Long-time readers might remember that I once had a bit of an obsession with aggregating web feeds on sites that I called “planets”. I wrote Perlanet to make this job easier and I registered the domain theplanetarium.org to host these planets.

The planets I built were of varying levels of usefulness – but of all of them, planet davorg was the vanity project. It was simply a way to aggregate all the web feeds that I produced. There were feeds from various blogs along with things like Flickr, Twitter and CPAN.

One of the things I liked about planets was that they were self-maintaining. Once you’ve configured a planet, it will just keep on running (well, as long as the cron job is running). If the web feeds they are aggregating have new content, the planet will have new content. And many of the feeds that powered planet davorg were still running.

But last weekend I found a couple of problems with it. Firstly, it looked like it was designed by an idiot. Which, to be fair, it was. Web design was never my strong point. But we have Bootstrap now, so there’s no excuse for web sites to look that bad. So that’s how I spent the first hour or so – slapping a bit of Bootstrap paint onto the site. I think it now looks acceptable.

The second problem was that not all of the feeds were still running some of them (Delicious, for example) were just dead. I can’t remember the last time I posted anything to Delicious – can you? So I spent some time tweaking and fixing the feeds (replacing CPAN with MetaCPAN, for example). Most of this was easy.

However, one feed was a problem. My Last.fm feed was dead. For over ten years I’ve been “scrobbling” ever song I’ve listened to and one of the feeds I was aggregating was that list. According to this page on their web site, my feed is supposed to be at http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/davorg/recenttracks.rss – and that was the URL in my Perlanet configuration. But it doesn’t work. It returns a 404 error.

I tried to contact someone at Last.fm to find out what was going on, but I haven’t got any kind of response. It looks like they’ve been running on a skeleton staff since CBS took them over and they don’t seem to have the time to support their users (not, I suspect, a recipe for long-term success!)

But there was one possibility. You can get the same data through their API. And some quick experimentation, revealed that their API hasn’t been turned off.

And CPAN has Net::LastFM which will make the API calls for me. Ok, so it hasn’t been updated since 2009, but it still works (I’ve just noticed that there’s also Net::LastFMAPI which is a little more recent).

So it just took a small amount of work to write a little program which grabs uses the Last.fm API to get some JSON that contains the information that I want and convert it to an Atom feed. In case this is useful to anyone else, I’ve put the code on Github. Please let me know if you do anything interesting with it.

And if anyone from Last.fm reads this. Please either turn the web feeds back on or remove the documentation that still claims they exist.

Also published on Medium.