Tag Archive for 'blogging'

Minor blog changes

Published
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Ian Dexter
on 25 May 2008
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You’ll probably notice the cool Flash tag cloud on the sidebar. That’s courtesy of Roy Tanck’s WP-Cumulus plugin. Thanks, @sofimi for the heads up.

I’m still on K2 (RC3), but I’ve ditched its Sidebar Manager for WP’s widgets. SBM has been causing lots of issues for me lately, but I haven’t had the time to muck around it. (When did I ever have time for anything, anyway? ;)) It’s working fine in my sandbox, though — well, RC5 at least, but I’m not that keen on porting my tweaks yet to that release.

I haven’t been posting here lately. Like a few other bloggers I know, Twitter (and FriendFeed) has been the choice for posting “lifestream” tidbits. But, heck, I don’t even use Twitter that much now (prolly, the IT sec audit at work has something to do with it, heh).

Revisiting my tumblog

Published
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Ian Dexter
on 14 April 2008
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I’ve made several improvements to my tumblog.

Previously, I merely plugged in the RSS output from Yahoo! Pipes to Feedburner, and served up the content using Buzzboost. Using techniques from Cristiano Betta’s lifestream and elsewhere, I simplified and modularized the Yahoo! Pipes mashup.

I then used the pipe’s JSON output and styled it with some simple CSS. I didn’t want too much dependence on other JavaScript libraries so I used native code as much as possible, except for dynamically loading the JSON object from Pipes (for which I used the JSONscriptRequest class). I’m still having trouble getting the logic of reloading the content asynchronously: for now, I simply destroy the child element containing the tumblog items and rewrite everything — expensive, I know.

I’ve also been thinking of creating a Google Gadget out of this, but the iGoogle API’s FetchFeedAsJSON method is somewhat limited. I may have to use my current approach of dynamically creating a JSON script request into the gadget.

Well, without too much fanfare, the code is over here, and the tumblog is right here.

Movable

Published
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Ian Dexter
on 15 December 2007
in Play
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Just a quickie. Movable Type is now open source (under GPL), so I’m testing it out.Movable Type

Like Wordpress, it’s very easy to install. Provided you have the database (MySQL, PostgreSQL, or SQLite), all you have to do is 

$ wget http://www.movabletype.org/opensource/nightlies/MTOS-4.1-en-boomer-r1116-20071214.tar.gz
$ tar xzvf MTOS-4.1-en-boomer-r1116-20071214.tar.gz
$ mv MTOS-4.1-en-boomer-r1116-20071214/* .

Then browse to http://domain.name/path/to/your/MT/install, and follow the prompts. Nightly builds are available, but if you want the bleeding edge, you can grab it through SVN (there’s an extra make me step, though).

The interface is intuitive, with the dashboard having that warm AJAXy feel, but it was a little too slow for my taste. Applying new styles (or “themes”, in Wordpress parlance) is as easy as select and apply, but adding widgets is counter-intuitive: you’d have to edit the style manually to add the widget code snippet.

The mix of Perl and PHP code is a bit weird for me as well — heck, I’m a purist: give me PHP or Perl, but not both. ;) There’s also the lack of specifying table prefixes for the database. I use a single database instance for my side projects, and I’m used to just adding prefixes to distinguish the apps, but apparently (from what I have read from the docs so far), there’s no way to configure that in MT.

Other than that, it’s a cool new toy. There’s no immediate plan of moving over to MT, but it’s well worth checking it out.

Tumblog

Published
by
Ian Dexter
on 4 November 2007
in Play
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I know, it’s supposed to be a tumblelog, but what the heck. I was able to squeeze out one for another domain I maintain: iandexter.com.

It was supposed to be for side projects, but since I’m neck-deep in work, I decided to make it a launch pad for my “presence” in the internet. But why stop there? So I decided to aggregate all that content, using Yahoo! Pipes:

Aggregating presence

Plunk the resulting RSS to Feedburner, and use BuzzBoost to put out HTML:

BuzzBoost

Then, voila! My very own tumblog.

Reportage on the Glorietta blast

Published
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Ian Dexter
on 20 October 2007
in In-between
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I cannot add anything original to the current news about the blast that rocked Glorietta, a mall in the Makati central business district, so here’s a recap of the event, from bloggers’ perspective:

This list is by no means exhaustive, nor would I attempt to make one. This is merely a snapshot of how bloggers perceive the event. It would also be interesting to note how these differ from how mainstream media tackles this.

Surprisingly, media people rose the occasion and — true to their calling — told the news as it is, based on whatever facts they had at the time. Analysis, speculations — editorials — can come later. This is news, this is journalism at work.