On my iPhone, I use Google Reader (mobile edition) and Tweetie to follow RSS feeds and Twitter respectively. I star items which look interesting, to save for later reading.
A little Yahoo Pipe combines the RSS feeds of these two sets of starred items, and I’ve put together a little script (using SimplePie) optimised for the iPhone layout to:
- Display the combined list of the latest starred items
- Highlight Twitter content (with a blue background) to distinguish from blogs
- Use CSS to highlight items I’ve read
Simple as that. Let’s see if it improves the ‘starred items’ reading experience on the train journey…
A support forum for Wikipedia platform Mediawiki unearths a deep truth about the world:
“The creator of the wiki is given both bureaucrat and sysop rights by default. They could, potentially, remove themselves from the sysop group to then have less rights than other normal sysops, but they could easily add the group back to themselves.
Consider this analogy: Groups in MediaWiki are like clubs. Say that the “sysop” club gives you free pizza and soda, and the “bureaucrat” club gives you free paper plates. When you belong to both clubs, you get the plates, pizza, and soda. However, if you quit the sysop club and are only in the bureaucrat club, all you get are the plates with no pizza and soda to go along with it. Yes, that isn’t the best analogy, but it does help to illustrate the point that groups are kept separate from one another and as such it is pointless to be a bureaucrat without also being a sysop
—Skizzerz”
Source: http://www.mwusers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=8951
I’ve used Flickr and an RSS reader for years. But until tonight, I couldn’t figure out how to subscribe to a feed of comments left by my Flickr contacts on my photos (as opposed to the feed of actual images in my photostream, which Flickr makes quite easy to get).
There must be an easier way than this, but it works:
1. Use idGettr to help convert your friendly Flickr profile name (I’m lesteph) into the numeric ID Flickr uses behind the scenes to manage your account.
2. Grab the URL for the Atom feed of activity (i.e. comments) on your photostream, as per the Flickr API docs.
3. Add your numeric Flickr user id to the API URI:
http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/activity.gne?user_id=XXXXXXXXX@XXX
Et voila. Try out the feed, and subscribe to it in your reader.
Most of the tools here are somewhat niche - if you need to bash sprockets of type X, then they’ll help.
But there’s a tool which pretty much everyone even tangentially involved in working on web projects should install and that’s web developer toolbars.
The Firefox Web Developer Toolbar adds a massively useful set of tools to your browser, including the ability to turn stylesheets and images on and off easily to simulate the experience of different visitors, disable your cache, disable Javascript, measure parts of your design using a pixel ruler, view the generated source (after all the scripts have run), and check the design at different screen resolutions. Most useful of all, it lets you hover over different elements of the page, highlighting them in red outline, and understand which elements, IDs and classes affect them - something that makes CSS debugging much easier.
It’s also worth installing the IE Developer Toolbar which adds similar (but not quite so sophisticated) tools to the notoriously fickle Interner Explorer.
I’ve mentioned recently using the JW Flash Media Player and the associated Wordpress plugin to enable easy embedding of Flash videos in Wordpress.
Our corporate network is - ahem - somewhat antiquated, and I was having problems getting the JW Flash Media Player to work properly on our machines. Turns out that we’re on and older version of Flash (7, rather than 8 or 9) and this seemed to be the root of the problem.
After a bit of searching, I found the Mini Flash Video Player by RichNetApps. This is a really simple, slightly bare-bones video player which works nicely even with ancient Flash versions.
Just drop the player files into your web directory, and add the code to your HTML. Here’s mine as an example:
<div class="flvPlayer">
<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=7,0,0,0" width="320" height="260" id="player" align="middle">
<param name="movie" value="/wp-content/miniflvplayer/player.swf?file=/uploaded/video.flv&aplay=false&autorew=false&title=Video+Title" />
<param name="menu" value="true" /><param name="quality" value="high" />
<param name="bgcolor" value="#ffffff" />
<embed src="/wp-content/miniflvplayer/player.swf?file=/uploaded/video.flv&aplay=false&autorew=false&title=Video+Title" menu="true" quality="high" bgcolor="#ffffff" width="320" height="260" name="player" align="middle" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" />
</object>
</div>
For small projects, there’s a lot to be said for self-hosting the video - aside from the Flash version quirks of our network, it’s not the headache I expected it to be.
If you do stuff with WordPress, then there are two plug-ins you should definitely include in your toolkit: Subscribe2 and Subscribe-to-comments. The bottom line is: despite the advantages, few people use RSS, and few people remember to revisit your site to monitor comment threads and new postings. Email is still king.
Subscribe2 is a pretty fully-featured email subscription tool. You drop a special comment into a post or paste the subscription form into a template and voila: your readers can sign up to receive notifications by email whenever you post something new.
Subscribe-to-comments (confusingly similarly-named) does a different job: it adds a checkbox to your comments form for commenters to receive an email notification when a new comment is added to the thread. Keeping track of the conversation in a comment thread is a bit hit-and-miss: with this plug-in, it’s easier for your readers to monitor and rejoin the thread if they want to.
I was looking for a nice way to embed videos for an internal Wordpress blog. So hosting videos on YouTube wasn’t an option.
The WP-FLV plug-in is a single file plug-in for Wordpress which lets you add a <flv> tag into your posts referencing the video you want to embed. This then calls the JW Flash Media Player and presents a nice embedded player.
Tip: Wordpress is pretty strict about stripping out what it sees as dodgy code from the WYSIWYG editor. So if you want to allow the page/post to remain editable but don’t want to have the suspicious-looking <flv> element stripped out, change the following line in wp-flv.php:
preg_match_all (‘!<flv([^>]*)[ ]*[/]*>!i’, $content, $matches);
to:
preg_match_all (‘!\[flv([^>]*)[ ]*[/]*\]!i’, $content, $matches);
and instead of:
<flv href=’link/to/vid.flv’ autostart=’true’ />
use the following snippet in your post:
[flv href=’link/to/vid.flv’ autostart=’true’ /]
I was looking for a site search tool to run on PHP and MySQL, and didn’t just want to use Google Custom Search.
Sphider is nice: crawls your site (clean, uncluttered admin interface is a bit like a Google Mini), and has a simple, customisable template for results, and works fast. It also has ‘Did you mean?’ suggestions to help correct typos in users’ queries.
You can set up a cron job to call the spider to recrawl your site nightly.
See it in action: http://www.thebigopportunity.org.uk/
