Paul's Time Sink

4 May, 2009

I have created a new plugin, called mtexport, which will export a LifeType blog to the Movable Type Import Format file.  This format is can be imported into WordPress.

The reason that I created this plugin, is because I am moving my blogs to Wordpress.  I have been happy with LifeType, but but I am getting tired of added features myself.  Often when I see some software that is available for other blogs, I have to port it myself.  This is what I did with AddThis, Akismet, Twitter, Related articles plugin, http::BL, and reflection.

I don't want to spend the time creating plugins for the cool new features, so I am just going to switch to WordPress where there is a large library of plugins.

Technorati tags: mtexport, LifeType, plugin, WordPress

13 Apr, 2009

I have stopped using Google Friend Connect  for blog comments.  There are several things that Google could add to make this more usuable

1. It should be possible to specify a home page when submitting an anonymous comment
2. It should be possible to configure the wall to not truncate the messages
3. It should be possible for the user to configure the what happens when a user clicks on their urls for their authenticated comment (link to Google Friend Connect profile, or blog)
4. Google should, and maybe already do, process the javascript and index the page using the content of the comments.  There could be a unique comment that someone leaves, and if Google doesn't index it, people will not be able to find the comment.

Technorati tags: Google Friend Connect, blog, comments

12 Apr, 2009

As I was thinking about before, I have disabled comments on this blog, and enabled Google Friend Connect for comments.  I am interested in finding out how well this will work.  I am still not requiring authentication for adding comments, in the hope that Google will still do spam filtering.

Technorati tags: Google, Friend Connect, social network, comments

9 Apr, 2009

I am thinking about disabling comments on this blog, but also adding Google Friend Connect's Wall gadget.  This would enable:

• Offload the spam filtering from my server
• Reduce the chance of security holes, as less user input would allowed on my server
• Enable cross site conversations,
• Enable the users to archive their comments

But there are some downsides to this

• Requires a browser to have JavaScript enabled to leave a comment
• Potentially slows the page loads, as requests have to go to additional servers.
• For posts that already have comments, the comments that had been previously added will not appear the same as the new comments.

Has anyone else done this?  If so, how well does it work?  Or should I just stick to LifeType's internal comments?

Technorati tags: Google Friend Connect, blog, comments

25 Mar, 2009

I have been trying to get the Google Reader items that I share and the links that I add on delicious.com, and post them to my blog once a day.  I wrote a rss plugin for LifeType that would create a post with the contents of an rss feed.  The problem is that I have not been able to generate a rss feed that only contains that last 24 hours of items. The problem is that the rss feed of shared items from Google Reader doesn't include the date/time that the item was shared. 

LoudTwitter is a service that will post the last 24 hours of your Twitter entries to a blog.  A while ago, FriendFeed added the ability to post to Twitter.  I have already configured my FriendFeed account with my Google Reader Shared item, and my delicious.com account.

Setting up LoudTwitter was pretty easy.  I created a new user on my blog that LoudTwitter would use (that doesn't have as much prividledges as my normal account. Also I can disable the account if needed.)  It was able to post to my blog well.

I don't think that I will use this service.  The problem is that I want to limit the types of content that gets posted. I don't want to post random twitter post, but I do want to include links that I post on twitter.  Also, I don't want to include links to articles on the blog that LoudTwiter is posting to.  LoudTwitter does have the ability to limit content to those that include a #loudtwitter hash tag.  The problem with this is that, I can't control the text that Google Reader uses for the shared items.

I think that my ideal solution is that FriendFeed adds this functionality.  I imagine that they should do something like their integration with Twitter.  I should be able to select which services I would want included in the post.

Technorati tags: twitter, LoudTwitter, rss, FriendFeed

21 Aug, 2008

A while ago, I configured del.icio.us to post the list of bookmarks from that day on my blocg.  For some reason this stopped working for me.  I like these type of automatic posts, as it makes it easy to share various pages.

I decided to write a plugin for LifeType that will import a rss feed, and then "summarize" the rss items and create a post with this text.  I probably could have gotten the del.icio.us blog posting to work, but If I created the plugin, this woud allow me to include Google Reader shared items, or Twitter tweets in the post.

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Technorati tags: rssimport, rss, del.icio.us, bookmarks, shared, LifeType, plugin

12 Jul, 2008

This tweet mentioned AddThis, and I went to check it out.  AddThis is a serivce that will generate buttons for web pages or blogs, where readers can use them to bookmark or share links. 

