Out of curiosity, if you create an entirely new test template with your magpie code, does it get the latest songs?  Is your RSS feed updating in a normal reader like Google’s news-reader, or whatever reader you use?

well, this is a barebones test page that I created for Robin, I just tried another test page and it’s still only picking up the 2 songs that appeared hours ago right after I had first removed the cache. I’ll add the feed to google reader to confirm feed works correctly. It is updating when you view the feed directly but I’ll confirm with reader.

Can you either post here or privately message me the URL to the feed?  Whichever you’re comfortable with.  Thanks =)

Sure no prob. The feed is here. Google Reader has parsed the feed okay but it’s not picking up the very, very latest. It did pick up songs that played from 5 minutes ago or so, so it’s ...seemingly working. Not sure if it will update at intervals though.

Ok, a new template for me with your RSS feed in Magpie got the latest songs as of right now (with the last one being the Dismemberment Plan); so let’s see what happens.  I got it Newsfire as well.

Hope you have better luck with it than me!

Ok, 3 new songs in Newsfire, and can’t get my template to update. I’m going to see if the team has any ideas on this while watching it throughout the day, it may be a time-based restriction from last.fm that we can’t get around, though I can’t imagine that as Newsfire works.

How weird! I really appreciate the help Lisa, I’ll stay tuned then. Thanks!

Hi, joey,

Ok, something is odd here.  What I’m going to ask you to do is open /system/plugins/pi.magpie.php and make a one line modification.  That will get it going immediately while we figure out what is really happening and get a permanent fix in.

1) Open up system/plugins/pi.magpie.php

2) Find line 1251.  It’ll look like this

3) Replace it with the following code

Essentially, what we’re doing here is having Magpie skip any caching for last.fm.  I have tested this with my own last.fm RSS feed and it worked, so you should be good to go.

Thank you!

That seems to do the trick Lisa, thanks so much! There is the very small matter of that funky alt character but I’m sure i can figure that out.

Just for reference the weird html characters from the feed were caused by character encoding not being set to utf-8 (despite specifying this in my xhtml, my server was overriding it). A simple htaccess cleared the problem up and the audioscrobbler feed is still working flawlessly.

Thanks again Lisa and Robin, you both rock!

I know that this problem is fixed but I just learned of another solution, albeit it may not be for everyone but it is extremely simple.

Wigitize parses any feed and creates a widget for you to place on your site and style as you see fit. The only catch is that it’s utilizing a javascript file on their servers but I definitely see this as a useful free web service.

Thanks for pointing that out, Joey!

I still prefer Magpie; it doesn’t rely on a third-party site, and you can still use tag caching or template caching to make sure it’s not constantly re-fetching the feeds. =)

Joey Trimmer - 08 January 2008 01:22 AM

Just for reference the weird html characters from the feed were caused by character encoding not being set to utf-8 (despite specifying this in my xhtml, my server was overriding it). A simple htaccess cleared the problem up and the audioscrobbler feed is still working flawlessly.

Joey, can you explain what you did here to remedy these odd characters. I can’t seem to figure it out.

andculture - 09 August 2008 11:03 PM

Joey, can you explain what you did here to remedy these odd characters. I can’t seem to figure it out.

Hi andculture, no prob! At the top of my .htaccess file I added this line:

Hope that works for ya!

To be a little more clear, in my root directory I have a file named .htaccess with that line as my first line. My server was overriding my character encoding that I specified in my XHTML so I had to override my server. This did the trick for me and stopped the funky characters from showing up. I hope it does for you too.