I followed the Virtual Venus tutorial to the letter. I have all the plug ins and modules installed and the overlib script. My category is being pinged properly but the list isn't showing up in my sidebar. Right now I have a list using
and that works but there is no formatting or anything. If you look at my page, the include incoming.php call is between the Listening list and the Reading list on the left under Currents. Nothing shows there but a blank space and that's how it was before I used the above code. Please help. My incoming.php index template and regex module templates are copied and pasted from the tutorial.

real quick before I head to bed....

I see this on your sidebar in the source:

So something is being generated, unless you uploaded that manually. For there to be formatting and albums on hover, you'll want to check out the code in the tutorial under "Create a New Index Template named Incoming with an output file of incoming.php."

Now, if you did upload that manually... then maybe log into your blog and go to the category screen, and view the category pings for nowplaying. Make sure that they are recent, that will confirm whether or not winamp is sending them.

Kristine

The list being generated is from the tags:



and not from the incoming php file. I do have the Incoming template and the incoming.php. I do have the incoming.php and Incoming template added. My category is pinging correctly. So, in a nutshell, I have all the necessary plug ins and templates. Winamp is pinging my blog but the incoming.php doesn't seem to be generating anything.

In the whole incoming.php page, NOTHING is showing up?


If nothing else, it should be showing the MTPingExcerpt section with a div above it and the date below it. You might check to see if any of your songs have artist and album tags filled in.

I'll try to get back to you later, but I'll be out celebrating the fourth w/my family

Kristine

I'm clearly still having the problem I emailed you about. This is all I see in the textarea box for incoming.php:


Here's what the regex modules look like:

1.
2.

Nope. It's coming out blank.

*Bump?

On the tutorial, all you can see is what you pasted? Or in your template inside of MT?

Today I changed all of the text areas on the Virtual Venus tutorial to have the html versions of the < and > - maybe see if that helps? Girlie had said she was getting an error on the page in IE5.5, so that's what prompted it.

Here's the incoming.php template in case you still are having issues getting it from the tutorial:



Let me know if that helps!
Kristine

Hmm.. no, it didn't help. I'm still not getting anything and I have the incoming.php file done right. I have the include call done right but I'm wondering if it's not a problem with the overlib script. I don't know. I'm lost. If you want, I'd be more than happy to give you blog access.

Yep, Kristine - that took care of the Javascript error!

Girlie - woo! That's good, I'm glad that did it


Did you check your regex module to see if you had less of the code than I originally posted? This is what *should* be in the module, rather than the shorter code you posted in your #1 example.



Are you sure that the songs you are playing have the ID3 info in them? When you go into the category pings for your "nowplaying" category, can you see the info in the titles? For my latest ping (on the category trackback popup), I see "Beth Orton - Beth Orton - Beautiful Way" -- the Artist is Beth Orton, and the CD is called Beth Orton, and the song is Beautiful Way.

Oh, and if it was a problem with the overlib script, you'd be getting script errors on your page, but there's actually nothing appearing on your page, so it can't just be that.

Kristine

Yes, the song info is showing up allright in the pings list.

I was ready to toss MT out but I got it working .... now for my question... I followed everything listed at Virtual Venus: Winamp Hoverable Playlist tutorial. I can see the incoming pings... and the played songs on the index of my blog.... I get an error when trying to make the "in" template it says:



I'm not sure about this part:


I'm not sure if that part goes into the "in" template? Or....? That's where I get a lil confused. Someone? Anyone?

I just deleted the "in" template & deleted the inclusion tag from my blog index until I figure it out.

er anyone?

You need to put that code in a Template Module, and call it "regex".

a random one? or a specific one?

You create a new Template Module on the List Templates screen - scroll down to the bottom and look for the link that says "create new module".

Woo! So far so... erm good. I have all that done, the pings are going in... my blog index is showing the name of the songs, except the link isn't really a link.

It's this

http://blank/

not this

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/******/snoin-20?dev-t=DCX89692KX8XL

I have the both javascripts in there and the div... wait maybe I should embed the overlib.js into the body of blog, eh?

I'm not sure what to do now.

nope, that didn't work.

MsBHavin:

When I view the source on your site, I see that you have a second set of html, head, and meta tags in the page. That could be causing a problem. And then the required scripts for overlib are AFTER the code to display them... I'm guessing that will be a problem.

