Rathole Radio

I’ve long been a subscriber to Floss Weekly, a video/audio podcast in the TWiT network focused on Free/Libre/Open Source Software. One of the occasional co-hosts of that show, Dan Lynch, also does an audio podcast (weekly) called Rathole Radio. I’ve just started listening but so far I’m loving it: he mixes genres (french instrumental hip-hop, dance, heavy metal / hardcore), and mixes in live performance.

The most recent episode, Rathole Radio 62, included all (assuming that includes the live performance) creative-commons licensed music from Jamendo. (There’s also a Rathole Radio Sampler EP you can download on which all tracks are creative commons licensed).

Two quick links to share from that episode. The first is an EP by “8in8,” a supergroup including Ben Folds, Amanda Palmer, Neil Gaiman, and Damian Kulash. Dan played the track “Because the Origami” on the podcast, but the whole EP is embedded below and downloadable for just $1 USD.

The second is from Bad Panda Records, a creative commons record label.

Back in September when they announced their 100th release, they also put out a downloadable 1.1GB archive of all 100 releases. Be sure to also check out the Big Panda Store for merch.

Upgrade are failed - photo by Collin Anderson, cc-by-2.0 license

As some of you may know, I developed and maintain a WordPress plugin called WPBook.

I’m trying a clean install of that plugin on a blog upgraded to WordPress 3.0 (which came out Friday) to make sure it works.

Wish me luck!

However, I also wanted to show avatars for users who use Gravatar or MyBlogLog.

The solution, for me at least (and for now) was to take Jan Olsen‘s excellent MBLA plugin and hack it up a bit. I took out the “Google Preview” functionality, and added in support for the hAvatar plugin. (MBLA already handled Gravatar and MyBlogLog, and had a nice caching system to boot, so it made a nice place to start).

So, if you leave a comment below, it should do the following:

1. If you leave a url in the url field (doesn’t have to be an OpenID, but it can be), and there is an hCard living at that url, and that hCard has a photo, it should be retrieved.
2. If you don’t provide a url, or the url you provide doesn’t have an hCard at it, or that hCard doesn’t have an image in it, then your email address will be checked at both MyBlogLog and Gravatar
3. If you don’t provide a url or an email address, you won’t get an avatar associated to your comments

There’s also caching, thanks to MBLA’s nice framework, currently set to just 1 day, for testing – I will pump it to longer timeframe once I’m convinced it all works.

If you’d like a copy lemme know – once I’ve tested a bit I will publish the code.

What I’m looking for is basically something to pull in the CD image and perhaps tracklist (from Amazon, from iTunes, from eMusic, from discogs.org – I don’t care) for a CD based on title/artist, and dump it in to a blog entry.

That’d make it much easier and faster to write about new CDs, which I hope would make me actually do so more often.

I suppose if I can’t find one I will have to find the time to go write one – not a lot of that lately (time), which is why I’m looking for a faster way to get blog posts written!