lovesongs has a wide variety of tools that have helped in its creation. Here's some of them.

I created my own XML parser to read the XML playlists that WinAmp3 puts out. Zalary had a great method of doing this with XSL and it inspired me to create something in PHP to make it readable by all browsers instead of just the new ones that understand XML/XSL. These tutorials were very helpful, and I modeled my parser after them:

• Zend - Hands on XML
• PHP and XML: Parsing RSS 1.0

The parser goes through and tells the browser what to do with each of the fields in the XML file. If you are intersted in something like this for your site, I might be willing to make it available.

Along the same lines as Collectics, I'm using the MTAmazon plugin to display the data about my favorite artists albums. The plugin connects to Amazon and gets all the info for me. Its very nice! If you purchase an album from this site because its helped you find something that you like, I will get a small commission on the sales, and this helps with my hosting fees.

The amazing power of Movable Type is used on this site for content management. A heavy dose of PHP and some carefully crafted templates aid in this as well. A direct connection to my MySQL database using PHP makes the random artist info possible.

A modification on a Movable Type template has been used. If you are looking for a css-based design like this, my other site Blog<styles> is the place to look!