Automated Lastfm Image Generator

• Version: 0.1
• Date: February 20th 2011
• Github Repository: https://github.com/nils-werner/lastfm-albums

This is a tool providing a service to generate and host album badges from Last.fm stats. It provides basic yet effective caching strategies that enables it to serve several hundreds of gigabytes per month from a shared host.

Overview

This tool is written using PHP5 only. The minimum requirements to run it are

• Apache 2.2
• mod_rewrite Module
• PHP5

Installation

1. Copy the files in place
2. Create a copy of defines.dist.php and name it defines.php
3. Fill the missing values in defines.php with your API key, your API secret and the cleanup key
4. Create the following folders and set the permissions to allow PHP to write there
   • images/overall
   • images/weekly
   • images/3month
   • images/6month
   • images/12month
5. To enable logging you also need to create the file log.txt

Maintenance

Before running this service you absolutely need to make sure you created the folders listed above. Without them only a small number of users will suffice to crash your server as no caching can take place!

You need to run cleanup.php at least once a week (it's recommended to run it on a daily basis) to refresh the image cache. The key you've provided in defines.php needs to be appended to the URL using the key parameter: cleanup.php?key=yourcleanupkey

If you've enabled logging you need to check and flush log.txt regularly. Depending on the settings you're using and the number of users this file can grow very quickly and deteriorate performance dramatically.

Usage

The users are able to customize their images to a certain degree. They're able to select from the following chart types:

• default (overall charts)
• 12month (last 12 months)
• 6month (last 6 months)
• 3month (last 3 months)
• weekly (weekly chart)

Also, the can set the number of colums or rows being generated. They're denoted like this:

• COLUMSxROWS

The maximum number of images is limited to 30.

Examples

• http://yoursite.com/phoque.jpeg (10x2 overall chart)
• http://yoursite.com/weekly/phoque.jpeg (10x2 weekly chart)
• http://yoursite.com/weekly/3x3/phoque.jpeg (3x3 weekly chart)

The generated images look similar to this: