Crosspost WLW Plug-In

Looking around for some cross-post plug-in for a while, I came along this plug-in for Windows Live Writer. Nice idea, but it actually does not load in WLW.

WLW Cross-Post Plugin

Right now, it is the only plug-in I found so far. I filed the bug and now I am waiting for any response. If nothing happens I have to have a look myself. Thanks for putting it under Ms-PL. If anybody get this plug-in working, let me know.

Last.fm ASP.NET Widget

The widgets offered by Last.fm are not really customizable. The latest Flash-based quilts are literally flashy and the image-based charts are quite unconvincingly to design. So I sat down wrote a small ASP.NET control to be used as Last.fm Widget with the goal to use it within my dasBlog installation. For that reason I made usage of the data feeds provided by Last.fm.

Last.fm ASP.NET Widget

Prerequisites

  1. You need a Last.fm account which you can create here.

  2. You might want to download any media player plug-ins from here to scrobble your music.

How to install on a ASP.NET Web Application

  1. Download the .zip file and unpack it’s content into your web application’s directory.

  2. Add the following line below your page tag to register the control with your ASP.NET web page:
    <%@ Register Src="LastFmControl.ascx" TagName="lastfm" TagPrefix="uc" %>
  3. At the place where you want to add the control similar to
    <uc:lastfm 
      id="Lastfm1"
      runat="server"
      Url="http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/aheil/recenttracks.xml" 
      User="http://www.last.fm/user/aheil/">
    </uc:lastfm>
  4. Change the username from aheil to your username unless you want to display my recently played music on your site.

How to install on a dasBlog installation

  1. Download the .zip file an unpack it’s content into your dasBlog installation directory.

  2. Open the hometemplate.blogtemplate file of your dasBlog theme and use the ASPNETControl makro to add the control on the page.
    <%newtelligence.ASPNETControl("LastFmControl.ascx")%>
  3. Open the LastFmcontrol.ascx.cs file and change the username at
     private string _url = "http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/aheil/recenttracks.xml";
      and
private string _user  = "http://www.last.fm/user/aheil/";

unless you want to display my recently played music on your blog.

How to Customize

The control makes heavy usage of several CSS div classes to be maximum customizable. The classes used are

.lastFmMain {}
.lastFmHeader{}
.lastFmItem {}
.lastFmItemTitle {}
.lastFmItemArtist {}
.lastFmFooter {}

Simply modify and add these div classes in your CSS file to make the control look seamless integrating into your web page.

The classes are used as following where the lastFmItem is repeating.

Last.fm Control CSS Usage

Download

Some Comments

I did not spent that much effort into this control. Writing this entry took longer that writing the control, not only since the pre-release Windows Live Writer version I am using crashed twice. There are several improvements, which could be done to this control, including reducing the parameters to only the user name, adding the Last.fm icon etc. If you are looking for a more sophisticated dasBlog makro, you might have a look at Alexander Groß’ Last.fm makro.

Monday Morning Mug #1

Monday Morning Cup #1I just decided to sit down on Monday mornings and summarize a couple of things. Hence this morning I had a look at the blog-o-sphere.

Iman, a friend from UK just stated his own blog. I am looking forward to read what he has to say. Damir once again became MVP. I am wondering why I never become a MVP… Otherwise, the blog-o-sphere was quite silent this week. I guess Clemens is busy with his daughter right now and BtK is not blogging for ages… Martin Calsyn, our architect also has a blog. Since I have still some issues with the encoding in categories within the dasBlog engine, Alexander started to help me in finding out why… Guess what? He has a blog, too.

Gravatar

GRAVATRdasBlog does finally support Gravatars. One step more away from the anonym beginnings of the web. Check the comments of this blog entry to view how they work. Definitely another Web 2.0 application. Gravatars can be easy added to any weblog:

A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an 80×80 pixel avatar image that follows you from weblog to weblog appearing beside your name when you comment on gravatar enabled sites. Avatars help identify your posts on web forums, so why not on weblogs?

DasBlog work continues…

Just 24h after I have upgraded my site to the dasBlog engine 1.9.7174.0 daily build, build 1.9.174.1 was release as stable. The work is going on and Clemens gives a first impression on what is happening in the future:

Once the project switches over to be “native” on the CLR/BCL 2.0 (we’re discussing the actual target framework version), I’ll rejoin the effort and I already have several truckloads of new features or changes in the wait loop. You’ll be surprised what that little engine will learn to do over the next several months…. 😉