Well there have been two improvements today.
The first one was an addition to the BookQueue. Using overLIB I've made it so that if you move over one of the links of the book which I'm reading it'll popup a tooltip style thing showing a photo of the cover of the book, who wrote it, and it's ISBN number. Here it is in it's full glory, just incase you can't be bothered to wait for it to appear on the random side thingy... cool eh?
Yes... I know the wishlist items don't come up with a box... I did it on purpose! HP iPAQ H5450 Pocket PC (English) doesn't have an Author or an ISBN number.
The next improvement was to the script which updates my "Recently, on sites I read...". Originally, a cunning script would get the RSS/Atom feeds from all of the sites I read at an interval of once every 10 minutes, without question. All the people who currently appear in the list are people I know (although it doesn't effect the blogspotters 'cause it's not your server) so I know you won't beat me too hard for the extra server load I cause to you by taking the file.
Well, I'd quite like to add people who I don't really know to the list, but I don't want beating, so I only wanted to get the file if their blog has been updated. Any blog that's worth reading pings weblogs.com when it has been updated - it sends it a little message saying "Hey, my blog's just been updated, tell the world!". Pretty much every other blog linking site will get the information from Weblogs and use it to update their databases. About a day after you've updated your blog everyone knows about it! I decided that I could get the changes file from weblogs periodically and check if the blogs I read have been updated or not and use this information to determine if I should get the latest feed from them. Due to it's nature, the Weblogs server is usually quite swamped with requests though and quite a lot of changes are made, so it'd take a while processing the data for the realativly few blogs which I read.
Still with me?
There is a site that sort of does the "Recently, on sites I read..." thing automatically - BlogRolling.com, but it doesn't have as much data as I would like (ie the post names) - it just says this blog has been updated recently (it gets it's data from Weblogs). BlogRolling will allow you to get the information on the pages you read and when they have been updated in a variety of ways, so I've opted to download the data in another RSS form. Cunning. So now my little updater script downloads this single, and quite small file, which lets me know when all the blogs I read have been updated, if some of these blogs have been updated since I last checked then I update my copy of the newsfeed from the site, and the list gets updated accordingly. Any sites which do not ping weblogs.com, and therefore blogrolling.com claims arwe never updated get updated in the old-fashioned way.
There are only two blogs which are currently on my list that don't ping weblogs.com... ahem... Rob? Kate? go on, you know you want to... it's simple in MovableType, just go to the "Weblog Config" thingy, then Preferences, find "Publicity / Remote Interfaces / TrackBack" and select "weblogs.com", couldn't be simpler. If you find that it comes up with errors and the like when you try and post to the blog about pinging failing... drop me an email/MSN or whatever and I'll let you into a little fix I did over at ClaudeStreet yesterday to make it work. If you're not Rob or Kate and you want to be let in on my fix then you can email me too, or leave a comment... then I'll decide if I'll let you use it (weblogs.com proxy thing running on my server).
Crap, I've lost everyone now...
You're making me quite tempted to start a blog actually, but then I've been quite tempted for months. Ho hum.
Posted by: TraB on July 22, 2004 10:56 PMDo it :)
Just don't tell any females the address, 'cause you might just end up going out with them and then it would restrict what you could put on the blog without getting bitch slapped.
Telling no females could be a problem though, 'cause I'd clearly put a link to it from here and females read my blog - so might read yours.
Remember: "Keep a diary and one day it'll keep you." --- Mae West.
Not that I want to put you off! I like reading about the insides of everyone's head! And I'm sure quite a lot of other people do too :-)
The main thing that's putting me off is that I don't have a nice linux box, which basically means a blogspot blog. Hmmm. Mind you I've been thinking for ages about sorting such a thing out for a number of reasons. Maybe I should do it...
Posted by: TraB on July 22, 2004 11:15 PMWhat? Sorting out a Linux box? Go for it if you've got a spare PC lying about.
You could start on BlogSpot (which isn't ideal I know as you can do faaar less cool stuff) and then when you've sorted out a Linux box import the blogspot blog into MovableType (or the blogging program of your choice... MT being a good one, 'cause you know someone who 'knows' it quite well ;-)).
Importing could be a bit of an arse though, especailly if you want to import comments that people have made (assumuming you enable comments)... hmmm... but then I suppose if you know enough about things to be doing cool stuff with MT, then you know enough to be able to import BlogSpot into MT, if that makes sense. If you don't, then you might as well keep with BlogSpot, even though it's quite pants.
Ramble ramble ramble, crap drunk again...
Consider it done. I won't do kate's cos i'm the other end of the country and she might 'bitch slap' me as you so gracefully put it :)
Posted by: Rob on July 22, 2004 11:49 PMCool :) Ah! Just do Kate's and don't tell her ;-) She'll never know... [ducks and runs from the bitch slapping]
Posted by: Ed on July 22, 2004 11:51 PMEd,
Is MT entirely PHP and does it run off MySQL?
Want to start one but want to be able to completely re-write everything...
Bwa ha ha!
Andy - it certainly can back into MySQL, and I think Ed's using a completely PHP version of it.
I lost my setup when I had to steal Lucy's hard drive for Snoopy (there being no point having a webserver if your router/firewall's fucked), and haven't set it up again since then :-(
Posted by: Joe on July 23, 2004 9:57 AMCheers Matey,
Ed - have you got the PHP version?
The one on MT site is CGI based (some of it anyway)
It is CGI based and spews out text files based upon templates. My set of templates happen to include a fair whack of PHP code and hence the pages you see are PHP, that make sense?
There are full on PHP ones out there though: Serendipity (http://www.s9y.org/) being one, dunno how good it is though, 'cause I've never used it.
How much of MT would you like to rip apart and change? I don't think there is that much it does that you would want to bugger about with! And if you think of something you'd like it to do, you can bugger about making some php to do the job based upon a cunning template you create or someone else will have wanted to do it too and you can get a plugin for MT to do the job.
Hope that helps.
Hmmm...
Think i might just write my own. That way i can go all retro and have JavaScript ducks quacking across the screen and other annoying things like that...?
Maybe not
Posted by: Andy on July 23, 2004 1:27 PMErm, but I could have JavaScript ducks quacking across the screen with MT if I wanted... just add the JS code to the template!
You also use <blink> if you really want :-)
Posted by: Ed on July 23, 2004 1:29 PMand annoying .wav sounds in the background?
Posted by: Andy on July 23, 2004 1:33 PMAnything you want!
You could get it to write C programs and compile them if you wanted it to... (although I'd have to workout the compiling thing... but it could be done, I'm sure!)
Excellent!!
If it can write the programs for me then i dont have anything to do at work.
Plus i can watch the javascript ducks for ammusement instead.
Just downloaded MT so i'll show it on the server and let you know how it goes!
Posted by: Andy on July 23, 2004 1:44 PMCool :)
Posted by: Ed on July 23, 2004 1:48 PM