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March 09, 2006
Pandora Sidebars for Your Blog
Tonight we're rolling out a really easy way to integrate your Pandora stations and favorite songs into your website or blog. For an example of what this looks like click here and look in the sidebar on the right-hand-side. You can add this kind of sidebar to your page by inserting just two lines into your homepage or blog template.
Let's say that you'd like to share the stations you're creating with everyone that visits your blog or personal homepage. We thought it would be cool if it was really easy to add these items to your page. To that end, we've created this new kind of feed to compliment our existing RSS feeds.
These new feeds are JavaScript includes that you can place into your blog or homepage template with one simple step. There are two different feeds. The first generates a nice looking list of all your stations. Your site visitors will be able to click to liste and it will always stay up to date with your most recently created stations. The second feed lists the songs your discovering on Pandora; choose from a range of styles including a compact version as well as a beautiful version that shows off the song album art. Your site visitors can click through to learn more about the song, listen to a sample, buy the track from iTunes, buy the album from Amazon, or create a new Pandora station from the song.
Creating the embedding code is really easy. Just visit this page: http://www.pandora.com/feeds#blog, pick a style, enter your Pandora username (your email address) and click the "Generate HTML" button. Copy the code that's generated to the sidebar portion of your blog and you're done.
For all the CSS hackers out there, you're welcome to customize the display style with CSS. Each element has been given a unique id to make it easy for you to assign custom styles.
Update 3/13: 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. Thanks for your help and feedback on all of this these last few days.
Posted by Tom Conrad at March 9, 2006 01:19 AM
Comments
at last! was waiting for that. pity this cannot be more customized in terms of look and feel and size. but great job
Posted by: ouriel at March 9, 2006 03:41 AM
Great feature, thanks!! It'd be great to see weblogs' plugin developers working on it asap.
Posted by: gillo at March 9, 2006 04:33 AM
Hi. I loved the site and the idea of Pandora. Really cool stuff. You should try to make some kind of link of the songs to a songs database like AMG All Music Guide, with all the discographie, biographie and so on. There are great music bands playing in my station that I've never heard of.
Hugs from Brazil !
Posted by: Tiago at March 9, 2006 06:35 AM
This is great. I just added this to my blog site (news2know.blogspot.com)
Wonderful. :)
Posted by: Steve Forman at March 9, 2006 06:56 AM
With a little bit of CSS you can make these look pretty much any way you want. When you generate the include for your page you'll get two lines back. The first is a CSS include, the second is the a JavaScrip include. To really customize the look, simply use the JavaScript include with the CSS include and then write your own CSS to control the presentation. You should be able to make it look just about any way you'd like.
Tom
CTO @ Pandora
Posted by: Tom Conrad at March 9, 2006 07:42 AM
this is pretty sweet. I was just about to post something on my site about pandora too, I'll have to add this before I do!
Posted by: Matt at March 9, 2006 09:19 AM
I can't get this to work on www.livejournal.com
I'd love to add it to my Info page but c'est la vie
Still awesome idea and I am loving Pandora
Posted by: Count Dooku at March 9, 2006 10:42 AM
Sadly LiveJournal, MySpace, MSN Spaces, and the hosted version of Wordpress don't at this time don't have a mechanism to support these kinds of includes. Until they open their platforms up a bit, there's not a lot we can do on these services. On the other hand, TypePad, Movable Type, Blogger and self-hosted Wordpress should all work great with this techniques.
Drop us a note here or an email as you start putting a sidebar on your blog. We'd love to see them!
Tom
CTO @ Pandora
Posted by: Tom Conrad at March 9, 2006 12:02 PM
this has nothing to do with this blog i just wanted to say
WOW
hats off to PANDORA and all the people making this website possible! i am truly amazed at the variety of songs available. i love hearing new bands and songs so this is absolutely perfect. my friend told me about it yesterday and i am already hooked. would be even better if this was a downloadable program instead of a website. something you could minimize to the system tray. but still.. wicked
Melanie
Posted by: Melanie N Small at March 9, 2006 03:47 PM
I love Pandora.
Posted by: ignazio at March 9, 2006 04:28 PM
Pandora gang-way cool. It just keeps getting better and better. Musicians and music lovers sharing music fueled by love of music-excellent.
Posted by: Mark Forman at March 10, 2006 12:45 PM
I just found your site today. I really love it! I picked Rich Mullins, one of my favorite Christian artists. You've played songs that I like that I had never heard of before. Thanks!
X
http://spaces.msn.com/X-Evolutionist
Posted by: X-Evolutionist at March 10, 2006 01:55 PM
Thank you! It just keeps gettin better and better...
