The Right Stuff

Time to release a major update for my Now Playing Plugin for Windows Live Writer. Over the last weeks some minor bugs surfaced, these have been fixed with the current release.

The %if syntax

One thing that has been bugging me was that metadata placeholders were included into the resulting markup regardless of the actual content. Imagine you have the Amazon plugin enabled and the %AmazonAlbumUrl% placeholder somewhere in your markup template:

<a href="%AmazonAlbumUrl%">%Album%</a>

Later, while you're writing a new blog post you're listening to a mixtape that's not listed on Amazon. Because the Amazon plugin cannot find information about your mixtape, Now Playing will leave the placeholder as-is, resulting in bad markup taking your visitors into HTTP Hell™ filled with lots of peculiar errors messages (I've already seen this happening).

<a href="%AmazonAlbumUrl%">My Mixtape</a>

The new %if statement helps eliminating this shortcoming: Wrap any content that is linked to the availability of a particular placeholder in an %if statement and Now Playing will create perfectly valid markup. The syntax is pretty easy:

%if(%placeholder%<content to insert if the placeholder holds a value>)

The example above, restructured to

%if(%AmazonAlbumUrl%<a href="%AmazonAlbumUrl%">)My Mixtape%if(%AmazonAlbumUrl%</a>)

yields

• My Mixtape
  

  if the Amazon plugin could not find the album's URL or

• <a href="http://www.amazon.com/…">My Mixtape</a>

  if the Amazon plugin was able to obtain a link to the album's page on Amazon.

Of course you can nest if statements to create dynamic templates. I work now with the following template:

<p class="nowPlaying">
    Now Playing [<a title="Find out about Now Playing" href="http://therightstuff.de/Projects/NowPlaying/" rel="previewlink">?</a>]:
    %if(%MusicMapArtistUrl%<a href="%MusicMapArtistUrl%" title="Display relations of %Artist% to other artists">)%Artist%%if(%MusicMapArtistUrl%</a>) &ndash;
    %if(%Album%%if(%AmazonAlbumUrl%<a href="%AmazonAlbumUrl%" title="Display Amazon page of the %Album% album">)%Album%%if(%AmazonAlbumUrl%</a>) &ndash; )
    %Title%
</p>

See the %if(%Album%%if(%AmazonAlbumUrl%… nested if statements in line 4? I use this to get rid of the whole album part if I'm listening to a song from my mixed playlist where the music has no album tag.

Now Playing's markup preview currently handles all placeholders as if they're holding values, so you may have to try a little the get your template working as you wish. In case you're having problems with the syntax, please leave a comment and I'll try to explain. 

Other features, fixed bugs and changes

Other little things I've fixed:

• An important notice about the Windows Media Player Plugin: You need to install the Blogging Plug-In for WMP in order to query the track information. Windows Vista users, please download this plugin which provides the same functionality on Vista (where the Blogging Plug-In refuses to install).
• The Amazon plugins allows you to set the search index (Amazon US, UK, Germany, France, Canada, Japan) you want use.
• Amazon has introduced a new access identifier I wasn't aware of. You can now use your Amazon Access Key ID with Now Playing. The possibility to use an Amazon Subscription ID is provided for backward compatibility.
• The iTunes plugin allows you to set if you want to start the iTunes application if it's not running. (iTunes has always been launched before.)
• Fixed a minor plugin loading bug and added detailed error messages.
• Code cleanup.

Download

Now Playing [?]: Wir sind Helden – Von hier an blind – Wütend genug