Mevio Developer News

I’ve added a technorati link to this weblog’s sidebar to make it easy to see who is linking here. I’ll be checking it regularly so if you want to comment via your weblog I’ll see it.

Chris Rockwell and I reviewed a dev version of our podplay feeds today and had a great discussion about the right structure for the data. A key insight, one that took me a while to get, is that the podplays themselves are the fundamental items of interest: “C.C. Chapman’s U-Turn Cafe played Josephine by Darren Geffre on Show #7″. We’ll be using that as an organizing principle for our RSS, coming soon.

Yesterday I read up on various namespace extensions and came up with little. XSPF was closest but it was designed for a different use case (listening as opposed to reporting). MusicBrainz tags are intriguing and I think ultimately there will be a place for them, but not yet.

I’m continuing to dig, checking out these directories of RSS namespaces, found with this Google search. Also suggested: MusicBrainz metadata, XSPF (thanks, Lucas!).

The PMN WordPress plugin is underway, though I spent a good chunk of yesterday on other stuff, e.g. interviewing and hacking on the PDN. We’re still looking for feedback on namespaces for reporting podplay. The plugin will be based on whatever we go with, so please do drop a line if you know of any relevant tech. Peace.

Dr. Minz’s music video for The Bears’ “Mr. Bonaparte” is getting heavy rotation at the Grumet household, thanks mainly to my four year-old’s tendency to demand “again!” for things she likes. We found it on the Flash TV podcast, to which we subscribe in iTunes and cue up in FrontRow. At this point we’re mostly using our new iMac as a television, actually. Must podcast about that. But back to the subject of music videos, I’d love to be able to subscribe to a podsafe music video podcast.

We’re about halfway through coding the new plugin for reporting PMN podplay. I’m digging the add_action/do_action callback idiom.

The plugin is basically a single-feed, caching RSS renderer. The renderer understands a handful of custom elements that store structured data about songs and bands. For now we’re using a “pmn” namespace.

This brings me to a question: is there prior art for capturing “song A by band B was played on show C, episode D?”. The last two pieces, show C and episode D, will probably map to the RSS channel and item elements. This is pretty standard for podcasts. What about song and band information?

Oh yes, and referring back to last Friday’s Daily Source Code, we’ll also need to capture an affiliate ID.

If you know of a good fit out there in RSS namespace land, post a comment or send me a message.

Steve Harris: “It’s great to see PodShow getting off to a good start in being open about their services and getting developers involved from the beginning.”  Thanks!

An inaugural podcast. Scott Johnson joins me to talk about what we’re doing here at developer.podshow.com. Check it out!

I’ve got GAIM all set up an am on IM now. Gtalk’s working there too thanks to :07 Seconds’ handy guide to configuring GAIM for GoogleTalk.

Hello Daily Source Code listeners! Come on in, it’s warm inside. Check out the Welcome page. We’re fresh out of the gate here but adding stuff rapidly. Stay tuned :-)