Eric Wahlforss is one of the guys behind SoundCloud. This is where he jots down thoughts on the web, music and strategy, among other things.
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Upcoming.org Events Script
Here’s my super simple upcoming.org events feed script. Nothing fancy, but it will do the job for a simple events feed like the one on this page. It’s a PHP script and it requires only the Magpie RSS-parser (simple drop install) and the expat XML-parser (included in almost every PHP-distribution out there).
I decided to go with expat since the upcoming.org PHP web services toolkit is somewhat hard to deal with if you haven’t got hosting with command line access.
In order to get the script to run, you need to figure out your upcoming.org user id and get an API key, and put those in the script where so indicated.
If you have cron support on your hosting provider you should use it. You need to use a cron task that looks something like this:/usr/local/bin/lynx -dump http://yoursite.com/upcoming-events.php > /dev/null
Never pull events more often than every 15 minutes.
Google Semantic Blunder
Just realized the importance of RSS search engines when looking at my traffic logs, realizing that one of the top 10 search strings leading visitors to my site is the phrase “iShuffle sucks”. Type this into Google and my page for entries tagged with music comes up as number 18. The problem here is that I don’t think the iShuffle sucks, in fact I think it rocks (but I did point out a few minor mistakes in the design the other day)!
What happens is here that Google mixes up this post with the post about Beatport and why it sucks! This would never have happened if Google had the least idea of the fact that it’s indexing a blog with separate posts about separate things! I find myself turning more and more to search engines like Technorati and Del.icio.us these days, and this little happening gives me all the more reason of doing so.