About this site
At song 46 in the 2006 triple j Hottest 100 countdown I decided to see how the "LIVE" player on the Triple J site was getting the track list. Looking at the HTTP requests the Flash movie was making I found it was loading a XML with a random number in the query string (to stop caching). The list must have been re-built on the server as each song was played on the radio as it was not a full 1-100 list but rather a list of the current song playing on the radio with a istory of the rest. I tried to "hack" the request with a few obvious query string name/value pairs, but had no luck. I then had the idea of using this feed to build a site with some stats on the countdown as it happened. So I wipped up an XML fetcher and a parser to put the data in a database for some common queries. I then reworked a free skin from the Open Source Web Design collection and added some iTunes affiliate links to cover the hosting.
During the top ten, Western Sydney had a power outage (blackout) and soon after I went to a mates B&S themed BBQ so I didn't get to finish the site 'till the following day. But here it is anyway. Next year I hope to have the updates working LIVE
Update: 14 Feb 2007
Over a year on an still not where I picture it should be. I have just added the latest count down for 2007 and managed to get data for 16 other polls from the past. No XML here, this was all a manual grep on invalid HTML tables and lists and even lines separated with break returns (<br>).
I've added a basic stat to show artists that have had enough votes to get more than one track into the top 100 (in the past the Cure were the kings of this). I plan so add some more stats (and graph them with the Google Charts API) soon. Come back soon.
Credits
- NSLog(); for documenting the iTunes URL format
- ARCSIN for the designer template
- Apple for iTunes (and hopefully some affiliate income)
- Last.fm for the great social music resource
- Triple J site for the greatest (and biggest) voted music countdown in the world
Contact
Please contact me if you find any errors in the data or you have an good ideas for stats you would like to see on the hottest 100.