I can't wait for the 'now playing' feed. That will rock.
Posted by: slackdog at March 10, 2006 03:40 PM
This is such a neat idea. The only thing is, when I select (for the Favorite Songs list) the white box with no cover art and generate the html for it, it makes a white box with the songs AND cover art. =( Not that big a deal I guess.
Posted by: erin at March 11, 2006 04:21 AM
What a wonderful idea! I added it immediately to my new blog. It would be even better if there were some way to make 5 random favorites appear, instead of just the last 5 songs marked as favorite...
Posted by: mithriluna at March 12, 2006 08:13 AM
Hi there, this is really cool to play around with. However in stations.js were the stations are generated in an unordered list, an unfinished p-tag is placed within each list element (li-tag). This is a bit annoying so could you please remove that from the script? List elements shouldn't be paragraphed so please don't complete the tag instead. :)
Thanks for a great service.
Posted by: Lennart at March 13, 2006 05:51 PM
Hi Lennart,
You're right, there are some issues with the markup right now. We're rolling out some fixes tonight.
Tom
CTO @ Pandora
Posted by: Tom Conrad at March 13, 2006 06:17 PM
Thanks for your (plural) help! I tweaked it a bit and it looks exactly the way I wanted it to. http://wordsnsounds.blogspot.com if you want to see it. Thanks!
Posted by: Erin at March 14, 2006 01:02 AM
Looks great Erin! And nice first post over at your new blog.
Tom
CTO @ Pandora
Posted by: Tom Conrad at March 14, 2006 08:46 AM
When are you going to make an affiliate program? Currently I have my own "favorites" list that I have to alter by hand which links to itunes and makes me money from my music review website. I would rather use pandora's generated lists because it will stay current with what I'm currently listening to and that is simply awesome. But then I don't make money anymore.
Any chance Pandora will have an affiliate program soon?
Posted by: andrew at March 14, 2006 01:18 PM
Yes, I love you guys. I am tempted to simply attempt at loving a new gender as it is not male or female it is simply known as Genome.
This is AWESOME, I added it to my site yesterday, so much easier than emailing the stations around.
Now... a question, as I have already put it to them... why dear Tim, don't you contact the boys over at Blogger and you two hop in bed for a little while and see what happens (I mean that in a hypothetical way - so if that reaaallly happens then no details please).
So when are you coming back to NY, please please come back soon, it's just an Acela train ride from your last leg in DC.
Thanks again for making my desk days more enjoyable guys.
Posted by: Mike Most at March 15, 2006 07:36 AM
u rock- that's true!!
Posted by: mars at March 15, 2006 11:26 PM
Thanks, it's very nice addition for building the Pandora (blog)sphere :-)
When can we have the html code to display the current song played on our radios? (even better with a link to the public page where you can listen to the sample and go back to listen the hosting radio).
Keep up the good work!
Cheers - Cooli.
Posted by: Cooli at March 16, 2006 01:42 AM
Great feature. It's nice to share.
Posted by: larry at March 17, 2006 08:23 AM
thanks to Erin, made mine work properly as well...
you guys are great!
http://boasson.blogspot.com/
y.
Posted by: yishai at March 18, 2006 01:51 PM
Nice idea. It makes it easy and interesting to support favourite artists when we can add their albums to the blog sidebar.
Posted by: nordseemix at March 19, 2006 02:08 PM
Well it's a little rough but it works great. A Pandora plugin for Worpress.
http://www.shoeinthedoor.com/2006/03/22/pandora-plugin-for-wordpress/
The install is a bit tricky if you don't feel comfortable editing your templates, but if you are just copy and paste one of the code examples.
Jake
Posted by: Jacob Smith at March 23, 2006 07:27 AM
hey if you can can you send the list of best music to thanks
Posted by: ed at March 29, 2006 07:04 PM
I love this great service.
X
Posted by: X-Evolutionist at April 18, 2006 05:27 PM
i like the idea of having pandora on sidebar, but it doesnt excercise the idea well, i was expect a basic player on sidebar, kind of like myspace's player, with pandora stations. hope that could happen in future :)
Posted by: bunky at May 9, 2006 01:02 AM
Will there ever be a feed with "Listener's recently heard songs"? That'd be cool for one's blog...
Posted by: Malte at June 25, 2006 09:05 AM
aloha! all very nice. a like it. peace bro!
Posted by: Tolik at October 1, 2006 02:43 PM
Can you please make a player that plays one channel and will work on myspace? Something small and stylish but still effective.. Tons of people would use this, I know.
Posted by: will at May 7, 2008 06:32 PM
