Last.fm – the Blog

Are you tired of missing all the prosaic shouts people are leaving in your shoutbox? A couple of weeks ago, our French frontman definitely was. He didn’t hesitate but wrote a Dashboard widget to keep track of them. It gives Mac users a nice way of checking their shouts.

In order to do so, he had to parse the entire page and extract the precious shouts from a giant mess of markup. That wasn’t so nice. And it only worked for Mac users, too. No problem for me, but some Vista-fanboys would go bonkers.

So, from this day on, you may have RSS feeds for every shoutbox you could possibly encounter. All you have to do is go to this page and follow the simple instructions. So basically, just enter this URL: http://tools.microformatic.com/transcode/atom/ hatom/http://www.last.fm/user/USERNAME/shoutbox (You need to remove the space I inserted to make it wrap.)

The URL you have to enter is the URL of the page containing the shoutbox. (Note: for user pages it’s better to use www.last.fm/user/USERNAME/shoutbox as that page is way smaller than your regular user page.)

For those interested in the nitty-gritty details: The shoutboxes have been marked up in a microformat called hAtom. That way, the markup can be very easily parsed and converted to atom or RSS, making your feed reader happy.