PHP

At time of writing, Spotify doesn’t provide a track’s artwork via its API.

So, I’ve written a simple function to get the image; but please note, not only is it quick and dirty, but it’s horribly inefficient and should be used sparingly – at the very least, make sure you cache the results somewhere!

You can access a public-facing web-page about a particular track using the following URL:

http://open.spotify.com/track/[TRACK-ID]

I haven’t blogged for a while, but I have been writing. I recently wrote an article for PHP Master (part of the Sitepoint family) on geolocation, called Targetted Geolocation with Geonames.

Laravel is the new kid on the block of PHP frameworks, and whilst in its early stages of evolution (the author wrote it, he says, in the early part of 2011) it does promise – and delivers, from what I can tell – an expressive syntax and an elegant (indeed, you might say eloquent) ORM.

I needed the means to add a quote to a website I was working on – a simple task, which could be acheieved by simply adding a text or HTML block. However this can be taken a step further by implementing a simple block type specifically for quotes, with the markup generated for you.

I recently developed a simple module for a project I was working on, which is so generic that it may well be useful to other people or on other projects. I was surprised to find that there was no existing module (that I could find) doing the same thing, so I wrote it myself (I’d actually inherited the project, and the person working on it had tried to achieve the same thing but by hacking part of the Drupal core – which is not a smart idea). The structure and implementation of the module was such that it seemed an ideal example to use as a tutorial in Drupal module development.