Mat Bowles

Updating the Delicious Glue script for DW

Thu, 13 Jan 2011 16:33:07 GMT

I'm in the process of adapting and updating the Delicious Glue script for use on Dreamwidth. It's what powers my daily linkdumps, and I find it very useful.

The current version is http://notzen.com/mat/Delicious-Glue.zip and contains the script itself, a required XMLRPC bit of code, and some CSS that can be adapted for your journal to make the posts look good (also useful for anyone to put in for their Reading page if several friends are using it).

I plan to write a how-to on the whole thing when I've finished everything, but ~~I'm having a few technical problems fixing some less important areas that I'd like to have work (over here if you're interested), especially setting a post security level~~. ETA: problems solved, me making schoolboy errors, all now updated, how to and instructions to follw when I've got time.

In the meantime, as I've not time to write it all up with screenshots right now, better to have it out there for those that do want it. You'll need your own server, running PHP5 or higher, or find someone with server space to donate (I am very grateful to andrewducker for both fixing the time zone issue and donating hosting space for me). If you get stuck, holler here as it'll help me figure out what needs to be in the walkthrough.

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Sharing widgets--what do YOU use?

Sun, 01 Aug 2010 01:38:51 GMT

One of the best things about the internet is the ability to share stuff with friends and others. It can be stuff you've made, done or written, or it can be stuff you've found. Lots of people like doing this so much that there're sites dedicated to the whole idea, or have that sort of function built in as an attraction to users.

Making it easy makes sense

If you're creating content, encouraging others to share what you've written with their friends normally makes sense. Making it easy for them makes it likely that they'll do it. Well, normally, some churlish types are less likely to share something if the site's trying to make it easy. No pleasing some people...

The first weblogs were, literally, logging the web, they existed to share cool stuff found. Now? Billions of aps out there. Awhileback, Debi polled her readers to find out what they like to use, I'm just going to ask.

coding sharethis buttons

I'm coding a share this set of buttons, initially for my and miss_s_b's layout, but eventually to possibly be submitted as part of the core function of Dreamwidth. I don't want to have too many little buttons, but I think I can make it so users can choose which buttons appear on their layout, and today I finally asked how I could strip the html, a silly little problem that'd be stopping me for weeks. I also want to have it only display on public entries, but that's a lesser issue.

I want it for my reading page, to allow easy sharing of links for me. That it might encourage others to share stuff I've written is an added bonus. If I ever get around to writing again regularly.

So, already coded I have Facebook, Livejournal, Twitter, Dreamwidth, Blogger, StumbleUpon, Bit.ly and LibDig (the last being, obviously, a very niche sharing tool). What major tools have I missed?

Unfortunately, as far as I can see, I can't do one for Wordpress.com, let alone custom installs, as the post page is always within your own subdomain, if someone shows me a hack to get around it or an alternative URL, I'm very much all ears.

What link sharing sites do you read or use?

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Hacking my 1337 layers: Dreamwidth Layout work

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 00:50:52 GMT

The joys of blogging using a completely new platform with a development team that really want to make it work, instead of just make it sellable is palpable.

Dreamwidth is, still, not a finished, ready-for-general-release product. That's fine, it's getting there. What's really good though, is that the team behind it are really keen on getting the documentation up to speed, and are generally pleased when you go point out something that isn't working right.

After a lot of headscratching, and a bit of trial and error, I've finally got the sidebars to my main layout almost looking right (at least on this browser, on this laptop, with my preferred default settings). Setting the margin for some of the lists to -12px was a daft solution, but until I can figure it out better, it's a working solution.

( Dreamwidth's default settings for page TITLE tags were, well, a bit weird, and broke basic usability and SEO rules. So I've been hacking. )

( I know a lot of people don't like reading entries against a dark background with light text--I've fixed that for you )
( Prettifying the Crosspost link in the metadata )
It's all, naturally, still being tested, but I thought I'd post and let people know that a) I'm still alive and b) I'm trying to be useful.

This layout is, officially, 1337

But more importantly, hover over that 'Dark' link. Look at the S2 ID number. Everytime someone creates a new layout on DW, it gets assigned a new, sequential, number. There are loads and loads and loads of them. But those of us who signed up to the site really early, well we've got styles with low numbers. Mine isn't that low. But it is pretty cool. S2 layout #1337. This layout is, officially, 1337.

I just felt like sharing that.

(feedback on the code, suggested improvements, bug reports, etc very very welcome. Pointing out that the pale layout is barely personalised and needs a lot of work will be a statement of the already known, I'm looking for unknown unknowns out of preference...)

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Administrivia

Sat, 17 Apr 2010 10:05:26 GMT

Some bloggy adminy points with some questions:

1) Thank you to the person who just paid for my account to be upgraded to paid; I'm always very grateful when people do this, while slightly bemused; it was on my to-do list for payday, but that's not for a few weeks, danke.

2) I've been doing some more tweaks to my layout, it's still nowhere near finished but it's better than it was. However, mooism had problems with the tag cloud in the side column obscuring the text ox for commenting; this shouldn't happen in the code and I can't replicate it, is it happening to anyone else, if so can you let me know what browser you're using and send me a screenshot?

3) theweaselking had problems logging in with OpenID so commented on the LJ mirror of my post; I know the OpenID commenting setup here isn't ideal, and it's being worked on by the dev team, but does anyone else have problems enough to stop them commenting here? Would a walk-through/explanation help people? I'll be doing some more work on my idea for improving the taskflow at some point as well; knowing what problems people have would be good, but obviously it's a low priority until post-election.