Also, you have an unclosed script tag:


should be



The combination of these issues could be making it not work. Also, you might want to make sure that your music files have info in the ID3 tags.

Kristine

I'm almost ready to call it quits... you'll never guess what...



so I checked the installed perl modules through my cpanel... and no XML::Simple. So now I'm asking my host if they can install it.

okay they've installed it.... w00t!!



now this is what i have pasted into the "incoming.php" template




is there anything i'm supposed to change?

Double check in this section - I'm not sure if the board ate the ? when you posted or if it really is missing:

I think you want to use this:


Kristine

KRISTINE!!! I LURV YOU!!! thank you so much!!! now i gotta figure out why my overlib isn't working...

something about along the lines...



looking at my source did I move the overlib to the right place?

http://aliehs.com/blog/in.php there's the "incoming template" but on the actual blog index... it shows the played list 2 twice. strange?

I fixed the "doubling" display... but I'm having trouble with the actual amazon picture.

When hovering over the artist/title display the link in the status bar actually works -

and the title tag works as well...



it's the amazon image that's not working? any tips?

Before I start, thanks to MsBHaven for linking me to this thread. I didn't notice it was here.

Okay I used to have that parse error that MSBHaven had but I fixed it by putting that needed "?" in the incoming.php file.

But now all I see is the message "updated 08/08/03 07:51 PM"

When I check the Trackback pings for the category I created, the address is



Help? :(

Btw, my site is located at http://www.ikeafied.com

*bump*

It feels like I'm really close, but I've got the same issue: Trackback Pings for Incoming list em all nice n pretty, but the URL's are all http://blank and the incoming.php file is empty except for last updated date.

Mp3's need the ID3v1 or ID3v2 data filled in? For the ones I'm testing I have both and neither displays.

MsBehaven, I just compared all of my codes to what I see in your source, and I can't find anything that seems off. Is it possible that you changed something in the overlib.js script??? I did some searches on the yahoo groups list for overlib, and the only other suggestion to questions like the error you are getting is to confirm that the div tag with visibility and zindex settings is inside the body tag, and yours is.

You might try downloading a fresh copy of OverLib and uploading it and see if that helps. Doing some of the basic examples that are on the overlib docs will ensure that the script is working... its possible that one of your other scripts is conflicting with it.

Oh, and I fixed the extra spaces in the REVISED head code on the tutorial -- you could try pasting that into your template and see if it makes a differrence.


palabok,
I'm glad you got the parse error figured out - I think that in my last edit, I accidnetly took the ? out, but I fixed it now.

Do you have a test page on your site that I could view? I don't see it on your sidebar at ikeafied (great design, btw!!!)

My URLs for the pings also say http://blank. The "recent pings" for my lovesongs blog looks like this:


The actual information is in the title, not the URL, so its okay that it says http://blank.

To check and see what data is really coming through, you could create a new template with this:


That will show you all of the details of the pings, and it will confirm that the info is going from Winamp to your blog.

Palabok and nugs - are you sure PHP is working on the server for the pages you are viewing? Are you sure that the plugins are all installed?

Hope these ideas help!!!!!!!!

Kristine

Hi Kristine! Thanks for your help! I ran the tutorial again and I was able to get further this time. My incoming.php file is embedded in the sidebar of http://www.ikeafied.com/index_winamp.php

The incoming.php file itself is located here: http://www.ikeafied.com/winamp/incoming.php

When you go directly to the second link and hover over the song names, you get these errors:



and



It's expecting some variable that isn't defined yet, weird.

Also if you go to http://www.ikeafied.com/index_winamp.php you don't get those errors, but the songnames link to my main page. Sometimes i think the box might be appearing because my page seems to scroll to the right when I hover over a song name, but no box appears.

I've been trying to get this to work also, with little success. At first WinAmp was indeed pinging MT, but it was showing up only as http://blank on the main page, the categories page, and the page with the list of trackback pings. Also, only one ping would show up at a time: if I erased it and played a new song, I'd get another http://blank ping, but that was it.

Somewhere along the line something must have almost gotten through, because my incoming.php file (dated several days ago) does have a single href tag in it with the info for overlib. However, there's nothing between the opening and closing tags, so nothing except the date updated shows up on the page.

