It’s amazing how much can be achieved with the help of a few scripts. If you come to think of it, scripts are the original mashups that Web 2.0 has vener­ated in recent times.

Today, I decided that I would have a “Now Listening” box shown on my blog — I’m not sure if it is visible at this moment — which would display the name of the artist of the currently playing track on my computer. So here’s what I came up with -

1. A Bash script that would use DCOP to query Amarok, deter­mine the currently playing song, and update a tempo­rary file accordingly.
2. A small PHP script that would read the file and display this infor­ma­tion, but only if it is available.
3. A set of CSS rules to format the gener­ated XHTML.
4. A cron job to execute the script every minute.

Voila! It’s done…almost like magic.

Tags: Amarok, BASH, Blog, cron, DCOP, Linux

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 5th, 2008 at 03:04 and is filed under Daily Rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.