to the world the track I have listened to a track at least 3 times in the last hour.
I am leveraging several APIs to create this app. The always wonderful last.fm API, as well as the bit.ly (awesome) API and the Twitter API. The real trick is taking advantage of the upcoming version 3 API from bit.ly. In the latest bit.ly API, bit.ly returns a boolean whether the recently shortened track is a new ‘hash’ or not. Meaning, if it has not been shortened by me before, it returns true. Instead of needing to attach a database to this app, I am just checking this boolean. Normally, I would consider this abusive, however, with all the preconditions of my script, I rarely even ask bit.ly if this shorten is ‘new’.
If it wasn’t for the descriptive potential of bit.ly, I would need to establish a flat file, or database to handle this logic check. Eventually, if they alter the API, this will become a nessecity, but for the time being I am leveraging this functionality.
Shortly, I will attempt to release a new wordpress plugin or cron that leverages all three APIs, but for the time being the code is a bit messy. If you are interested, please reach out in the comments below with an email address and I am happy to share the code. Otherwise, enjoy my twitter stream and all the music I am addicted too.
