code in the ruins

I read a lot of record reviews over at Pitchfork, and when something sounds good, I usually jump over to Last.fm to listen to it, or to remind myself to check it out again later. For a long time, I've been meaning to write up a Greasemonkey script for Firefox to generate the Last.fm link for me, so I don't have to type it in every time. You know, because that's so hard.

Anyway, I'm working on an, ahem, not tremendously exciting project at work, so I finally got around to it. I went ahead and made it extensible for other links besides Last.fm, so it can do links to iLike and Wikipedia, too; others are easy to add if you're reasonably familiar with Javascript. The script adds the links right next to the album artwork, right below the links to Emusic, digg, del.icio.us, and so on.

I posted it on userscripts.org. I currently have a hundred or so back reviews to read, so hopefully I'll have saved net keystrokes by the time I catch up.

Update: added links to IsoHunt, Mininova, and the Pirate Bay, by request.  I can't test right now because I'm on Firefox 3 RC2 and Greasemonkey doesn't work there yet.  But you can get the new version right here for now.  I will update it on userscripts.org as soon as I get it tested.

I wanted to find an RSS feed for Pitchfork's Best New Music section, but I couldn't find one… turns out they don't have any on the whole site. Thankfully, I found someone who took matters into his own hands. He hosts feeds for a couple of different sections of Pitchfork, generated by a Perl script. Awesome… but the Best New Music section isn't in there. I decided to try to modify his work to generate one for this section as well.

So it worked. Here's the Perl script and the RSS feed itself, which contains all of the reviews listed on this page. I'll set up a cron job to generate it every day.

Update: Never mind. Pitchfork has their own RSS feeds now. Fun while it lasted…

• Best New Music
• Features
• Downloads
• Record Reviews
• News
• Today