KGF iTunes Widget

I guess I’m filing this under “creative” because I’m making something?

Anyway – looked all over for a widget to display my top iTunes songs, artists or genres and although there were two listed in the WordPress plugin search panel, I could get neither to work. So I’ve dusted off my rusty coding skills and learned how to make a basic widget and pull up some info from the iTunes Music Library. I’m not experienced at all with PHP or XML so it’s been a learning experience so far. Many thanks to the developers of the iTunes XML Parser for PHP, it’s just what I needed!

I’ve still got a long way to go – you can see the app in the lower left hand sidebar of this page. Currently I’m displaying play count, track id and genre. Clearly I have duplicate records listed and I’m trying unsuccessfully to filter out some genres (Data and Audiobook) but both are small problems I should be able to fix pretty quickly.

The next step will be to add some options to the plugin that can be manipulated through the admin panel – number of songs, type of data to display, and a way to update the listing once so the widget doesn’t have to parse the entire iTunes Music Library every time you call the page.

All in good time, I guess.