RAPaul.com

Rockin’ Robin

Introducing Rockin’ Robin, a mashup between Last.fm and Twitter.  Head over to http://robin.rapaul.com/ to check it out if you haven’t already.

The basic premise is that you enter your Last.fm username, Rockin’ Robin fetches your recently scrobbled tracks, then mashes them up with the latest tweets from Twitter. It’s an excellent way to see what the Twitter community thinks of your tracks and to find Twitter users who have similar musical tastes. Of course you don’t need to enter your own username, you can enter the username of any Last.fm user to mashup their latest tracks.

Below is a screenshot (click to enlarge) highlighting some of the mashup goodness. Electric Feel by MGMT is the recently played track, with tweets shown from different Twitter users. To view more details on the artist, track or Twitter user you can click through to Last.fm or Twitter using the links (orange text).

Rockin’ Robin is in its early stages of development, as such there are many things that should/could be done to make Rockin’ Robin more rockin’.

Some ideas include:

• Allow Twitter users to add there own tweets to the conversation from within Rockin’ Robin.
• Show more tweets for popular tracks.
• Tweak the Twitter API search to favour real user comments over radio station type tweets.
• Show shortcut links to your Last.fm friends to make mashing up their recent tracks a simple click away.

If you have any suggestions or comments please feel free to add them below.

Also stay tuned for a follow up post “The making of Rockin’ Robin” which will cover the technical side including: Accessing Twitter & Last.fm APIs, JSONP and Dojo Toolkit (query, behavior, script.io).

Tags: last.fm, mashup, music, rockin' robin, social, twitter, web

Setting up RAPaul.com

Setting up RAPaul.com has been a breeze.  Especially easy with recommendations from Rob.

1. Set up a web host – This was done using A Small Orange (ASO) – yes that’s the name of the hosting provider.
2. Secure a domain name – This can be done automatically when setting up an account with ASO and worked perfectly.  The trickiest part is finding a domain name that is available.
3. Install Wordpress – ASO provides a large feature set of administration tools, one of which is a really handy install tool named Fantastico.  Installing Wordpress comes down to a couple of clicks.
4. Customise Wordpress – Installing a Wordpress theme is also very simple, extract a theme (e.g. deMar) into the themes folder then it is available to be chosen through the built in Wordpress admin tool.
5. Set up Feedburner – This collates statistics about your subscribers etc. Details are shown here.  The plugin makes it very easy to add both the post and comments feeds.

Note the process I used to upload content was to use ASO’s cPanel interface.  There is an option called ‘File Manager’ that lets you upload a zip or tar.gz to a required location, you can then unpack the archive by selecting it and choosing ‘Extract’.

All in all, the process has been very simple and painless.

If you’re thinking of setting up an account with A Small Orange, here is my referrer url.

There are some additional configuration options I haven’t had time to play with yet, including:

• Install the google sitemap plugin
• Install the google code syntax highlighter
• Install google analytics

Tags: a small orange, aso, fantastico, feed, feedburner, hosting, install, theme, web, wordpress