$ cat /home/buntine/mind_melting_brilliance

Update May 13th: V2 is completed and available for download: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/witchhammer/

I knew the day would come when the guys behind Metal-Archives.com would decide to unveil thier new web site. I specifically wrote Witchhammer in a way that would limit my headaches if the web sites HTML changed some time in the future.

Of course, that day has come! The new Metal-Archives.com is totally different. It's been rewritten from the ground up (as far as I can tell). The new format actually makes Witchhammer a bit more intuitive, but there are still a couple of issues (the MA JSON pseudo-API doesn't seem to respond to it's input parameters!)

I've been working sporadically over the past few nights to get the Witchhammer working with the new site. I am about 90% of the way through and should be able to deploy the new version some time in the next 48 hours.

Thanks for the patience. :)

Just a quick one so I can direct emails and nasty comments from Heavy Metal warriors here.

Metal-Archives.com, as of 31/01/11, have disabled their search functionality and replaced it with a Google site-specific search (supposedly for performance reasons). Unfortunately, this totally breaks Witchhammer.

When the Metal Archives staff decide to re-enable the search, Witchhammer will start working again (unless they change their views, in which case I'll have some work to do).

Please stand by! I've also added a note on the download page: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9671/

Also, i've passed the 3,000 users mark. I think that's pretty cool.

A big "thanks" to the people that emailed me and those who brought it up on forums, etc. Sorry for my delay, but I've just updated Witchhammer to be compatible with Firefox 3.6.*. All should be fine within the next 30 minutes or so (just waiting on Mozilla to update their cache).

As per usual, download it from the official repository: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9671/

Thanks again!

I've just finished an upgrade to Witchhammer, my Firefox extension for finding information on the http://www.metal-archives.com database.

I've made the following changes:

• Added song search
• Implemented loading dialogue
• Cleaned up JS namespace pollution
• General code cleanup and refactor

It's currently available on the Firefox Addons website. You can also fork me on github.

Any feedback you may have would be greatly appreciated! :)

After I released Witchhammer 1.0, my bandwidth usage went up 3,000%. My logs are telling me that over 500 people have already downloaded the extension!

In any case, I decided that I could make an enhancement or two. Namely:

• Full support for both band and album/release searching
• Better handling of AJAX requests (as metal-archives is often down or slow)

It still works in the same way as before, although there is now a submenu available that allows you to choose to search for either bands or albums. The results are aggregated and displayed efficiently (instead of simply redirecting you to a webpage).

You can download the extension at Firefox Addons and Softpedia (thanks to whoever submitted it there!).

Note, you will need Firefox 3.0 or above -- so make sure you upgrade if you need to.

Please let me know if you find any bugs or areas for improvement. Thanks!

NOTE: My latest version is available here: http://andrewbuntine.com/articles/2008/11/27/witchhammer-13-available-now

Record Collecting is a hobby of mine. Well, perhaps an obsession. Infact, I feel somewhat comfortable in claiming that I have the best collection of obscure Czechoslovakian Heavy Metal LPs in Australia!

One of the best general resources for confirming information about bands (or discovering new ones) is undoubtedly The Encyclopaedia Metallum (or simply "Metal Archives" to most of us). When browsing a tradelist, distro listing, EBay, etc I find myself continuously jumping to said website. So I thought:

Wouldn't it be cool if there was a Firefox Extension that allowed you to simply highlight a bands name (or keyword) on a webpage, right-click, select "Find at Metal Archives", and be presented with a nice listing of the results?! You could then select the results you wanted to see, and click "Ok". A new tab, linking to the bands profile, would be opened for each.

So this is exactly what I did. I decided to name the extension Witchhammer; a reference to the cult Czech band, Törr.

Witchhammer is currently in sandbox at the official Mozilla Add-Ons website, and should be available for download there soon. In the meantime, you can download it here: http://www.andrewbuntine.com/firefox/witchhammer.xpi

You will need Firefox 3.0 or above. I developed it on Linux, but have tested on Windows XP and found no problems. It also works fine on Mac OSX.

If you find any issues or areas for improvement, please feel free to email me!

Enjoy, thrashers!!