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[DW] Profile link icons update.

Thu, 07 May 2009 16:28:59 GMT

In my Monday post about icons, I gave replacement codes for the 5 icons that DW commonly uses as well as the 3 that LJ commonly uses. I missed one that DW uses, namely direct links to LJs using the new custom site code.

If you didn't know, rather than the old [lj-user="matgb"] code, DW has replaced it with [user name="matgb"], ie removing the LJ bit given, obviously, it's not on LJ. But cunningly, they've also added another option, if you code [user name="matgb" site="livejournal.com"] it will link to matgb on LJ, not DW. And it'll take the LJ usericon from the LJ server as well.

Which would be cool. Except it doesn't auto-discover whether it's a person, community or feed. So my post Tuesday mentioning the Russian President's blog displayed it as a person, not as a community. Which I think is slightly unintuitive and misleading. So I've fixed that.

I've added another bit of code for DW so that off-site links to LJs instead display the LJ pencil, to show it's something on LJ, not a bloke regardless of what it is on LJ. So, if you look at this post on DW using my style, it'll show the little pencil when I repeat the link. Look: blog_medvedev. I suspect I could keep doing these for ages—if you regularly link to IJ, WP, JF or whatever people, y'know what? Sort your own code out, ask me if you need help.

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Social media inward looking wankery

Tue, 05 May 2009 21:19:05 GMT

Couldn't resist writing this one up: In post-Soviet Russia, President blogs you. The President of Russia has a Livejournal (blog_medvedev) and updates it (or gets someone to, anyway) fairly regularly.

( LJ, its future, DW not a threat and SUp taking it in the wrong direction )

Ah well. I'm supposed to be writing up what's wrong with the OpenID implementation on both LJ and DW, but I keep getting distracted.

Short version: ( Both sites are problematic, DW has the excuse of being new, LJ has no excuse at all )

That's pathetic. Hopefully the competitive pressure from DW will push them into making more improvements, like it has done elsewhere. Competition is, after all, a good thing, and LJs been stuck in its own little rut with nowt but a bunch of clones for too long.

Meh, rambling. Time to go do something constructive.

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Look, a poll in a post

Sun, 03 May 2009 14:25:58 GMT

OK, testing again. Using the Dreamwidth poll wizard, then looking to see if/how polls crosspost to LJ. Odds are you'll need to login with OpenID to vote, etc, but it's about time you did that anyway.

View Poll: Poll wizard testing

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Holy electronic cover version, Batman!

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 18:28:40 GMT

I am having difficulty figuring out words for describing how cool this is:

My quote of the day is from the description:

Keep in mind the scanner and floppy drive are not musical instruments. These are mechancial devices whose frequencies tend to drift and can cause some notes to be out of tune.

Seriously, how cool is that? (via)

Also, I'm testing the DW crossposter, apparently there are issues with post edits and embedded videos that we need to iron out. So comments off on LJ and on on DW, I don't plan on making a habit of this until it's way out of closed beta, but you all know me and plans...

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Digital dreams redux

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 08:41:21 GMT

OK, forgot to tick a box on the crossposter, let's try that again.

If you're already on Dreamwidth then really, nothing to see here...

This are a test post. There is nothing really to see. However, if you fancy following the link and saying hello to test the OpenID login, that'd be cool.

Gotta love beta testing features, this might not even work...

ETA: not only does it work, but apparently it auto-edits as well. How cool is that?

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Digital dreams

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 08:37:58 GMT

This are a test post. There is nothing really to see. However, if you fancy following the link and saying hello to test the OpenID login, that'd be cool.

Gotta love beta testing features, this might not even work...

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Hacking my layout around

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 22:49:00 GMT

So, following a few how-tos and some half remembered tricks from last time I messed around with my LJ layout, I've hacked into the Zesty theme and done some surgery to it.

ETA: I'm not currently using the Zesty layout, you can see where I got to here:
http://matgb.dreamwidth.org/?s2id=5702 and read this entry using it here:
http://matgb.dreamwidth.org/359787.html?s2id=5702

Firstly, I added in some code to let me define an off-site stylesheet (which I'm hosting in a Wordpress theme on my server as I can edit it online easily, a trick I'll build on I think).

Then I took out all of the "theme" CSS from the layout code and saved that in a seperate file. Now I'm adding in CSS from my normal colour scheme, slowly, in order to try to get the general look and feel of my LJ layout, but improving on it based around stuff I've learnt since I last did it.

Seems to be going OK so far, I have at least got a bearably readable friends page—it'd be nice if one of the themes available during Beta wasn't a white background, it was giving me headaches and I'm nowhere near as bad as some are.

I plan to write up a how-to anyway, would people be interested in full source for it? I've always found fiddling around with S2 to be more effort than its worth, hence the need to get a stylesheet I could edit ASAP. I reckon it'd definitely be worth getting the codebase for Zesty (and eventually Negatives for SB) into a styleable position, but I'm guessing I'm doubling up some work already being done.

Ah well. Haven't done proper code hacking for ages—it's still a bit flaky, need to finish some tweaks just on what I've managed.

If anyone can figure out how I can get my header to shrink down a bit, or how to get the navigation menu over to the right of the page, I'd be grateful.

And I do plan to get back to this layout at some point, I'm currently using just Core2 with my own stylesheet, I like it.

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So...

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 23:26:06 GMT

Import seems to have worked well, need to check it all out and fiddle with some stuff.

Then, well, content has been a bit low everywhere of late. I'd blame it on the norovirus but that's only been for the last three days.

I guess I need some Dw icons now.

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