Doy "blips" music.
I have my last 15 blips in this little player...let me know if any of the links are broken.
Two things.
First.
I’ve been “dinking around” (a technical jargony term for all you newbies) with rss feeds today, mainly because I’ve never used them and I finally got the point of actually CARING about them when I wanted to add my recently played tracks from Last.fm.
That FELT like a run-on sentence, but wasn’t.
At any rate, I first came upon SimplePie.org, which is a simple rss reader for your websites. I went through the tutorials, uploaded it to my site, and then added it to the wordpress header file. Upon putting this in the page, I got a series of error messages (most of which I didn’t quite understand) that freaked out wordpress, and I really wasn’t making any headway (did you catch the pun?) and was about to give up.
My friend Brad, an infinitely better programmer than I am, even when I’m dreaming, pointed me to Wordpress’ built-in rss function, called simply, wp rss. Gotta admit…never knew it was there, and more importantly, didn’t really care…until I needed it…craved it, of course.
I plugged in the code in literally about five minutes, tweaked, seasoned with css and went my merry way with a last.fm custom recently played tracks thingy on my site.
I would LOVED to have known how to do all this with javascript and the last.fm api, but I’m just not there yet. If I could only have played around with programming more…you know…when computers were Commodore 64’s and all…
Second.
I’m still ruminating on this whole “24 Hour Party People” thing I mentioned earlier…
If you are going simply on the recommendations of these respected critics, the movie is a triumph. A triumph, that jumps, skips avoids real character development except when it comes to the main character, which is understandable I guess, if it weren’t for the fact that it’s trying to give watchers a glimpse of a music scene.
And while both Joy Division and Happy Mondays are great artists in their own right, I don’t think it’s fair to hang the entire “madchester” scene on their backs.
In fact, The Smiths (the bloody SMITHS) are mentioned ONCE in the film, at the end, when “god” visits Tony Wilson, informing him that he “should have signed” The Smiths.
Apart from that, it just felt incohesive. One could argue that when you’re doing a movie about a drug-fueled music culture, cohesiveness is what you’d avoid, but when you’re dealing with biopics, it seems more apropos…in my opinion, anyway…be that what it may.
So, why all the fuss?
I don’t know, ask them.