It’s no secret that I am deeply entrenched in the back-end world. I can optimize the hell out of some queries, and write some pretty complex php, but when it comes to html, css and javascript, I am a barbarian. In fact, I stopped learning about html in the 90’s, before css and back when javascript was pretty useless. I just don’t care for working on visual stuff, especially if it’s going to be finicky and inconsistent on different platforms.
Anyway, a longstanding complaint I’ve had when using Tinysong is that I can’t listen to a song before I share it. How do I make sure it’s the song I’m thinking of? Sure, I could copy the URL and paste it in the location bar and load up lite, but by then my other song options are gone, not to mention that I’m lazy.
I finally decided to take a stab at adding playback to Tinysong myself, and I’m happy to report that everything seems to be working quite well. I can’t take credit for the whole thing, or even most of it. Katy wrote the streaming code, and Chanel made some beautiful javascript wrappers for the whole thing, both for other projects. I simply took what they did and wrote the css and javascript to glue it to Tinysong. I’m happy to report that it seems to be working quite well, and I hope I’m not the only one who appreciates this enhancement. Give it a try and let me know what you think.