What is it?

Scrobbles is a simple WordPress plugin that fetches your Last.fm data and displays it on your site where you wish.

Installation

1. First, you need to upload scrobbles.php to your WordPress plugins directory.

2. Next, you’ll need to do a quick edit of your template. Find the place where you’d like to display your songs, such as the sidebar, and add the following line:

   <?php scrobbles('username'); ?>
   

   Replacing username with your Audioscrobbler username.

3. Activate the plugin in your WordPress admin panel, and that’s it!

Is that it?

That’s all you need to do, but there are a few things you can do to customise how Scrobbles displays your song info.

scrobbles() can take up to seven parameters that allow you to customise the output further. They are, in order:

• username – Required

  Your Audioscrobbler username.

• num_songs – Optional

  The number of songs to display. Defaults to 5 and is limited to a maximum of 10, that being the number of items Audioscrobbler displays in its RDF feeds.

• gmt_offset – Optional

  How many hours in front of or behind GMT you are. Defaults to 0, GMT, but can be anywhere between -12 and +14.

• format_string – Optional

  How to format the string. By default, it displays the song and date in this format:

  %song%<br />Played on %date%
  

  %song%, %link% and %date% are the available variables. Dates are formatted according to the date_format parameter.

• date_format – Optional

  How to format the %date% variable. The variables are exactly the same as PHP’s date function.

• base_element – Optional

  The base element of the “loop”. Defaults to ol, producing an ordered list. Scrobbles assigns this a class of scrobbles, allowing you to alter visual styling with CSS.

• each_element – Optional

  The element that will be used for each song. Defaults to li, which makes sense in the context of an ordered list but might not if you change base_element.

Tips and Tricks

• You can make your Scrobbles display a bit prettier and add a “powered by Audioscrobbler” logo if you like. Download this image to your server and add the following code to your theme’s CSS file:

  ul.scrobbles, #scrobbles { background:transparent url(path/to/image.png) no-repeat bottom right; padding-bottom:35px; }
  

  Changing the path to the image appropriately, and please don’t leech from Last.fm’s servers.

Discuss

You can discuss any problems or post suggestions for future upgrades to Scrobbles – or any of my other plugins – on the mailing list available here. Come join in!

Widget

If you use the WordPress Widgets plugin and a compatible theme, you can use this version of Scrobbles instead:

Install, activate, and edit the options in the Presentation → Sidebar Widgets menu. Much easier to customise as well as to enable and disable!

Changelog

2005-08-23: Initial Release

2005-08-24: 1.1 – Added date and string formatting, used WordPress’s existing Magpie system, general tidying and improvements.

2005-09-09: 1.2 – Added gmt_offset parameter.

2005-11-01: 1.3 – Added %link% variable.

2005-11-08: 1.4 – Added %artist% and %title% variables – %song% still works, though. Changed to new Audioscrobbler feed URL.