townx

Another update: I noticed today that this module had disabled my site. I'm not sure why, but I think it may be because Last.fm wasn't responding. I'm still using it, but if you have it on your site and everything goes bad, it might be because Last.fm isn't available. I manually disabled it in the system table for my Drupal install and my site came back to life, so I know it was this module that caused the problem. I need to do some more debugging before it's suitable for production, so use at your own risk, or exclude the block from the admin page so at least you can disable the module if it causes problems.

Update: I've just updated this slightly, so that the cached track listing is used if your recent tracks from Last.fm is blank. This avoids you getting an empty listing if you haven't been listening to music for a while. I also updated it a second time to prevent errors occurring if you get broken XML back from Last.fm (which happened to me once, and caused my whole site to crash).

I've had a couple of requests for my Last.fm Drupal module, in response to a previous blog post. This was also a good opportunity to learn how to write modules for Drupal 5 and learn the new forms API, which I've now done.

The new version is attached to the bottom of this post. It requires Drupal 5 and PHP 5 with the DOM extension enabled (this is used for parsing the XML feed from Last.fm). It won't check whether the DOM extension is enabled (it's not that clever yet), so it could cause issues (like your site breaking) if you try to install it on a system without PHP 5 and/or the DOM extension.

Install it as a standard module (drop into the modules directory, enable in Administer > Site building > Modules). I've integrated it with the admin. system (under Administer > Site configuration > Last.fm module settings), so you'll need to configure it there before it works. The settings required are:

• Your Last.fm username.
• The number of tracks you want to show (1-10).
• The period for which you want to cache the list (5 minutes to 1 hour), or no caching. The listing is cached in your Drupal root directory (under the filename lastfm_cached.html) for efficiency. In cases where Last.fm doesn't respond quickly enough, you will get an error message (rather than it just leaving your site hanging).

Then turn on the block with the title Recent tracks in the block admin. pages. And away you go! As proof it actually works, see the left-hand side of this site, where it's in action.