I was trying to figure out why Alan’s Feed2JS tool wasn’t displaying dates for my weblog feed. Alan pointed out that it was an RSS 0.91 feed, so it didn’t have dates. Duh.
After an email to the Blosxom group, and some googling, I’ve got an RSS 1.0 feed available. Turns out I needed an additional plugin to give the minimal Blosxom script some extra brains, and then some flavour files to tell it how to render the feed.
Read MoreI’ve just installed Alan Levine’s handy Feed2JS tool, which takes any RSS feed and spits out a couple of lines of HTML/Javascript for embedding it on any web page. Very handy stuff.
It’s available here if anyone on campus needs it. I’m using it to aggregate the active Learning Commons weblogs onto a single page here.
Thanks, Alan!
UPDATE: (2004/08/04) I have noticed that the Feed2js deployed on commons is being pretty heavily abused. It’s being used by German dating sites, and many many other questionable (and certainly non-academic) uses. The number of requests on our server for the single feed2js.php file is an order of magnitude greater than the next-most-requested file. I’m temporarily disabling Feed2js for a while.
Read MoreJust came across this comparison of open source licenses from OpenFoundry.org.
Almost plain english, and provides a nice at-a-glance table of key features and restrictions of the various licenses. They compare the 10 most popular licenses, as used by projects on SourceForge.net
This should be a useful companion to the listing of actual OSI-Approved licenses from the Open Source Intiative.
Read MoreI was thinking a bit over the weekend about modifying Jay Allen’s awesome MT-Blacklist plugin to work with Blosxom. I just did some googling, and searching of the Yahoo Group for Blosxom, and came up with Doug Alcorn’s BlogSpam.
It’s based on the MT-Blacklist plugin, and uses the same blacklist.txt file. It even merges in email notification of new writebacks, making my own wbnotify_nosendmail hack unnecessary and redundant.
If you’re thinking of using Blosxom as a weblog in a public space, do yourself a favour and grab BlogSpam. It replaces the default writeback plugin, and only requires some minor customization. (I added some additional stuff to quote the name in the sender’s email address, and to use a specified mailserver rather than localhost - I’ll probably do some other minor modification to tweak the output message as well).
Read MoreThe Library of Congress just released this report, which discusses rights expression languages (the stuff that drives usable DRM).
Here’s a link to the PDF. Haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but it might come in handy.
Read MoreI’m poking around in the Pachyderm Flash template source files, and just came across this gem:
shell.isloaded = "nononono";
I’m not sure what “nononono” means, or where it came from. It may have been just too obvious or boring to use this instead:
shell.isloaded = false;
Especially when the code to test the shell.isloaded variable seems to expect a boolean anyway. At least the original authors had a sense of humour… ;-)
Rachel Smith, with the New Media Consortium, has just released an excellent set of guidelines for authors of learning objects.
It’s the first document I’ve seen that focusses more on the educational side of things, rather than the technical. This approach is much needed, since the real implications of this stuff are not technical at all…
And, her flexible learning-object-is-whatever-it-needs-to-be-as-long-as-it’s-educational operational definition of “learning object” works for me, too.
Read MoreI was frustrated because the Blosxom wbnotify plugin wouldn’t work if you don’t have sendmail enabled on your host. I don’t have it turned on on the commons webserver, so writeback notifications failed.
As my first Perl coding ever, I modified the wbnotify plugin by Pasi Savolainen so that it uses the Perl module Net::SMTP rather than sendmail.
After some tweaking (mostly because I can’t seem to hit the right keys to save my life today. Come onMotrin, do your stuff), it’s working, and happily sending notifications of new writebacks.
Read MoreI’ve had SSHPassKey installed for a while now - Bill Bumgarner wrote it back in his CodeFab days (pre-Apple), in order to make ProjectBuilder ask nicely for a CVS password.
I’d forgotten about it for a while (haven’t been using CVS), but I fired it up yesterday and set it to respond to SSH password requests - so I get a nice GUI to ask for it - and better yet, it’s Keychain aware, so I can ignore it after it’s set once.
Read MoreDoh. I’ve been trying to get this working all day, to no avail. My installation of Macromedia Studio MX 2004 (with Flash MX 2004 Pro), has suddenly decided it doesn’t want to launch.
I needed both Dreamweaver and Flash today, and neither one wanted to show up to the party. Fell back on BBEdit to edit the HTML (actually, that was probably more efficient anyway, so no biggie), but I have to go through some Flash files to evaluate some requirements for a project. And that’s hard to do when Flash doesn’t want to run.
Read MoreThe guys at CodingMonkeys have just announced the release of SubEthaEdit 2.0
It looks basically the same (after a 30-second tryout), but has code completion, and the ability to invite folks to a shared document.
Looks like a good release (more info here: SubEthaEdit - Features), but it’s got a new network protocol which isn’t compatible with 1.0 - so everyone has to upgrade. So, go upgrade! ;-)
Read MoreAlan just sent me a link to Mark Pilgrim’s Freedom 0 [dive into mark] post on the whole MovableType3 thing. It’s a really good read, and is pretty much in sync with my thoughts on the matter.
I’ve been thinking about this for a while (even before MT3). What we’ve got now in “blogspace” is essentially a monoculture.
Just about everyone runs MovableType. It makes a nice, big, juicy target for spamroaches/rat-bastards. Same problem in the OS world - Windows makes a nice juicy target because it’s essentially a monoculture. The folks who are in the “smaller”, secondary tools, (Blosxom, WordPress - for now, MacOSX, etc…) are somewhat sheltered, because they aren’t the low hanging fruit. Much bigger ROI for spammers to focus on the dominant tools(s), and forget about the little guys.
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