azazil.net

For a very long time I’ve been resisting the pressure to create a MySpace profile, especially considering the cluttered flashing pages owned by a large percentage of MySpacers. A month or so back, I decided that it wouldn’t hurt to create a simple page to help funnel traffic to my blog. I registered, and then filled in each of the fields in the profile editor, but it’s hard to love the vanilla page that drops out of that process. I left it for a while, but even my friends were bugging me to pimp the page out, and I knew I’d need to do something a little different to keep myself interested. A hotch-potch of so-called MySpace codes is something I refuse to entertain!

So, for the last couple of days I’ve been busy futzing with my myspace page to try to come up with a clean design, that can act as a sort of portal to my other pages on the interweb. Here are the things I eventually want to address:

1. Blog. I don’t want to maintain a second blog in MySpace when I have a perfectly good hosted blog at azazil.net. My MySpace page should show an exerpt from my latest azazil.net blog post along with a link to the full post.
2. Pictures. I already have a perfectly good flickr account to upload my pictures to. My MySpace page should take readers to my flickr.com pictures.
3. Music. I hate that many MySpace pages start blaring music out of my speakers just because I’m looking at the page. The music player on my myspace page should be silent by default, and ideally will offer a handful of my own compositions from Ill Will, D-FEX, Alien Fuck Beast and Hemlock (bands I’ve been in over the years).
4. Friends. MySpace social networking can’t function without the friends functionality. Users will navigate through my page according to the friends network I’ve built up.
5. MySpace links. In order for my page to behave well in the MySpace world, I want to maintain the default interface elements that MySpace users expect to see: the profile details; the message/share/favourite/add/block/group/rank link bar.
6. Commenting. MySpace users seem to talk to each other by commenting on one anothers’ pages, but they also contribute to the messiness of those pages. I want to provide a form for readers to submit their comments to the page, but I think I’ll collect and display the comments on a different page to avoid cluttering my MySpace page proper.

Div Overlays

It’s pretty difficult to make the default MySpace eyesore look half decent without using a lot of cross-referencing the source html, and carefully writing css to restyle everything. It is even more difficult to point the standard interface elements (blog/music/pictures) offsite using just css, but after some googling I found this basic MySpace div overlay code that covers the entire MySpace interface with a div panel that can be filled with whatever code you like! I needed to tweak it a little to cover the default MySpace menubar, being careful not to violate the TOS by covering the advert.

RSS Feed Display

I certainly don’t want to get into having to paste blog excerpts into MySpace manually all the time, so the sensible approach is to look at my blog’s RSS feed, and display part of that inside the myspace overlay. MySpace doesn’t allow javascript, but more googling led me to this flash based RSS feed reader. The colours and fonts didn’t match my design out of the box, but luckily Adobe offer a 30 day trial download, and changing the interface elements was a breeze… even though I’ve never used flash before.

MySpace Music

Eston Bond turned me on to the Open Source XPSF Flash MP3 Player, though his instruction at hyalineskies.com are no longer correct with respect to the latest releases. Hosting a playlist and some mp3s here at azazil.net allowed me to add non-invasive music from Ill Will to my MySpace page.

Friends and Flickr

With a little gimp-fu, I put together some collages of my flickr photos to add some colour to the page, along with an external link to my flickr account, and a carefully copied internal link from my original MySpace profile to my list of MySpace friends.

Internal Linking

I haven’t yet implemented the various internal MySpace interface elements, but I’ll work them into the page over the next few days….

What do you think of the result?