What is this?
This is another little code project / see how useful it is website I thought of and built. Essentailly it is to be viewed whilst listening to BBC Radio 1, BBC Radio 2, BBC 1Xtra and BBC 6 Music, and provides realtime information about the artist currently being played. For instance if you have a PC hooked up to your TV, you might put this on your TV whilst you have the radio on your stereo.
Why did you do this?
Becasue whilst listening to Radio1 I like to find out a bit more about the artist, see their website, look at albums they've released etc.
How does it work?
I'm using the now playing rss feeds that were made available by the BBC guys at Hack Day UK. I run them through a few Yahoo pipes to do the heavy loading (extract artist name, make API calls to retrieve data, etc.) and use JQuery to handle the JSON requests and DHTML stuff. The only server side code I've written is a small proxy page to allow me to make JSON requests to pipes.yahoo.com. That's it!
Known issues
Firstly, it is a bit rough and ready, but should generally work. However known issues are:
- It isn't showing the artist that is actually playing - I rely on the BBC's data feeds, and check for an update every 60 seconds, so there can be a delay.
- Yahoo pipes output gets cached by Yahoo, I try to get around this, but it can also cause issues.
- The top web result isn't always about the artist now playing, I rely on Yahoo web search for this so it can be hit and miss.
- 1xtra is particularly bad as the artists aren't particularly popular on the web.
- The top website result, as it is loaded into an iframe, can cause javascript errors, trigger popups, or in some cases pop out of its iframe, however not much can be done about the content of these sites
I like this, tell me more / make it better
If you like this or you find it useful and want me to add / fix stuff, or want more information then email me - nowplaying [at] cgriley [dot] com
Developed by Chris Riley