The “listening to” box at the top of the left sidebar is now working in recent versions of browsers (Mozilla, Firefox, and IE6) operating under Windows, but I have no idea what you’re seeing in Linux etc. and I understand the effects are variable in MacOS. A friend sent me screen shots of this page rendered in Camino, Safari, Mozilla and IE for Mac, which are all quite different [thanks, abby.].

Essentially, what is going on here is that a small plug-in to iTunes under Windows creates an XML file with a listing of the last ten tunes iTunes has played; this is updated and FTP’ed to my server every time the song changes. An XSLT stylesheet attached to the XML file renders it in HTML, which gets displayed in a small frame on this page. By tweaking the stylesheet, I have gotten Windows browsers to metabolize and display the file properly, but in one or another Mac browser you could be seeing any of the following:

• a good-looking formatted list of artist, song title and album
  
• an unformatted text dump of the data, plus the other data the plug-in is writing on each song that I opted not to display, such as year, timing, bitrate etc.
  
• a text dump of the XML file, tags included
  
• a null display

Have I forgotten any? Does anyone have a clue how to make this work across all platforms and browsers? (keeping in mind that, on my web host, I cannot use any tools like PHP to extract the data from the XML file…. As an aside, when I have the time, I want to figure out how to massage the XSLT transform to prevent the display of the empty parentheses ‘()’ in entries that do not have an album name.

I’m justifying this rigamarole because I am enjoying the challenge of this non-programmer’s little foray into XML, but maybe this whole endeavor is frivolous and you need to learn about my musical tastes about as much as you need a hole in the head. But, if this display is not working in your browser and you are for some reason really desperate to see what I am listening to, clicking on the word “listening” ‘s hyperlink takes you to the same information derived in an entirely different manner and displayed in my page on Autoscrobbler, a neat free open-source system that rices and dices my listening data in useful ways and has the added benefit of compiling listening data across all its users (from iTunes, Winamp, and sundry other music clients). (If you happen to have an Autoscrobbler page set up for yourself, drop me a note pointing to it if you’d care to, I would love to see what you are listening to. I feel a little hesitant about publicizing this, however, because the system seems overloaded and slow to crunch my data. In fact, they have temporarily closed to new sign-ups while they figure out how to cope with the volume they are experiencing.)

This is one of that genre of application that I am sure you have encountered through the years which, among other things, let you easily — without having to do any ratings — find out what else others who share some of your tastes are listening to, the idea being of course that you might discover on that basis other artists who would appeal to you but with whom you were not acquainted. However, I have to admit that, so far, this has not resulted in any earthshattering surprises for me, and I prefer to discover new artists serendipitously than deliberately, to jump grooves rather than remain in the same one…