Several Spotify-related widgets, code stubs and WordPress plugins have appeared to enhance your blog or website. Here’s a look at some of them.

.

Spotify Social

Your account page on the official site now includes a handy piece of HTML code to promote your playlists. Copy-paste the code into your blog or website for a clickable graphic like this:

There’s also a WordPress plugin called Spotify Profile Link that does pretty much the same thing.

.

WordPress Plugin: WP-Spotify

David Hermansson’s WP-Spotify is a WordPress plugin that lets you link Spotify tracks to your posts and pages using uri-based shortcodes. For example, once installed enter a song URI in brackets like this:

[ spotify:track:1g0CqXt6IaISnszhZ4QEun ]

and it appears in your blog post like this:

[spotify:track:1g0CqXt6IaISnszhZ4QEun]

WP-Spotify includes a widget you can add to your sidebar that displays your loved (starred) tracks in Spotify: have a look at the bottom of this page for an example.

Currently you can only specify single tracks, but the developer is already working on support for artist and album embeds.

.

My Spotify Playlists

You may have spotted my Spotify Playlists selector at the bottom-left of every page on this blog. You can navigate through the pages or enter a search word (such as a genre) to display, then click the playlist graphic to open the playlist in Spotify. To do this, I used an excellent WordPress plugin called WP-Table Reloaded. This lets you easily add and configure tables to your blog, without much need for any HTML or coding knowledge. I created a table with three columns: one for the clickable playlist cover art, one for a description, and a general Genre section to use with the search:

The search box and layout are specified via the table’s setup page by enabling the DataTables JavaScript library. To add a new playlist to the selector, all I need to do is add a new row then write some text for the description and genre. Adding the cover art works in the same way as adding a new image to a blog post: upload the graphic, paste in the playlist title, then add the Spotify URI as the link. I prefer to use the URI rather than the HTTP link to ensure the webpage remains in the browser, rather than jumping out to a Spotify webpage.

.

I’m A Scrobbling Man

There are lots of Last.fm scrobbling plugins and widgets for bloggers, but the one I use is called Last.fm for WordPress. You can configure it all sorts of ways to display various stats from your Last.fm page, either with a widget or with a bit of code in your page like this (note you’ll need to disable your visual editor to post the code):
.

 lastfm_tracks('username');

.
I’ve added this to the bottom of my blog’s About page so that you can see the last 5 tracks I’ve listened to like this:

Let us know in the comments if you find any other useful Spotify-related tools for bloggers!