May 27, 2006 at 2:02PM Ok, I give in. I’m going to give Last.fm a try.
I’ve signed up, downloaded the iTunes and Winamp plug-ins, and I’m installing them as I type. Here goes nothing!
Update: It is teh werk! But I really need to change this site to use UTF-8 rather than Latin-1. As you might be able to see, the Last.fm listing on the front page goes screwy when there’s non-ASCII characters in it. Converting the site’s not too difficult. I wrote some code for doing that a while back for doing that for another project, and everything’s 7-bit clean except for the contents of the DB since I fixed Demoroniser() (the moron being me for still using Latin-1 and whoever wrote the HtmlEditFormat() and XmlFormat() functions for making such a godawful mess) to remove the character literals it contained and to convert some characters I’d missed.
Yesterday (Saturday) I wrote the front-end for version two of the weblog code. It’s much, much better. I have to write the feed generator, entries-for-tag page, and the comments code, but the rest is done. I’m using agressive page fragment caching as a compromise between baking the site and frying it, and the caching code is pretty lightweight and unobtrusive. I might post it up here. It’s a disc- rather than memory-based cache, so there’s no danger of me tying up the server’s resources! Then I can tackle the backend. Because I’m separating the backend into another application, the frontend doesn’t use sessions at all, so the only thing standing in the way of effective use of caching is whether whoever’s visting the site has commented before (and so has cookies, which kills HTTP caching), and CF5 getting in my way.
Hell, I might finally have at least the weblog section of this site in a state I can be proud of, and all because Last.fm uses UTF-8 and doesn’t encode characters.
I’m working on finishing it later today, and when it and the new design are stable I’m killing this weblog, throwing up the new code, and merging the linklog and weblog entry tables together.
Now, if I could only get the rest of the site under the wiki or some kind of a page manager...