Zack Mahdavi’s Blog

Congratulations Kent for being elected Coop Board of Directors! Your hard work paid off!

This week has been crazy, even for such a short week. I’ve had many sleepless nights cause of stupid computer science! (PS, if you’re a potential turing scholar looking at my site after coming to the spring reception, please ignore the “stupid” comment). Uggh… why does CS have to be so demanding? I’m always staying up late trying to finish these programs where you feel like fixing one big only brings 100 more. It’s like those monkey heads at the arcade… you try to hammer one of them only so that 10 more pop up. What a nuisance, I tell you! Uggh..

Friday night, I was redesigning my super-personal web site, MacZack.com. I did add a really cool feature just for kicks. It’s my mp3 collection, updated as fast as my mac can think! And no, I’m not kidding! I’ve been wanting to learn XML, which is yet another web developing language, so I decided to learn it by creating this dynamic mp3 collection list. Here’s how it works.

The Macintosh has this program called iTunes (which is an AWESOME program, btw) that catalogs your entire music collection and makes it very simple to access your music. Now it stores a catalog of this music in an XML file, and it automatically updates this file library every single time you add a song into the database. So what did I do? That’s easy. I made use of YET ANOTHER web language called PHP to open up this XML file, parse it, and display it as my mp3 collection online!

Since MacZack.com runs off of my Mac here in the dorm, that mp3 collection updates immediately once I add, edit, delete, etc a file in iTunes! It’s sooo cool!

So you want to take a look? Click here. I’m on the second network right now, so the page might load slower than usual.

I also completely redesigned the look of maczack.com, so let me know what you think of the site design, as this might become the new look of ZMWeb.com in the future.

I love the web!

Filed under: Old ZMWeb Entry