Brett Terpstrasongza - Brett Terpstra

Updated: Songza Lucky Link Service

Brett — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 03:25:25 +0000

Songza.fm has moved to Songza.org, so I’ve rewritten the old Songza Lucky Link Service for Snow Leopard to match. This new version of the service runs without dependencies, so it should work for any Snow Leopard setup right out of the box. It’s a bit silly, but what it does is take your selected text and run it as a query on Songza.org, parse for the first result (if there are any), shorten that link and insert it after your selected text. A fast, easy way to punctuate your obscure music references in emails and on the web. Have fun, and join me in hoping for the Songza API to blossom into something we can really sink our scripts into!

To install, just download the file below, unzip it (double click), and move it into [your username]/Library/Services. To use it, select text in any Cocoa app (Safari, Mail, and most Mac apps) and look under the application menu in the menubar for the Services submenu. Trigger it from there, or just right click on your selected text and you should get the same services menu as a contextual menu item. If you’re feeling clever, go into the Keyboard preferences pane, choose Keyboard Shortcuts -> Services and double click the blank space to the right of the service to assign a hotkey. As long as that hotkey isn’t already assigned by the application your using, you can trigger the service with it any time you have text selected.

Download

Songza Lucky Link Service — A Snow Leopard Service to generate a shortened url to the first result of a Songza.org search for the selected text. The text will remain, but it will have the result in parenthesis after it. Uses a built-in html parser to scrape the results, at least until Songza provides an API. More Info

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Updated: Songza Lucky Link Service

Songza is back!

Brett — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 15:43:57 +0000

Just a quick note for those who may have missed it: Songza is back at http://songza.org! This is exciting to me personally, as I had been having a lot of fun searching and automatically creating links to Songza pages, mostly just to back up obscure music references when I pushed them on unsuspecting victims. Hooray!

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Songza is back!

Downtime apology and upcoming projects

Brett — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 17:55:59 +0000

I apologize for the recent downtime, which also affected the Clippable bookmarklet’s ability to work. Dreamhost has been pretty awful with downtime lately, and my attempt to switch to a different physical server resulted in a horrible mess for myself and several clients. I have to say that Dreamhost support was extremely helpful in repairing the situation… their support is the main reason I’ve stuck with them through the 4 hours of downtime I’d had up to that point. I’m not sure I’ll be able to swallow much more, but we’ll see if things run as smoothly as they’ve promised from here on out.

In other news, I have a new version of the Songza service–one that doesn’t require any additional libraries–which I’ll post soon. A couple of other little projects are in the works, including a service that interprets natural language dates for various purposes. I’m in Atlanta for a week, then I’ll be in San Francisco covering Macworld for TUAW, so it may be a bit, but I’ll be back!

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Downtime apology and upcoming projects

Songza Lucky Link Service

Brett — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 23:41:42 +0000

This is a quick and dirty Snow Leopard Service that scrapes Songza.fm to find a song related to your selected text in most applications. It replaces the selected text with an is.gd shortened link and the name of the first song it found (just to be sure you’re on the same page… literally). The code is also available as a TextMate command for those interested. Update: TextMate command with link selection popup.

The service (and TextMate command) require the Hpricot gem for ruby. In most cases, this should be installable from the command line with sudo gem install hpricot. If you see errors, you may need to update some Ruby components. Once that’s set, just install the workflow in ~/Library/Services and it should immediately start showing up in your services menu. Add a shortcut for it in Preferences -> Keyboard -> Shortcuts -> Services. Next time you’re tweeting or writing an email about a song, why not send a Songza link to back up your point?

Download the service.

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Songza Lucky Link Service