miscellaneous, etc.

My good friend Teri pointed me to [Audioscrobbler](http://www.audioscrobbler.com) yesterday, it’s definitely one of the cooler things I’ve seen on the internet in a while. They provide a plug-in for your favorite media player (regardless of platform) and it builds stats about the music you listen to. You can [check your own page](http://www.audioscrobbler.com/user/cmiles74/) on the Audioscrobbler website to see your listening profile and find other people who are listening to the same thing. It reminds me of the [old Firefly website](http://web.archive.org/web/19981206161059/www.firefly.com/GuestHome.fly). They also [compile their own charts](http://www.audioscrobbler.com/charts/), so you can see what other people on the network are listening to.

They [provide a webservice](http://www.audioscrobbler.com/development/webservices.php) that lets your query their database, so my next step was to plug it into my website and get rid of the annoying application I was using to sporadically update the “listening to” list on the left. I found a real easy to use PHP library that will load, cache, and then parse an RSS feed called [Magpie RSS](http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/). It only takes five lines of code! :)