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Originally uploaded by turbobumble.

I just finished a first alpha of a Wordpress plugin which integrates my plazes location with Google Maps resulting in the map at the top of this weblog. When i’m online it retrieves my longitude and latitude from the Plazes server and uses that to generate a Google map with a little marker denoting my current location and linking to my Plazes profile.

So useless! so cool!
As soon as i’ve tested it a bit more on my own weblog i’ll release it as an official (beta) Wordpress plugin just like the Last.fm plugin i wrote today.

Todo:

• Replacing the google marker with a plaze marker
• Nicer layout of the popup
• Nicer layout of offline message and error messages

I fully agree with David that there is no such thing as a general-purpose CMS, Lots of people have tried but in the end a custom built CMS is usually better suited for the task at hand, more user friendly and maybe most importantly; easier to adapt to changing needs. A nice in between is software that handles a specific type of content management like a weblog tool but there are not a lot of domains where this is a viable option. A good example would be e-commerce where there are many ‘one click web shop’ solutions but no succesful online retailers using any of the standard solutions that are available. In fact most of these successful shops get their edge from rolling their own software and thus gaining the flexibility to beat their competition.

I hacked together a simple Wordpress plugin for Last.fm which uses the webservice feed to display the recently played tracks on your weblog. It’s based on the del.icio.us Wordpress plugin and uses a similar layout, the same caching mechanism (to a file in /tmp) and CURL to retrieve the feed.

You can download the plugin here: lastfm.zip

To install simply unzip and copy the lastfm.php file to your /wp-content/plugins/ directory. Turn it on in your administration panel. And finally call the recent_tracks(<username>) function with your username from somewhere in your template. i.e:


<li><h2><a href="http://www.last.fm/user/tizzle/">last.fm/user/tizzle</a></h2>
<ul>
<?php recent_tracks('tizzle'); ?>
</ul>
</li>


Make sure your webhost has installed the CURL library for PHP though otherwise this plugin won’t work.
If not you could opt to use this modified version of my plugin which uses fopen instead.

Version history:

• 0.5 (16-05-2007) - small fix to account for changes in Lastfm XML format (Thanks Anthony!)
• 0.4 (09-03-2006) - changed caching behaviour and using XML instead of RSS feed
• 0.3 (01-11-2005) - moved UL tag generation into plugin
• 0.2 (01-11-2005) - fixed a caching problem
• 0.1 (01-11-2005) - initial release

Een deel van de beoordeling is gebaseerd op publieksinput. Jouw mening is daarom waardevol!