At home, I browsed a bit the internet for that song and stumbled upon a version of the song that might be even better than the original. Check out JoeySuki’s remix:

Very nice track!

The site doesn’t contain any i18n, neither I used any PHP framework or other toolkits to built it up. It’s really just some stupid likes of PHP code bound together with the Facebook SDK. Now that’s what I’d call RAD!

It was pretty interesting for me to see, how little effort it takes to “socialize” a site, especially when it’s built from ground up with Facebook-operability in mind.

Yesterday, I additionally implemented an automatic Twitter status update. I’ve registered @likemichde on Twitter, created an Twitter Application, generated access tokens for it and implemented automatic twitter publishing within several lines of code, thanks to Abraham Williams’ twitteroauth for PHP.

It’s very neat how modern media allows us to spread information all over the planet, even with only little knowledge of technology. And if you put in the effort to dig deeper, you use these new technologies to reach even more people and provide connectivity to all kind of different sites.

For example, my photography site mariusmm.com is using Yahoo!’s YQL to query my flickr account for the latest photos and randomly pic a handful of them for displaying as a slideshow. And I’ve implemented everything in 100% JavaScript, there’s no single line PHP or any other server-side language.

First of all: Hell, yeah! iTunes Cloud finally removed the pain and anger brought by Apple’s policy of having an iPod Touch/iPhone only linked with one iTunes Library. For me, it has always been a pain to synchronize my music in a smooth way all over my devices (iMac, MacBook, iPhone), especially when it came to MP3s. The fact that iTunes didn’t consider MP3s when using “transfer purchases” took any chance (except of using “Home Sharing”) to get MP3s synchronized all over. With iTunes content I permanently had to go that way: Buy them on my iPhone, connect the phone to my iMac when I was at home, “transfer purchases”, reconnect the iPhone to my MacBook when I was at work, “transfer purchases”, all done. But with MP3s this didn’t work.

Now thanks to iTunes Match and iTunes Cloud, MP3s are being matched to actual iTunes Store content and, if nothing could be found, the MP3s are being uploaded to the cloud, from where they can be streamed/downloaded to all registered devices. Sounds awesome, huh?

Well, actually, it really is awesome. There are some downsides, for example the *very* slow iTunes Match servers for uploading data. I’m not sure if that’s only because of the instant heavy load that recently hit the servers or if Apple just didn’t spend enough money for the server’s to be the dog’s balls. Anyhow, besides of that everything runs just fine so far. Streaming/downloading works with good speed (no endless seconds of buffering, nor interrupts while playing), artwork yet seems to be a little problem since here it doesn’t seem to get synchronized instantly all over my devices and the iTunes Match recognition works okay (only have/had to upload around 1k songs of nearly 5k).

The only thing that really bothers me is the fact that my iPhone actually gets flooded with music and the only way I found to remove recently “streamed” (or “streamed and automatically downloaded) music is by scrolling through my list with nearly 5k rows and swipe-to-remove each song I’d like not to have on my iPhone anymore, so I can use the 16GB for more than just audio.

It would be really nice if someone could point me a better solution to fix that issue or, if there is none, if Apple could please implement a feature that allows me to “clear the least played songs”.

Oh well.

iTunes Match

Hello Little Printer, available 2012