I have been using my port of Sociable for LifeType, but AddThis looked interesting enough that I created a LifeType plugin for it.  I will try it out for a while.  One concern that I have about AddThis over Sociable is that the javascript needs to be loaded from their servers.  So if there servers are loaded, this could affect my page load.

I will post a link to the wiki page for the LifeType plugin, once I create it.

Technorati tags: AddThis, social, bookmarks

1 Jun, 2008

This is a pretty good article that describes how to serve up your content from your Windows Home Server to your Xbox.  It is working perfectly for me.

The one thing that I want to figure out is to have the video transcoded to play on the Xbox.  The Xbox only supports a relatively small subset of video formats.

[via MS Windows Home Server blog]

Technorati tags: Xbox, Windows Home Server, media, video, transcode

31 Jan, 2008

• jkOnTheRun: Google fixes IMAP issue with HTML mail for Windows Mobile
  (tags: Google imap gmail windowsmobile)

26 Dec, 2007

I have been looking for a blog editor for my phone for a while.  This would allow me to post to my blogs without using the web interface or through a SMTP gateway.  Travelling Blogger looks to be a potential solution.

 This is a Windows Mobile application that lets you create and edit posts on a blog that supports the MetaWeblog xmrpc API.  Once I configured the information for my blog, it pulled down the list of my existing blog posts.  Then I was able to create a new blog entry.

 This was starting to look promising, but then I realized that it wasn't a WYSIWYG editor.  This means that I would have to enter all of the html tags manually.  Travelling Blogger doesn't support copy and paste from Windows Mobile 6, so it is not easy to transfer text from the built-in browser.

 I was willing to overlook this, and plan on using Travelling Blogger just to post simple text entries, but then it wasn't able to actually post anything to my blog.

 I guess I will just use the web interface, or just wait until I get back to my computer.

Technorati tags: Travelling Blogger, xmlrpc, smtp, Windows Mobile, MetaWeblog

3 Dec, 2007

• The MINIX 3 Operating System
  (tags: minix opensource unix linux kernel software computer)

10 Nov, 2007

I just heard of reCAPTCHA.  This is a very interesting spin on CAPTCHAs.  Accoring to their web site, 60 million captchas are solved every day.  reCAPTCHA uses part of the effort to "scan" books.

 A reCAPTCHA captcha contains a word that OCR didn't find a match when scanning books from the Internet Archive.  In addition to the word that is not recognized, a successfully scanned word is displayed.  The captcha is considered successfully entered if the known word is entered, and then the answer for the unknown word is added to a database. If enough people enter an unknown word with the same answer, then the probability of the answer being correct goes up.

There are several plugins for blogging systems, as well as a PHP api. 

Technorati tags: reCAPTCHA, spam, captcha, internet archive, book

4 Nov, 2007

As I have mentioned before, I have been trying to use the Flock block editor to post to my blogs.  Almost everything works, except one major feature.  The WYSIWYG editor isn't really.  If you enter newlines in the text editor, they don't get converted to paragraph tags.  (ecto has an option to enable this.)

 I think that I will just stick to the web based interface provided by LifeType.

Technorati tags: Flock, xmlrpc, LifeType, ecto, wysiwyg, editor, blogging

25 Oct, 2007

In this post, I mentioned that I was looking for a good blog editor for Ubuntu.  I saw this article that mentioned Flock, and decided to try it out.  This is a browser, based on Firefox code, that is gear towards social networking.

In addition to social network activities, Flock also included a blog editor.  This allows you to do offline editing of blog entries.

Technorati tags: flock, movabletype, blog, editor, xmlrpc

23 Sep, 2007

I have been setting up my new laptop, this weekend, to run Vista and Ubuntu. The hardest thing so far, is to find replacements for the various Mac OS X applications that I used. For example, ecto is a great blog editor for Mac OS X. There aren't many blog editors available for Linux.

apt does include some blog editors, but they are pretty limited in their functionality. Scribefire is also available, but if I wanted to write blog posts while in my browser, I will just use my blogging software's web interface.

The best application that I have found so far is Bleezer. This is a cross-platform java application, that supports many blogging services. Some of the other features it has are:

• Image uploading
• Multiple category support
• built-in tagging support
• spell checking
• integrated xmlrpc pinging

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Technorati tags: bleezer, blog, xmlrpc, Vista, Ubuntu, ecto