Tom Conrad

We rolled out a whole bunch of changes at Pandora tonight. Many of them are aimed at making playlists better; I’m pretty excited about those as that’s what it’s really all about for us. Have a listen and let me know what you think.

We’ve also added a tiny little progress bar to let you know how much of song is left. I can pretty safely say it’s the smallest progress bar every released. It’s just tiny. So get your bifocals and head on over to Pandora for a look.

Our good buddies over at Laszlo Systems are having a meetup tonight in San Francisco and I’ll be on hand to talk a bit about our use of Laszlo at Pandora. They’ll also be doing a demo of their very cool DHTML runtime. Neat stuff. Signup here if you want to learn more about OpenLaszlo or what we’ve been doing with the Laszlo platform at Pandora.

Over at Pandora we’ve just added a new feed mechanism that makes it easy for you to add Pandora to your blog sidebar. For example, I added these two lines to my blog template:

<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”http://www.pandora.com/styles/feeds/
songs-art-gray.css”/>
<script src=”http://www.pandora.com/feeds/people/tconrad/
favorites.js?max=5″><
/script>

This automatically generates the sidebar listing my favorite songs that you see at the right on this page. Similarly, you can add a list of your stations using these two lines:

<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”http://www.pandora.com/styles/feeds/
stations-buttons-gray.css”/>
<script src=”http://www.pandora.com/feeds/people/tconrad/
stations.js?max=5″></script>

To generate something similar for your page, click here and follow the instructions.

Update: We released a new version tonight that should make things work better in a wider variety of settings. In particular we’re using CSS that is a bit more explicit about what should be displayed and how. We’ve also updated the mechanism we use for opening new windows that should fix some problems with popup blockers.