Sam Soffes

I recently added an albums I've been enjoying this week section to my homepage. It's still a major work in progress. For some reason, tons of people have commented about it on Twitter asking how I made it, so I thought I'd write a quick post about the tech behind it.

The first thing your probably noticed is the sexy vinyl look. I got this from Komodo Media (all of their stuff is awesome, you should check it out). Some simple CSS plus their images and it looks dang sexy.

I'm using the Last.fm API to get my listening history. The call to get your top albums for the week doesn't return the album art for that album, so I have to get all of the albums and then get the art for each one. This whole process is pretty slow (source here) so I shove it in memcached on Heroku using the memcached gem so rendering is fast on my homepage.

I setup a cron to nightly rerun the lastfm:update rake task from above and update the cache with the new data. Pretty simple.

Anyway, I was proud. Nothing complex, just cool. Feel free to rip off anything I wrote. It's all on GitHub.