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Paul's Time Sink

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Posting daily activity

Paul Westbrook | 21 August, 2008 01:29

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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AddThis

Paul Westbrook | 12 July, 2008 03:29

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.

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Xbox and Windows Home Server

Paul Westbrook | 01 June, 2008 02:32

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]

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links for 2008-01-31

Paul Westbrook | 31 January, 2008 00:25

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Travelling Blogger

Paul Westbrook | 26 December, 2007 23:33

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.

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links for 2007-12-03

Paul Westbrook | 03 December, 2007 00:20

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reCAPTCHA

Paul Westbrook | 10 November, 2007 16:48

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. 

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Update on Flock blog editor

Paul Westbrook | 04 November, 2007 01:24

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.

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Flock blog editor

Paul Westbrook | 25 October, 2007 10:20

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.

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Bleezer

Paul Westbrook | 23 September, 2007 02:29

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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Updated plugins

Paul Westbrook | 11 September, 2007 15:15

Yesterday, I updated some of the plugins for LifeType.

  • reflection - Upgraded to the latest version of the reflection javascript
  • related - Now you can specify the minimum number of keywords that are required to generate a list of related articles.  This should prevent short posts to have a list of not very related other articles.

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Posting from within Google Docs

Paul Westbrook | 12 August, 2007 00:21

I just discovered this today, and I don't remember hearing about his before.  You can post documents directly to your blog from within Google Docs.  This is very similar to the functionality that Microsoft Word has.

You do this from the Publish tab for each document.  You can configure this for a hosted provider, or any blogging software that supports the standard xmlrpc APIs.

Publish settings:

Publish Settings

Blog Site settings:

Blog Settings-1

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madKast

Paul Westbrook | 08 August, 2007 00:39

I heard about madKast on the last GeekNewsCentral podcast.  This looks like a pretty cool way to add a widget to share your posts via email or on social networking sites.

You have to include a javascript in your header, and then the script parses the page to identify the individual posts.  Then it places an icon next to each title.

Madkast Icon

When you click on the icon, a widget appears where you can send the link in an email, or your can post it to various sites.

Madkast Expanded

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Submitting to Akismet from LifeType

Paul Westbrook | 31 July, 2007 13:25

I have updated the Akismet plugin for LifeType to allow spam comments to be submitted to Akismet.  This allows users of LifeType to help Akismet catch spam that are being missed.  When installed, you can submit spam from the list of comments.

There are some things that I want to add, when I have some time:

  • Allow a list of comments to be submitted as once
  • Allow comments to be automatically deleted after being submitted (Or at least, mark them as already submitted.)
  • Allow trackbacks to be submitted to Akismet.

The plugin will be available the next time that it is pushed to sourceforge.

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http:BL plugin for LifeType

Paul Westbrook | 15 July, 2007 15:30

I have written a plugin for LifeType that blocks spam comments and trackbacks by blocking clients that are listed on Project Honey Pot's http:BL as having sent comment spam.

It is pretty cool that Project Honey Pot has made this API available to give access to the data that they have collected.  In addition to the API, they have made an Apache module available to block http requests.

The download link will work as soon as the plugin is pushed to sourceforge.  In the mean time, the plugin can be checked out of the subversion repository.

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