Apr 1, 2009

If you have some friends with a Last.FM account, head over to http://perfectfestival.com, where you can generate the homepage for a fictive music festival where all their favorite bands are playing! Try something like "Hey chx, I'm going to Perfect Festival at the end of June, should I get you some tickets too?"

The idea came up two days ago when I was playing with the Last.FM API and Wordle. The website is still a little rough around the edges, but considering we only spent a couple hours on it I'm pretty happy with the results. Thanks to Troy Shields for jumping on this fun project with me and creating the design.

I'm simply pulling the user's top 50 artists from Last.FM data, sorting them by overall listener count for more credibility (that obscure band that you really like would never be on the main stage, with Coldplay opening for them…). The pictures are also from Last.FM, I decided to use their resized version rather than try to download the files and manipulate them with imagecache.

One common issue is that people listen to bands that don't play concerts anymore. The following three lines of code take care of 90% of the cases:

<?php if ($artist['name'] == 'The Beatles') { continue; } ?>