Yesterday saw the release of Last.fm Artists 2.0.  It’s a complete rewrite and finally fixes several major bugs with the cache and handling of the urls.  You can see all the new features on the Last.fm Artists page.

The release of Last.fm Artists didn’t go as smoothly as I hoped.  It turns out there were a lot of things I didn’t test out with the cache on first activation.  I released 7 updates to the plugin within a span of 3 days because of poor testing and bugs, all mainly due to the cache folder.  But I learned a lot from this release. The lessons I’ve learned are invaluable.  I now have a better understanding about releasing and testing your product, how to use a SVNs, and how to quickly find and fix bugs.  I hope to apply these lessons to the release of v1.1 of Last.fm Artists.

I have already started working on v1.1 of Last.fm Artists.  I’m very excited to continue working on this project.  This verison will be object oriented unlike the previous release which was entirely procedual.  It was originally object oriented but I felt it was a waste and made it procedual.  Now with some planning and forethought, object oriented seems to have been the better way to go.  This should make it a lot easier to maintain than v1.0 and will allow me to quickly add features.

Speaking of features, this release will be packed full of features.  Support for recently listen to artists, recently added artists to your library, and loved artists will make the plugin even better.  The plugin will also come with a much better admin interface allowing you to select and make styles of how the image will appear with the added ability to display their names and playcount.  You’ll also be able to upload your own images so if you don’t like the image that is on Last.fm, you’ll be able to choose your own.  If you have any other features you want added, comment either in this post or the Last.fm Artists page.

I hope to get v1.1 out before I start school which means sometime in the next week or so.

This blog is the cumulative of my work the past few months.  I plan on updating this blog with thoughts and my spare time projects.   Hopefully this won’t become like my other blogs I have had in the past where I would ignore it and stop posting.

A little about myself: my name is Gary and I’m living on the east coast of the United States. I’m a technology enthusiast who likes programming, drawing, math, and creating stories. I’m knowledgable in XHTML, CSS, PHP, and Ruby and currently learning Python.  I’m going to take a computer science class at school where I hope to learn Java as well.

The name finalstar comes from quite some time ago when I had dreams of starting a video game company and in those dreams, the company was called Final Star.  It evolved over the years to just represent what ever I was working on at the time.  I registered the domain finalstar.net in 2005 and it hosted these odd projects I’ve been working on.  I also own finalstar.org but I’m not sure what to do with it yet.

Currently, I’m working on Last.fm Artists, a plugin I made that displays images of a user’s top listened to artists.  It basically Last.Fm Records but for artist instead of albums.  You can check it out more at it’s project page.