en http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/ Thu, 1 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 Thu, 1 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 60 http://www.audioscrobbler.net/data/webservices pogue972's Last.fm Journal http://www.last.fm/user/pogue972/journal The Last.fm journal for pogue972. Last.fm journals are a place to talk about all things music. Cool Last.FM Widgets and Graphics to Display on your Profile Page http://www.last.fm/user/pogue972/journal/2012/02/03/5bdfzk_cool_last.fm_widgets_and_graphics_to_display_on_your_profile_page Fri, 3 Feb 2012 14:05:24 +0000 http://www.last.fm/user/pogue972/journal/2012/02/03/5bdfzk_cool_last.fm_widgets_and_graphics_to_display_on_your_profile_page
There are lots of very neat third party made widgets, also known as profile apps, graphics and data you can add to your last.fm profile to highlight your own personal music taste, along with adding some flare and customization to your profile. All of these widgets get data from your musical database provided by last.fm's freely accessible scrobbling data that they make freely available to anyone interested. There are many different kinds of widgets and dynamically updated graphics you can place in your About Me section of your last.fm profile page. Although the width of this part of the page is rather small, it can still include skyscraper style images of many types.

Getting Started

In order to find where you can edit your about me section, you have to visit the Your Account Settings page under your account. You can get there by clicking the down arrow next to your username, located at the top right of the page, and click settings. The alternate route is simply to go straight to the URL http://www.last.fm/settings. Once there, you'll be under the main 'Account' section of your profile, and the 'About Me' field is about halfway down the page, right under your country selection.

Here you can put in text using BBCode markup, which is common on most major forums and other sites. It uses tags like prefixing text for bold, italics, and others. At the top of the page you can write a short message to your last.fm profile viewers. Tell them a little about yourself, or any information you deem relevant -- its all up to you.

In the 'About Me' area you can also add images, clickable links to artists, groups, places, and more. All the things you can do are well documented in the BBCode link listed above. If you want to include your own images, you can post them on free image hosting sites like imgur (recommended), TinyPic, or ImageShack (hdsander has recommended against using ImageShack, as he says they will delete images after an undetermined period of time. If you know of any other good image hosting services, please let me know!) Once you upload the image to one of these services, it will tell you how to copy and paste the image into your profile, and you will want to select the BBCode field. Make sure that the image fits into the size constraints of the 'About Me' column on your profile, which is about 300 width. Anything wider than that will break outside of the column and not look right. imgur allows you to edit the dimensions of the image once you've uploaded it, but you can also use other free tools. I'm not familiar with any web or cloud based image editing, but please leave me a comment if you know of a good one. I use IrfanView which is freeware Windows software.

The Widgets

As I mentioned, there are many different last.fm widgets available and you'll want to find ones that adhere to your personal tastes. I'll go over the ones I use in my profile and then share some links with services I didn't use but still might appeal to others.

Last.fm User Levels - This widget gives you a small 300x30 bar, of a color scheme you can pick from, and uses a proprietary non-disclosed system assign you a numerical rating of how "addicted" you are to music. Although levels can vary to a great degree, its impossible to know just how they use to calculate their levels. Nonetheless, its still an attractive and dynamically updated graphic based on your listening preferences.



Village Idiot Badges - This is a simple starburst patterened button that displays the total amount of songs you scrobbled on last.fm since you first began using it. It only has 4 colors, but is still an attractive eye catcher to show your visitors your stats.



Last.fm automagic Badges - Automagic badges gives you a selection of different dynamically adjusted single line graphic based on what you want to have displayed. It can be set to display your average daily, weekly, and monthly tracks or albums played, along with totals and an option called "Trueness" which doesn't seem to differ from user to user. You are also allowed to choose the front and color from a large list, but it can get some tweaking to get it pasted into your 'About Me' profile section to display the font and color properly. It doesn't automatically change the font or color unless you hit the enter key after your username once you've made the selection. Check out their group page for Automagic Badges.



Last.fm Tools v4 by shoxrocks - This is one of the neater text & graphic based widgets out there, which will display your artists, tags, or albums in a "cloud" format, bunching them all together in a vertical and horizontal stack. To get started just enter your last.fm username and you'll see what options are available for you. Your favorite artists, for example, will show your most listened to artist as the largest text, and subsequently smaller for other ones. It is very attractive and catches the eye immediately, turning your head from side to side to try and read the text of the placement of the text. The album cloud images I don't prefer and use a different service for that (see below). One downside to this widget is that after a certain period of time (~months) you are required to go back and click the graphic and reactivate it. This helps keep bandwidth costs low for the individual who runs the website, since inactive profiles drive up server usage needlessly. Visit their last.fm group page Last.fm Tools



Normaliser - Normaliser is a very simple columns and rows list of your top artists along with how much time you've spent listening to them. You can customize for artists, albums, time period of listening, and the number of entries shown. You can also customize the color scheme and pick from one of their many default background pictures to lay the data on top of. Just click "Yes please - generate my widget for me right now" at the bottom of the page to get your customized widget.



