Inspired by a thread on the WordPress.com support forums, I decided to integrate my last.fm chart into this little blog at the sidebar.
I choosed an existing chart style called “thenorm” by last.fm user 1side0 and edited it so that its design now fits into the “White as Milk” theme I use for my blog. I choosed a smaller font and a different font colour. After creating a text widget with a link to the chart image, I watched the result in Konqueror, and it looked good!
However, when browsing my blog with Mozilla Seamonkey, the chart image was overlapping the main text area. Pretty ugly. This happened because the CSS file of the blog theme defines a fixed width for the sidebar, and usually a chart image containing both artist and track title is too wide to fit in this restriction.
So I edited the chart style again and defined a fixed width of 170px. From what I read in the CSS file, that should work well with the White-as-Milk theme without destroying the whole layout. As there is not that much space now for long track titles or artist names, this style looks best when only showing the artists. When showing both artists and track titles, too many entries are cropped.
I named the chart style “WaM2″, which stands for “White as Music revision 2″. If you are logged in to your last.fm account and want to use that style, you can find the code you have to insert into the text widget here.
4 Comments
November 7, 2006 at 10:09 pm
hey. i liked your theme a lot. i was just wondering if i could include a background. how do you create styles? with css? i really want to create one, just for fun. could you tell me how to do this without using the “chart builder”? please leave a message at my last.fm profile if possible. thank youu!
November 7, 2006 at 10:43 pm
The style was created using the chart builder, which is the only possibilty I know to create a style. It’s possible to include a coloured background or a background image with the last.fm chart builder, of course. I don’t think you can create a chart style without using the chart builder.
January 28, 2007 at 4:42 pm
Do you know where I can find “thenorm” chart? Is it in Basic, Most Recent, Editor’s Picks, etc.?
January 28, 2007 at 8:48 pm
The chart style is directly linked in the blog post above. It’s possible you may find it through the different categories, but as there’s no search it will be hard to find it there.