But I’m pleased with myself, so I’m writing about it. After some effort, I’ve got the ‘Now Playing’ feature back on Black Ink – or rather, replaced it with a ‘Recently Played’ feature. It’s a bit egocentric, thinking that anyone gives a toss what I’ve been listening to, but so’s the whole damn site, and I mostly did it for the technical challenge.

This sounds pretty trivial – after all, there are tools that’ll do it for you if you use WinAmp on the PC, or iTunes on the Mac. But I, of course, am a difficult bastard, and use iTunes on the PC, so instead of being able to get nice little application to do it for me, I’ve had to cobble together a means to take the XML that you can generate with iTunes, parse and sort it, and dump it out. The sorting was the biggest bastard, and still isn’t perfect, as the most recently played is actually at the bottom of the list, but if I want to keep the ‘Recently Played’ function on iTunes useful, and not limited to the last five tracks I’ve played (and I do) I’m going to have to live with it, until I can be arsed to re-write the thing from the ground up.

Which I’d like to, because at the moment, it’s completely custom to the way I want it to display on my site, rather than being generic, but it’ll wait until I have a week or so spare.