Greggman.com Category (code)

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Flickdown 2.0

I updated flickrdown for the release version of .NET 2.0 and added support for private images, tags and groups. You can download it here.

FlickrDown

I needed a program to download a friend's images from flickr so I whipped this up.

Tanjunka

1 of the reasons I haven't been updating my website as much as before is I've been spending nearly all my free time writing this software.

Today I just got it to the point that I think I can use it on this site. I wrote it basically because at the time, last November, I couldn't find any blogging software that did what Tanjunka does. Basically it lets you post entries to your blog with photos faster than any other software I've used. Drag in the photos, type a your entry, pick post. By default Tanjunka will resize the photos to a blog friendly size. It always seemed to take 5 to 15 extra minutes to post anything with a photo to a blog so my goal was to get rid of that problem. The easier it is the more likely I'l post.

Tanjunka can do basic photo editing so hopefully I won't have to go to photoshop anymore.

Javascript Sidebars

I saw this post about how to put part of your moblog on a side bar on your front page using PHP. Getting PHP to run can be trouble for some or your ISP might not support it. I also saw this link on how to get it to work using some MT plugin. That's of course an MT specific solution and it has the disadvantage that the bar doesn't update automatically.

Well, here's a way to get it to both update automatically and not require PHP or any plugs.

That is to have your blog generate a javascript page generator page for you (that's a mouth full) and then put a short javascript link on your main page. This is how blogrolling.com works for example.

In your moblog make a new index template and set the output file to "mobar.js"

Set the Template Body to something like this

mymobar('Moblog'+

"<$MTEntryTitle encode_js="1"$>"+
"Posted: <$MTEntryDate encode_js="1"$>"+
"<$MTEntryBody encode_js="1"$>"+
"\" target=_blank name=\"comments\">Comments | \" target=_blank>View all"+

'') ;

function mymobar( s ) {
  document.write( s );
}

rebuild

Now go to your main blog and edit the template for your front page. In the spot you want your mobar to appear put in this line

Now, if you didn't make any typos and you fixed (http://yourblog.com/moblog/mobar.js") to point to the mobar.js on your site you should have a live mobar on your blog.

If you want to modify it, the important parts are that each line in your template that generates text needs to have quotes around it and it needs to end with a + sign. In top of that you need to add encode_js="1" to tell movabletype to adjust anything it outputs to work with Javascript. And on top of that you need to make sure any quotes you use are escaped with a backslash \ , like for example the links HTML in the example above. If you make a mistake the browsers will not display anything where you expected your sidebar to appear and you'll get a javascript error. It can be a pain to debug if you are not used to alll that but once you get it correct it should work fine.

This method will work with almost any blogging system. It will even work across servers. For example it's what I use to get the headlines from game-science.com to appear on the tokyopia.com front page on the right bar. The game-science people put in a template to generate a javascript file that outputs their headlines and then I just put the one line javascript on our site to use their headlines.

The only issue is the browser viewing the page must support Javascript but half the stuff on the web requires javascript now-a-days so I suspect that's not a big problem.

Furl

Furl was recently recommended to me. It's a site that lets you keep your net bookmarks online but more than that, it will keep copies of the pages for you if you want so even if the original site disappears you'll still have the info. It also lets you share your bookmarks in various ways. Here's mine so far. I'm not sure if anyone will find them useful but I find it useful to be able to bookmark something at work and then reference it at home and visa versa.

It also lets you present your bookmarks as blog entries if you want, giving a comment to each one and allowing others to comment as well.

It's even got importing and exporting to and from IE and Mozilla.

I'm not sure what the original intent was, blog tool, bookmark tool or what but either way it's pretty cool.

Thumbs

I finally got my first shareware program online. I don't really expect it to sell but it was fun to make it and see all the stuff I had to do to get it ready to sell. You can check it out here.