I experimented unsuccessfully with the trackback URL, but now that I've changed it back no pings are showing up at all. I'm not getting any error messages, and oddly enough, WinAmp is successfully submitting URLs to a CGI script I cobbled together to display one current song on the same server. Could someone ping me with their WinAmp to help me pinpoint the cause?

http://www.retrofit.net/cgi-bin/contentman...t/mt-tb.cgi/106

Any ideas would be appreciated. Thanks,

Michelle

Grrrrr.... Okay we're making progress, but it's beginning to get annoying...

I downloaded the new version of the dosomething.dll thinking maybe that had something to do with it. Nada.

I went through the tutorial again creating a new category and what not, then bingo!! We finally have songs named in http://www.nuglops.com/list.php

The really weird thing that's bugging the crap out of me is that every single entry has only 3 words in it.

A song by the Rolling Stones is listed as "The Rolling Stones" Weeee... that tells everyone a lot now doesn't it? I don't see anyway to change this either, if I list name and title in the ID3 tag's 'title' it still only lists 3 words.

Heeealp?

Palabok -
I'm not getting Javascript error messages from your index_winamp template, only from the Incoming page... which is because the overlib.js file is only included in the index page... so on the incoming page, it doesn't know what to do.

It looks like the MTAmazon plugin is NOT working - if you view the source on your page, you can see an ending </MTAmazon> in the source. So maybe verify that it is installed in the correct places? So since this isn't working, its not giving you the link to purchase the album, or the picture or the title...

Solioquy, could we have a link to a test page on your site? It might help us know what's going on.

Nugs -
The 3 words thing is probably because of your Excerpt setting... In your Weblog Config under Preferences, look for the Number of words in excerpt: If it says 3, try changing it to a higher number and see if that changes things. (more details on the wiki about this setting.)

Another good test to see if your songs are really sending more than 3 words would be to use the snippit of code at the bottom of my last post (Aug 9 2003, 08:36 PM) and see if the full info is being displayed with the PingsBlogName tag.


Kristine

My incoming page is:
http://www.retrofit.net/nowplaying/incoming.php

My test page, with the plain ping data, is at:
http://www.retrofit.net/nowplaying/test.php

(Please note that I don't have overlib in that directory, so the hovering part won't work there.)

Since nugs had some success after creating a new category, I decided to try that, again with no luck. (I'm beginning to grasp at straws here! ) So the new URL to ping that category, if someone with a working installation has the time, is:
http://www.retrofit.net/cgi-bin/contentman...t/mt-tb.cgi/110

Thanks for trying to help,

Michelle

No such luck, Number of words in excerpt is set to 40 (I don't remember changing that, so I'm guessing that's a default variable?)

As a test to see if I could figure out what was going on with the dosomething plugin I told it to send the data to a local machine on my network. I then used a packet sniffer to see that only three words are coming across as PingsBlogName variable. I've got a support question up with Winamp as well, but I don't think that's the problem.

Anyone know of a better dosomething type plugin? I'm just hoping to continue trouble shooting this thing.

For now I've abandoned the Amazon/overlib stuff, I just want it to display the name of the artist and the name of the song first, they I'll worry about the rest.

To this point I've tried changing all the ID3 tags in my current playlist to have underscores or hyphens in place of spaces, added the artist to the title entry in the ID3 tag, set ID3v1 and ID3v2 tags for each. None of this seems to matter though so frankly I'm confused.

Just FYI the code I'm using is:

And the dosomething URL I'm posting is

(btw, is it obvious that I'm a tech support geek?)

Jeff

Thanks for the suggestion Kristine!

There was something wrong with my mtamazon plugins. I fixed the problem and as you can see from this test page, it loads up fine.

I thought that would be the end of my problem but when I try to implement the list on my actual site, it messes up completely, as you can see from here. I place the list within other div tags and it messes it up completely as you can see the floating amazon window all the way to the left. I tried positioning it and it didn't help too much so I might just play around with it more. I didn't realize how much work it would be just to implement this thing.

*bump*

Help! I've gone through all the support forums and everything else, and I'm also getting a blank incoming.php (aside from the date).

