Listening/hackery

Listening: (grabbit the rabbit) (nibbling on) (Mike Relm’s mixes).

Grabb.it is a major rewrite of that site. It includes a lot of stellar XSPF work, and Chris Anderson, one of the grabb.it makers, posted this announcement to the XSPF list:

===
Grabb.it
  An online music player that will create playlists for any web page
that links to music files. You can remember, download, and share the
songs you find.
===

Thanks!

And an informal api announcement:

Grabb.it can now directly output xspf for any web page that links to
mp3s (...I know I wish 95% of browsers could play ogg... and there's
no reason we won't support ogg in the future.)

The API call is designed to be compatible with the standard xspf flash
player (it has not query params, so it can be passed into the
playlist_url param to the xspf_player.swf), and it is super simple to
use.

http://grabb.it/api/grab.xspf/my.domain.com/path/to/page.html will
output an xspf file of http://my.domain.com/path/to/page.html

We can also generate rss and jspf.

So for those of you that want to convert xspf to jspf, you can do it
with a line like this

http://grabb.it/api/grab.jspf/mfdz.com/jchris.xspf

or for rss, it is like this

http://grabb.it/api/grab.rss/mfdz.com/jchris.xspf

One caveat is that this API uses the internal grabb.it processing, so
the mp3 links returned are all @ grabb.it and redirect to the original
sources - this is so we can add content resolver features to provide
redundancy among urls. The other idiosyncracy is that if you are
requesting that Grabb.it parse a page it hasn't seen before the first
response will not be xspf. Once the page is parsed, it will be useful.
So if you are using the API to embed a flash player on your blog, it
won't work right away, but once the pump has been primed it should be
reliable.

The "official" announcement is here: http://grabbit.tumblr.com/post/1777237