Doing some bloggy housekeeping today, so if you should happen to visit and witness things blinking in and out of existence, that’s why.

The most visible change i’ve made so far is the much better implementation of the “hearing” section of the sidebar, which is powered by Brandon Fuller‘s fantastic Now Playing plug-in. The iTunes plug-in, which was a reasonable $10, FTPs your recent plays as a RSS to your website, where you can manipulate just about any information iTunes passes along (number of plays, album, stars, link to your Amazon referred ID, et cetera).

I had been meaning to get album covers up and running, and with only an hour or two of extra work i have it inserted tiny stars and more intelligent play counts. If you buy it and already use a little PHP on your site i’d be happy to help you get it to do what you want it to do.

For a while now i’ve been wanting to include a sidebar RSS feed from an integrated wishlisting website – i.e. one that you’d use for an online Baby Registry if you planned to draw from multiple different stores. Yesterday i found the best implementation of the idea i’ve ever seen, the very smart The Things I Want. After subscribing to the site you create a bookmark(let) in your browser, and whenever you view something you want you just load the bookmark – which guesses the item’s title, price, and image. You can add buy-priority, comments, and tags. So far the only downside is that any RSS feed is of your WHOLE LIST, which is a little cumbersome, but for a relatively new site it already gets a hardy recommendation from this blogger.

Also, some new incoming links! Heart be still. Age Old Songs is a very nifty blog that will find its way onto the sidebar later today. Also, perennial hot favorite from across the country Min Jung Kim apparently still knows i’m alive. Plus, the usual highly appreciated love from good friend Rabi @ Wockerjabby, and the continually nifty Philly-blog collective Philly Futures.

In a world of people reading me via RSS feeds in an integrated reader, or on a site like Livejournal, i often forget that some people (like me) still have good ol’fashioned domain blogs and give good ol’fashioned links to other people they read.

If you’re one of those ol’fashioned folks and i’ve recently missed you link, feel free to let me know, as i’m not the obsessive statistic whore that i was in olden days.