Interestingly, when I remove the call to the regex module include, I at least get a listing of the songs played, although there's no links or formatting. Which is annoying.

Is there something I'm missing? Should I replace the text var="PingBlogName" with a variable depending on my blog name? In which case is it my blog name, my blog ID, or something else entirely?

Help!

Andrew
www.badlydubbedboy.co.uk

I see you bumped this

My internet has been down 3 days of this week, so I'm a bit behind. I think Comcast in Washington state has just had too many problems with the Blast bug, so they couldn't keep service up. Ugh!!!

So as soon as I get caught up, I'll try to be back and answer. As long as I have internet still later/tomorrow. LOL!!

Woohoo! I finally fixed it... I don't remember if it was mentioned but I see that it was fixed on the tutorial page... but I had forgot to add in the id="" part to...



...to the div tags.

Thanks for all the help.... hey maybe this thread should be linked to from the tutorial, eh?

Another problem I had... you can't have parenthesis in your ID3 tags... like Delerium (ft. Aude) it either has to be Delerium and Aude or just Delerium. It also seems I was having a problem with the ID3v2 tags... you can't use them. You can only use ID3v1 tags.... I dunno if anyone else has had this problem... that's what I figured out on my own.

I'm running Winamp 2.8.

Palabok...

it looks like your CSS definition for p, ol, li, blockquote, table, tr, td is making the overlib popup have no background color and extra margins. You might divide that up into 2 sections and see if it would work:


When I switch that with my stylesheet bookmarklet, it looks like it works better.

---

Jeff...

Did you try a template with this in it:

That might show you if there's other data in one of the other fields that is showing up.

I'm gonna look more into this, and see if I can come up with more info for your problems.

---

Michelle...

I used winamp to send you a ping with a Michelle Branch song, and it didn't update either of your test pages. Even though dosomething said it submitted a ping, I don't have any way from here to know if it really went through.

---

Andrew...

When you use the code as written, and nothing shows up, can you do "view source" and see if anything is showing up there? Its possible that it will show you a plugin tag that isn't working or something else that would give us a clue as to why its not doing what it should.

---

Sheila...

(hey, I just noticed from your site that your birthday is the day before mine!! )

Hmmm, I hadn't noticed problems with parantheses in my song names... it seems like I have a few that do have them, but I can't put my finger on what directory they are in to test. You could try modifying the Regex template so that this part:

is encoded for javascript like this:


---

Okay, did I get everybody? Phew!

Kristine

Hello Kristine - thanks very much for agreeing to help!

When I use the code as written, it now goes to http://andrew.ulimit.org/incoming2.php - which, as you can see, reports nothing but the date/time of last update. The .php with the "lobotomized" code is at http://andrew.ulimit.org/incoming.php which reports it faithfully, but with hardly any tags.

The lobotomized code I used is:


I'm running Winamp 2.9, and my tags use ID3v1 and ID3v2... can you help please?

Kristine,

Nope, MT didn't receive your ping... I then tried pinging that category from an installation of MT I have on a different server, and it went through just fine. (I was actually hoping for some kind of error, so that we could finally get down to the bottom of this!) Any ideas? Thanks...

Michelle

P.S. Thanks for putting up with us, too!

Ok, after some problems I kinda have this installed, but for some reason the ping doesn't send the album information for the Songs.
You can see my test.php here
And this is the dosomething url I use:


Anyone know what's going on there?

*bumping to see if anyone can help*

LilStar, is it possible that your music files dont' have the album identified in the ID3 tags? That's kinda what it looks like in your test file.

Kristine

They have their albums defined, yes.

Hmmm, I just looked through dosomething's documentation to see if there was something I was missing, and I can't think of anything. You might double check that the album is filled in on the id3v1 section; it sounds like it originally only used id3v1 properties, not id3v2, but without doing some testing, I'm not sure which the current version is using.

Your ping URL looks exactly right, I don't see a reason why it wouldn't be working.

Kristine

LilStar78
I had a similar problem where the album title wouldn't get sent and therefore the titles wouldn't be found in amazon. Try checking your dosomething plugin and check "Enable ID3 Info Gathering", set a directory for your temp dir, and enter a temp file name (temp.html). Then restart winamp. See if your test.php page now has the album info.