Grooveshark is the easiest way to discover, share, and listen to music online. That’s according to… Grooveshark. If you’d prefer an opinion from a different source, you might go to Mashable, where Leslie Poston tells of her two-year relationship with Grooveshark, and of her favorable first impression of its new way to add customizable music widgets to your blog, Web page, or social networking site.
A music widget, you say? Will it work at WordPress.com, which strips out code from many external widgets (because they use Javascript or other code that might pose a security threat). Well, I tried it, and it did work. I posted from Grooveshark and then edited the resulting (draft) post; I didn’t see a way to get code for pasting in to WordPress.com. It turns out that the Grooveshark widget runs on the Clearspring widget platform and… but that deserves its own post.
Anyway, as an example of a Grooveshark music widget at WordPress.com, here’s Nick Drake, doing “Time Has Told Me,” with Richard Thompson on electric guitar. At least, I hope it is. There has been some widgety weirdness during the writing of this post.
[clearspring_widget title=”Grooveshark Widget: Chameleon” wid=”48f3ef6c29317865″ pid=”48f7e7584c65c13d” width=”400″ height=”300″ domain=”widgets.clearspring.com”]
I’m a developer at Grooveshark. What is the Clearspring platform? The Widget was developed entirely in-house from scratch–no platforms of any sort used. Also, what sort of issues were you having earlier?
Skyler, thanks for your comment.
When I created a Grooveshark widget and specified this WordPress.com, the post generated included the shortcode clearspring_widget. You can see how I got the impression that clearspring are involved.
You can find out about the clearspring platform at clearspring.com.
The issues arose when I previewed the post in progress. A couple of times, the preview showed a widget other than the one I’d created.
Hi Andrew, another Grooveshark dev, hoping to shed some light on the Clearspring question.
The Grooveshark widget doesn’t exactly run on Clearspring, but we do use Clearspring for convenient embedding on sites where it might not otherwise be possible. The methods to their madness are a bit convoluted, I’ll give you that.
Our widget feature is very new, and we ran into a consierable few nasty bugs when we first launched. It looks like you were bitten by one of those bugs; your widget is empty. If you want to, you should be able to go back and edit your widget, and you can re-add that song. You shouldn’t have to change your embed code or add it again, the changes *should* be reflected automatically on your post. If you have more issues with the widget, please feel free to contact us directly, too!
Jay,
Thanks for your contribution.
Nick Drake fled the widget overnight. Sadly appropriate though that may be, I don’t think it’s anything specific to Nick.
It seems that Grooveshark fails over to some playlist or other if told to fire up an empty widget. That’s smooth, perhaps too smooth: it would help if there was some indication that something was amiss.
Grooveshark is pretty cool, i think one of friends was talking about it the other day.
Dunno. It’s not showing in my wordpress blog.
From the start, there has been a problem with this Grooveshark widget. I plan to revisit Grooveshark later this month.
It’s working prefectly now. I’ve used it many times in the past and moved my blog’s music from iMeem via VodPod in the sidebar to single songs and playlists in individual posts.
It works like a charm 😉
Regards
So with all that, is there a way to then embed a Groovsehark playlist widget in a WordPress.com hosted site? I still have not been able to get it to work.