Muskblog: Making the Internet better since 1995

I keep trying to improve my various web mashups as APIs change and I pick up a new trick or two. One idea I had was to decrease the number of albums from every CD I own to say 100…

When I started building my mashups with PHP one idea I had was to fetch audio previews for songs and albums, this was supposedly possible with the Amazon Product Advertising API, but I could never get it to work with the limited data I had in my csv file…

After finally getting my web mashup code into GitHub I spent a lot of time ensuring the code was easy to read and well commented. The code still needs testing on another box than that used by my webhost, volunteers? I use my collection of web mashups as a test suite of sorts for the codebase. I’ve tracked down a lot of bugs, but as the codebase has grown and more APIs have been added I think it runs less efficiently.  I have a number of theories on why the CD Cover Gallery in particular works less well: Far from […]

Lost among all the glossy photos of the new iPhone, Apple quietly announce the closure and failure of Ping, their social network targeting music fans. Ping was built into iTunes and thus only accessible when you were using iTunes on your computer or other Apple device. Apple famously integrated Twitter more tightly into iOS as they see Facebook as a bigger rival, but their continued insistence on a made at Apple social network, definitely seems like paddling upstream near the falls. Well maybe not near the falls, Apple may have achieved too big to fail status. It would be nice if […]

I’ve been waiting for iTunes Match since before the project had a name.  Then I had to wait even longer because I’m Canadian.  iTunes Match combined with iCloud was supposed to allow you to store your entire music collection online so you could access it anywhere. The early iPods had actual hard drives in them and could hold numerous songs.  They didn’t have touch screens and iOS wasn’t what it is now.  Now not only do iPods have color LCD screens and in many cases touch screens, they have WiFi, and they have lots and lots of apps competing for […]

It took several attempts and for a while I didn’t think it was ever going to work, but I now have iOS 5 on my iPhone 3GS and am using iTunes 10.5 and iCloud.  I’m a bit disappointed.  You need Mac OS X Lion to use iCloud currently.  I’m not a big fan of Mac OS X Lion, but I also own a PowerMac G4 which I’ve spent considerable time and money upgrading.  I used to use my G4 to do backups, but after Time Machine came out, that was no longer a possibility as it only works with external […]

Online music is a fascinating space with a lot of creativity and competitors, there are many heavyweights but plenty of nimble startups as well. In the olden days, online music meant pirated music…

There are a number of ways you could enjoy my favourite music. You could pop buy and listen to some sides on my stereo which is almost back to fully functional now. Or you could take a peek at my loved tracks and most frequently listened to artists on Last.fm. Now you have a third and potentially even more exciting option, I’ve created a mashup devoted to my all time favourite songs. This mashup uses the code I’ve previously posted, but I’ve revised and expanded it. I’ve also created a subclass and added token support for yet another API, this […]