Top Albums Collage - Although album collages is not all this widget can do, it is their best. You simply enter your last.fm username and tell it how many album covers you want to use in your collage. It takes the cover of albums you widely listen to and lumps them together in a large rectangle which you can then paste into your profile. Its customizable by timeframe and layout. There is another collage option to display artists pictures instead of album covers, as well as a text art badge that shows your top artists in a square or circle, but I find it hard to read and not very attractive. I also use band logos instead of artists pictures (see below) for this function. Their last.fm group can be found at Gammalyrae Last.fm Tools



BandLogos (mirror) - The BandLogos creator will go through your profile of your favorite artists, customizable by time, and provide you with a color customizable image of the logos of your favorite bands or artists. Although there are some bands that don't have logos stored in its database, it should have a sufficient amount if you listen to enough big name groups. It has an especially large database of heavy metal group logos, and users are welcome to submit new logos to their group BandLogos. lastfmlogos.info is now accepting new logos to their database, as the previous administrator who ran BandLogos has apparently retired.

✰ UPDATE ✰


Running the lastfmlogos.info project is an effort done by a group of unpaid volunteers who supply their own time and energy to help keep the project up and running. These volunteers write the code to ensure the project works properly, update it frequently to make it work better and ensure its free of bugs. They also sort through new submissions for artwork to include in the project. This, amongst many other tasks they do daily to ensure Bandlogos continues is done entirely in their free time. But, not only spending time on the project, they also spend money out of pocket to provide for servers, web hosting and etc to make sure the Bandlogos websites stay up and running 24/7

If you enjoy Bandlogos and would like to help contribute to keep this great project going, please visit their websites and leave a donation for them today. It helps the project and it helps everyone who uses it. When you donate, it benefits the entire last.fm and its good karma. If you'd like to donate, visit Lastlogos.info and click on the PayPal link at the bottom of the page.



Listening Milestones - The Listening Milestones widget will create a table of songs you have listened to at certain intervals through your last.fm account experience. You can set it to choose, for example, the first song you scrobbled, followed by the 1000th, then 2000th, 3000th and so on -- and there are different types you can choose, even customizing it to whatever you prefer. The output will display a table of songs in the order you selected along with the album cover and last.fm's built in preview button so visitors to your profile can listen to a short clip of the track. There is a beta option to embed the Youtube video for the song into the table, but it exceeds the width requirements for the 'About Me' section on last.fm, so it won't show up properly. The Youtube video table would work great if you have another site or blog you wanted to post it on. I also noticed that Milestones wasn't able to find all of the album art for some of the songs I'd listened to, so I went on Amazon and found the cover art, uploaded it to imgur and then placed that into the BBCode for the table. It can take a little practice to tweak and get it to fit where you want it to fit, but through trial and error you should be able to get it work if the covers are missing. I've personally found that this can become one of the longest skyscrapper graphics in your last.fm profile page and it gets to be a bit tedious to maintain. I'm thinking of scrapping it altogether.

You can find Listening Milestones group at Milestones.



FXD Last.fm Tag Cloud - The Tag Cloud is a very small and clean looking graphic that will show up the top tags you are known to listen to with the names of some of the artists underneath it. You can choose from two color schemes - red or black. The Tag Cloud updates dynamically every time you view it, so it never looks the same twice. Out of all the widgets, its one of the most frequently updated. The only variable you are given besides color is the time period to look at your musical tastes. The FXD Cloud doesn't have a dedicated group, but it seems to be run by one or more people. The main person who seems to answer help questions regarding the project is ivanhlyzov. There is a also a forum post here with more information about it.



New Stuff! (Fall 2012)

I've come across a few more profile widgets I wanted to share with my readers. Some of these don't particularly appeal to me, but they might to you, so check them out and see what you think!

Terpilovsky - Top Artists Chart Generator - This generates a skyscrapper graphic showing your top 10 artists based on your last.fm stats.



Terpilovsky also has a Recent Tracks graphic generator, which is nice looking, but a little too wide to be able to fit into the constrains of a last.fm profile page.

My Music Habits creates some line graphs and pie charts of how much you listen to "Top 25 Artists" vs Non-Top Artists.

According to how the explanation given by the website for my statistics:
Artist Listening Habits

In terms of artists, 40% of your listens came from your top 10 artists, 58% of your listens came from your top 25 artists, and 69% of your listens came from your top 50 artists. Approximately 31% of the artists you've listened to lie outside of your top 50 artists.



In my opinion, the graphics don't do much for me or give visitors any important or interesting listening information about your habits. It kind of looks like something you could make in an Excel Spreadsheet of what you've been listening to. So, if you ever needed to make a presentation to your boss about your favorite music, this is where I would go to get that data. There doesn't seem to be an affiliated group or user for this widget, but there is an email address on the site to get in contact with the author if you find it necessary.

Getfo - This site looks at your statistics on last.fm and generates a graphic based on how much you listen to male artists vs female artists. Unfortunately, when I went to visit the site to try and check it out more, it was incredibly slow and didn't work. Although the site is still INCREDIBLY slow, I was finally able to access it and take a look at the results. There are two choices for generating images. One is called MaFaIn:

MaFeIn (“Male, Female, Instrumental”) just analyses your top 50 artist and then shows you a chart where you can see what percentage of your favourite music is performed by male vocalists, what – by female vocalists and what – without any vocal.



The second is called Years and simply produces a vertical line graph of what year the music you listen to you most was made -- what it describes as "Year chart for music you listen". How far it goes back, I'm not sure.



Because this site is so slow, I'd recommend just downloading the pictures and then uploading them to imgur. Copy and paste the link for the BBcode option into your profile where you want it to go. This will reduce bandwidth on Gefto's site and probably keep your profile from showing up blank or broken images there, since they most likely wouldn't load most of the time anyway.

Anthony Lieken's Eclectic Music Gauge

According to the author, this works using the following 'algorithm'

Take your top 20 artists. For each of these artists, collect the top 5 similar artists. The resulting number of unique artists is your eclectic score. If the score is small (extreme = 5) your musical preferences are very limited, and if it is large (larger than 80, extreme = 100), then you have an eclectic musical preference. You can compute your own score at http://anthony.liekens.net/pub/scripts/last.fm/eclectic.php



My score seems to be 94 out of 100, which I find a little hard to believe since I listen to mostly pop music and nothing I would really consider "eclectic". But, it's all in the eye of the beholder I guess. Or, maybe the programmer. Nonetheless, there are a lot of other features and tools on the page that let you compare your profiles with your friends and get a lot of data & stats about what you listen to.

You can visit Anthony's last.fm profile aliekens and his group about this (and other projects) on Stats

Other Services

There are many other neat and cool last.fm profile apps and widgets to find on the net. Many of them I didn't include because they simply didn't fit my taste, but some widgets cease development, or the sites that host them can't afford to keep them up and so they disappear over time. Previously I had a Twitter widget that displayed my latest tweets in BBCode for my profile, but that service recently disappeared. However, there are other good sites out there with guides to feed your widget fetish!

Last.fm Tools - This site contains a wide variety of widgets, apps, tools and just other general interest data that you can see based on your scrobbling profile. Last time I checked, a few of them no longer worked.

13 Cool Extras And Widgets To Pimp Up Your Last.fm Profile - Originally posted on discomint.com which was down when I tried to access it. I copied all 13 of the links to a bitly bundle and you can find them here.

last.fm top albums generator - I played with this tool once, but didn't like the results and didn't use it. I don't remember exactly what it does. Author: https://twitter.com/coversdev

Last.fm Profile Visitors Widget and Counter - Apparently this allows you to get a counter for your last.fm profile and see where people are visiting it from.

FlagCounter - Displays a list of flags in the countries people are visiting your last.fm profile from. I see many people using this, and it is kind of neat, but I think its a little too Big Brotherish for me. But, it is a very attractive banner!

Favorite Artist Image - This is supposed to create a skyscrapper banner that displays your favorite artist stats. When I tried, it came back with a broken image. Not sure if works. When I tried to access the page, it appeared to be down. The domain registration showed it will expire within a few days. If its coming back, I do not know.

build.last.fm - Last but not least, last.fm's very own widgets and tools - although not all of them are for your profile page, some can be used on Facebook and similar services. Worth a look.

Final Considerations

One thing you don't want to do with your last.fm profile is to clutter it up with too much junk as to make it slow to load and unpleasant to look at for visitors. last.fm doesn't let you redesign your entire profile, but only your 'About Me' section, which helps. Remember how peoples MySpace pages got way overloaded with animated GIFs, tons of embedded flash content, autoplay music and all kinds of other nonsense? You don't want to make your last.fm profile look that way either. Luckily, last.fm has taken the idea from Facebook to have a standard layout page for profiles and still give you some leeway to customize your look. So, try some of these out and see how they fit on your page, what color schemes fit and let me know what you think! Also, if you find any other cool widgets, tools, apps or graphics, please feel free to let me know in the comments. If I've missed including your group associated with any of these widgets, please leave me a shout, PM, a comment, let me know on Twitter @pogue25 or if you must, you can email me.

Thanks for reading! Please feel free to comment and share! If you liked this article, please say thanks in the comments!
pogue972





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]]> Music http://www.last.fm/user/pogue972/journal/2011/02/06/47b1hz_music Sun, 6 Feb 2011 08:54:33 +0000 http://www.last.fm/user/pogue972/journal/2011/02/06/47b1hz_music Music is good. People listen to it and it makes their ears feel happy. Some music, however, causes peoples ears to feel sad. This is in fact not music though, but noise, and that is a common misconception.

Music was first discovered in 1981 by an astronaut sent by Viacom to discover which Video Killed the Radio Star.]]>