my recently played songs (via last.fm RSS):

Last updated: 9:00:37 PM

how does this work?

The data that produces the list you see here originated on my Windows PC running Windows Media Player 11. Using last.fm's Audioscrobbler plugin, the song data from my PC is automatically fed into last.fm's database (conspiracy theorists beware!). Last.fm publishes this data on their site in the form of web pages and an RSS feed. I've programmed a simple coldfusion script which takes that RSS feed and outputs the data on this page. The page checks for updated data every 5 minutes. (5 minutes is the frequency that last.fm updates the 'Recent Tracks' RSS file.)