So I got annoyed with looking up albums in RYM and decided to write something to extract the ratings into Songbird.  The result is here, it’s actually at 0.2 already because I’ve done quite a lot of work on it recently (whilst being something of a slack blogger).  Now all I need are the POTI guys to make Songbird do multiple genre tagging, improve the search/filter functions accordingly and then make Songbird much snappier with large libraries.  Then I will have the (almost) perfect media player.

Future plans include integrating the RYM enhancer script into this, once I’ve got the hang of pref management.

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I just realised I never blogged about this.  Before I started messing about with Greasemonkey, I wrote a small Firefox extension just to dip my toe in the Mozilla waters.

It is far from complex and is based on the classic ‘Define’ extension, simply adding an item to the text selection context menu that allows the user to easily search an artist or album on Rate Your Music.

So here is the extension, feel free to install it on Firefox versions up to and including the forthcoming 3.1, and also (more importantly, as Songbird is my main browser as far as RYM goes) Songbird versions up to and including the forthcoming 1.1.  This won’t be submitted to AMO yet, as I first plan to turn my Greasemonkey script into an extension (already done, utilising this nifty tool), before adding an options menu and integrating the context menu functionality in this extension to make the ultimate (only?) RYM enhancement for Firefox.

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Yes, that’s right.

The short story is I got annoyed at the glacial pace of feature development over on Rate Your Music, Richey showed me a couple of Greasemonkey scripts he found to enhance the experience and this one popped up as being the most useful.  Except that I didn’t like a few things about it, so proceeded to simplify the options and add a small pile of new features.

So I present my enhanced version of the RYM enhancer script.  Features:

• Changes ratings from 0.5-5 to 1-10*
• Sets hover (title) text of star rating to a 1-10 scale*
• Calculates average ratings for each artist and release category (album, single, video, etc.)*
• Enhances ratings with colour (1-4 red; 4-7 yellow; 7-10 green)*
• Highlights rated, owned or wishlist items in both custom charts and lists
  • Rated items are highlighted in blue, owned items in yellow, wishlist items are red.
  • Each type of highlight can be switched on or off depending on user preference.
  • If both owned and rated highlights are selected, owned items which have also been rated are highlighted in green.
  • If both wishlist and rated highlights are selected, wishlist items which have also been rated are highlighted in purple.
  • Calculates the total number of each different highlighted item type at the bottom of the page.  This is performed dynamically based on the highlighting preferences.

Starred items are features carried over from the original version of the script.  Highlight colours have been carefully chosen to allow readability, and also to provide a colour combination metaphor when rated & owned, or rated & wishlist, highlights are selected.  You can’t own an item and have it on your wishlist, so there is no combination highlight for that.

There are certain circumstances where releases that you have rated will not be highlighted.  This is because RYM allows you to rate multiple versions of any given release, but doesn’t provide a user friendly way to manage these ratings with respect to the release as a whole.  So if you have rated a release version which is different to that displayed in a list or chart, that album’s entry will not show up as having been rated.  Most annoyingly, this also happens when looking at artist pages; the way I currently get around it is to rate multiple versions of the same album, which achieves the desired results but can be annoying as you are rating the same release multiple times.  I might see if I can provide a better fix to this issue with an extension to the script.

Needless to say, this requires Firefox and the Greasemonkey extension.  Go get it

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Ok, so new blog set up with minimal customisation (everything is likely to change) and the first theme that validates properly with HTML Tidy (it also happens to be nice and green).

This is the first speed comparison of the new native JavaScript GetElementsByClassName functionality which is built into what will become Firefox 3. Very impressive, it should mean Fx3 will actually feel significantly faster when poking around sites, especially those with lots of JS.

Picture from the above link:

On a side note, I’m very impressed with WordPress so far, it’s all very well laid out, nice and intuitive. You can edit anything you want so eventually I’ll be hacking up a theme and hopefully integrating the blog with the rest of the (not yet existent) site. Oh, and the Dreamhost installation really was only one click!

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