Scrobbrel

Yesterday, I wrote a script called Scrobbrel. If you give it a last.fm username, it will show some information about that user, including all their friends. This is useful because it allows you to browse through last.fm friends more quickly than using last.fm directly (which tends to be painfully slow).

Also, it uses XFN to represent all relationships (both friends and links to other pages about the user), allowing last.fm relationship information to be processed by tools like Rubhub and XFN Graph. Unfortunately, a bug in Rubhub prevents it from following relative URLs correctly, so it doesn’t work yet. Phil McCluskey (the creator of Rubhub) assures me that this bug will be fixed eventually. XFN graph doesn’t work properly either; if anyone can work out why I’d be grateful to find out.

On the topic of XFN, rel-lint is a useful bookmarklet. It lists all XFN links on a page, as well as other rel attribute based formats (such as rel-tag). Try it on this blog, or my website.

For those who are interested, Scrobbrel is written in Ruby (not Rails), and uses the Audioscrobbler webservices. REXML makes XML parsing really easy.

Comments and suggestions are most welcome.