craigmcn

Shuttergirl asked the other day what it means when there’s music listed on my home page. Let me explain. I use Winamp at home as my default music player on my computer. There’s a whole bunch of plug-ins for Winamp to do this, that and the other thing. I use the Now Playing plug-in to post my tracks to my website. I have a script that writes the track information to a database table, updating the date it was last played and increasing the number of times it has been played. If the track isn’t in the database, it gets written. The home page then just grabs the most recently played track to display. If you mouseover the track name, the track details pop-up. You’ll also notice sometimes the heading is Recently Played and sometimes it’s Now Playing. Now Playing means that Winamp is currently on and playing the listed track. Recently Played means that the track displayed was most recently played. If you mouseover the heading, it will display the time the last track was played. Originally this listing was expandable and displayed the last 10 tracks played. You could click any of the tracks to request that I make the track available for download. Due to some slight abuse by a handful of visitors, I discontinued the practice.  I may resurrect it, but I’ll need to add a lot more rules and verification. So, that’s what that’s all about.