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Paul's Time Sink

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Technorati Link Count Widget

Paul Westbrook | 26 November, 2006 20:39

Technorati has released a widget to show the number of incoming links to a post, on the blog post.  This is essentially  just just a link to the Technorati search page, for the post, but it also has some javascript which will dynamically update the number of incoming links.

The instructions that Technorati has to install this involve manually modifying blog templates.  To make this easier for LifeType, I created a plugin.

[via Sifry's Alerts]

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Blogger archiving responsibilities

Paul Westbrook | 07 November, 2006 19:59

Do bloggers have a responsibility to archive the content of posts that are linked to, so when the post becomes unreachable the information is still available? 

I linked to a forum post that described how to fix a problem where your iTunes library file became locked.  I didn't post the actual steps, as I didn't get permission from the author.  Then at some point later, the thread was removed from the forums at ipodlounge.  For a while it was available in Google Cache, but then it disappeared.  Now when people find my post from search engines, they can't find the instructions.

 (More)

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Amazon aStore

Paul Westbrook | 29 September, 2006 01:46

Amazon has made it very easy to create a personalized store.  This allows you to promote products from Amazon, and potentially get some revenue from thess.  Anyone with an Amazon Associates account can create an aStore. 

It was very easy to create my store, but there are some things that I think that they should add:

 (More)

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technorati tags in ecto and LifeType

Paul Westbrook | 27 September, 2006 21:53

ecto, for a while, has had the ability to add Technorati tags to posts.  This results in a chunk of html being added to the posts, within the <!-- technorati tags start --> <!-- technorati tags end --> tags.

This worked fine for me for a while, as the tags got added to the end of the post.  But things didn't work right when I switched to posting with the MovableType api.  ecto adds the tags at the end of the first part of the post, before the text in the mt_text_more field.  This causes the tag to appear on the bottom when displayed on the main page, but smack in the middle of the post, when the whole post is displayed.

 (More)

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MovableType for LifeType

Paul Westbrook | 24 September, 2006 04:34

I finally got around to doing a MovableType implementation, that I have mentioned before, for LifeType.  I have posted the diff here.  Hopefully, I will check this in soon.

Update:  I have checked this change in and have created a plugin to enable it.

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Blogging from Google Video

Paul Westbrook | 19 September, 2006 09:25

Just like you can blog from within digg and flickr, it looks like you can blog from within Google Video.  Unfortunately it looks like Google Video only supports hosted blog services like Blogger, LiveJournal, MySpace, and TypePad. 

It would be great if Google supported the standard protocols like MovableType, metaWeblog or Atom.  (I am surprised that they don't support Atom, since Google uses the Atom standard for many of their products.)

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Blogging within flickr

Paul Westbrook | 11 September, 2006 20:28

As you can see from the previous post, you can post directly to your blog from within flickr.  flickr supports many of the standard blogging packages, as well as software supporting Atom, Blogger or metaWeblog APIs.

flickr's implementation of metaWeblog is a lot better than digg's, where flickr actually makes the API calls to get the list of blogs from the blogging software, where digg didn't.  Unfortunatelly, when posting from within flickr, there doesn't seem to be a way to select a category for the post.

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Programmatic Interfaces: the MovableType XMLRPC API

Paul Westbrook | 06 September, 2006 18:10

The MovableType XMLRPC API documentation can be found here.

(I want to finish the implementation for LifeType.)

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LifeType 1.1

Paul Westbrook | 06 September, 2006 01:26

LifeType 1.1 has been released.  1.1 includes a large number of improvements over the 1.0.x releases.

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Akismet effectiveness

Paul Westbrook | 31 August, 2006 21:33

I have been using the Akismet plugin for LifeType for a while, and I have been pretty impressed.  It has worked well  enough for me to disable the captcha plugin for comments. 

I also modified the plugin to call the akismet service for trackbacks.  I found that it didn't block all of the spam trackbacks.  I re-enabled the Validate Trackbacks plugin and this has blocked all spam trackbacks.

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wp-ecto Plugin

Paul Westbrook | 23 August, 2006 02:25

I saw this post about the wp-ecto WordPress plugin, and I though that it was a pretty neat idea.  This plugin adds a icon similar to the social bookmarking links that appear on blog post.  But instead of navigating to a social bookmarking site, it launches ecto and creates a new post and fills in the title and url.

This inspired me to add this functionality to the sociable plugin for LifeType.

[via TUAW]

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blogging from within digg

Paul Westbrook | 20 August, 2006 14:39

I just noticed a feature of digg.  You can post on articles on digg directly to you blog from within the digg site.

There are some problems with their implementation.  The interface to configure the metaWeblog settings, do not all allow spcifying the blog ID, which is required for he metaWeblog API.  Also, the blogging interface doesn't allow categories to be specified.
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web crawlers and JavaScript

Paul Westbrook | 10 August, 2006 19:07

Many web pages use JavaScript to modify the content of the page.  The effects of the javascript can be seen by anyone who has JavaScript enabled in their browser.  But most web crawlers do not interpret and run the scripts when crawling pages.  This is a problem when this content is intended to be seen by the web crawlers.

For example, BlogRolling is a site that lets you store links.  Then you can insert a JavaScript into your web page to display a blogroll.  One use of these blog roll sites is to link to other sites that you find interesting.  Ideally these links would help affect the Google PageRank or the Technorati rank.  But, it appears these crawlers are not intepreting JavaScript, so they are not picking up these links.
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LifeType 1.1 beta-1

Paul Westbrook | 02 August, 2006 02:07

About a week ago, the LifeType team released beta 1 of LifeType.  There have been a lot of improvements since the 1.0 release, including disk-based caching and reduced memory usage.  This version has worked very well for me.

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Sociable for LifeType

Paul Westbrook | 21 July, 2006 23:01

I have ported the Sociable WordPress plugin to LifeType.  Now you can add links to various social bookmarking for each of the posts in LifeType.  Here is the wiki page.

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