Bill

Ok, it isn't quite that easy - but almost; I've done the hard work of building a revenue stream from listening to music - you just need people to care what your listening to, have a blog, a last.fm account, and an amazon associate id. With these ingredients you can, potentially, make money simply by listening to music. How? Well, I'm about to tell you.

First off you need a blog and a way to display RSS feeds in your blog. I use wordpress and a plugin I wrote for it called FeedList. FeedList is pretty easy to use and is what shows "My Recent Music" on the homepage of this site. Secondly you need a Last.fm account. Last.fm is a cool service that provides a way to keep track of what music you are listening to. It then makes that list of music available via an RSS feed. That RSS feed is then consumed by the wordpress plugin FeedList and displayed on your blog. Nothing to difficult yet I hope.

Now, however, instead of using the last.fm RSS feed in the normal way I created a Yahoo! Pipe that will convert your last.fm RSS feed into a different RSS feed. This new RSS feed contains links to Amazon.com instead of last.fm and each link has, embedded in it, your Amazon associate id so that when people click on the link and buy that music from Amazon you get a referral fee.

That's it. You listen to music, last.fm collects the info about the music you listen to, then Yahoo Pipes grabs that info and sends you an RSS feed with amazon links that you can then display on your blog for people to click on. I told you it was easy!

OK so that is the easy overview. Here are some more complete instructions:

1. 
   
2. Create a last.fm account and keep your username handy
   
3. Download and install the last.fm plugin that works with the program you use to listen to music with. The plugins are about halfway down the page.
   
4. Create an amazon affiliate account and keep your amazon affiliate id. If you don't you can use mine strictlymovies-20
   
5. Setup a blog using wordpress, or some other blog engine, just make sure the one you pick has a plugin, or the native ability, to display RSS feeds on the blog
   
6. Use the following URL as the feed URL you want to display in your blog.
   

   
   	http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=7d20665c0dc0240fd18516ec360efe21&_render=rss&amid=...
   

   
   Just replace YOURUSERNAME with your last.fm username and YOURASSOCIATEID with your amazon associate id (or mine; just note if you use mine I will make money because you are listening to music).
   
   
7. Get people to view your blog; tell your family and friends, write blog posts, etc.
   

You can make even more money by showing ads on your blog (google adsense) but using your music to automatically generate ads is a lot less intrusive and far more personalized to you. So, go on, give it a try!

#Music #Geekiness #php #Code #ThisSite

I have been using MediaMonkey as my main music player/manager for the past couple months and I really like it. It has a bunch of nifty features but I'm only going to talk about one here; you can extend it's functionality via custom scripts. Because I like some uniformity in things I have written two scripts to help me out and I figured I would put them here for others to use if they want.

Personally, I like having all of my songs at the same bit-rate (128) because I can't tell the difference between 128 and anything higher anyway. I also like to use the "audio-leveling" feature in Media Monkey so that I don't have one really quiet song that I end up turning up only to be deafened on the next song which is screaming at me. To help me identify the songs that need to have their volume analyzed (stores a setting in the song on how to level it) I wrote my first script called "Unleveled" which adds a new menu node under the main node "Files to Edit".

I also use Last.fm (to keep track of my listening habits and so others can see what I'm listening too). However, it turns out you can't have any parentheses in your song titles (round parentheses like those that wrap this aside). So I wrote another script to replace all the round parentheses with square brackets [like this] in titles of songs. It's called LastFMfix To use it I do a quick search to get all the songs with a round parentheses in the title then run the script which appears under "Tools ->Scripts".

I doubt many people will need either script - but perhaps the way I implemented them will help others who are trying to write their own scripts. Disclaimer I am not a VB coder normally. In fact I almost never use VB but these scripts were pretty darn easy to write.

Here is how to install the scripts:

Unlevelled

This one is really easy. Unzip the unleveled.zip file into the program files/mediamonkey/scripts/auto directory.

Fix for Last.fm

This one is a bit trickier. First unzip the lastFMfix.zip file into the program files/mediamonkey/scripts directory. Then you have to edit the file Scripts.ini (found in the same directory) and add the following chunk of text just before you see the text [AdvancedReport]:

[LastFMfix]
FileName=LastFMfix.vbs
ProcName=LastFMfix
Order=50
DisplayName=&Fix title for Last.fm
Description=Fixes titles for Last.fm
Language=VBScript
ScriptType=0

#Music #Geekiness #Code

There was a problem with my site after I upgraded to wordpress 2.0. It was never showing an updated comment count. It turns out this had to do with the SpamKarma2 plugin. There is no easy way to update the comment count value. Wordpress2 stores this comment_count value in the wp_posts table. Therefore I wrote a quick script that will update your site if you are having a similar problem.

Here is the script:

Just put it in a new file in your wp-admin directory - then visit it in your browser via the corresponding URL (if you follow the link save it as comment_count.php). After you visit the file it will just show you a blank page. However, it worked so make sure you delete it when you are done. To confirm it worked just view any post that wasn't showing the correct comment_count and see that now it is.

To anyone familiar with SQL at all you may think my approach is a little unrefined and it is. What follows is the code I wanted to use - however It didn't work with my version of mySQL. Honestly, I don't know if works with any version of mySQL or if maybe I just have a minor syntax error.

I believe the first example will work for all versions of mySQL but the second version will only work with MySQL 4.1 or later.

#Geekiness #php #Code