You can now see what I'm playing currently on my mp3 player

I've added something "cool" to this blog. On the right in the sidebar there's now a section called "Now playing". This information is updated every time XMMS changes to a new song. So every time I load a new track, the title and artist information is updated.

The XMMS "Song Change" plugin is configured to call a shellscript with the song title as a parameter. This shell script then uses curl to send the song title to a PHP script that adds the title to a row in the wordpress options database. Every time the sidebar template is loaded, the plugin outputs the "currently playing" MP3.

In the future I might add something to show that the information is very old if necessary. I'm also thinking about removing "Various" or "Various artists" from song titles when necessary.

[update]

This is really nice, I've noticed that when XMMS is closed, the "Song Change" plugin sends an empty song title to my script. So an empty field in the database means nothing is playing. Also, "Various" and "Various Artists" is removed from the title, including additional adornments like - or / and spaces.

[update]

You can download the first release of this plugin at the new Wordpress plugins page.

[update]

Version 0.2 is available at the Wordpress plugins page.