Mar 06, 2006
Deepest Sender – FireFox Plugin
I just downloaded Deepest Sender, a plugin for Firefox that makes blogging really easy. From their page:
Deepest Sender is a client that will allow you to post to blogs from directly within Firefox. It is primarily a LiveJournal client, although it supports Blogger (Atom) and WordPress (metaWeblog) too, with support for more stuff to come. Note that the actual Deepest Sender website will always have the most up to date version.
Neat.
Seems to work too, if you are reading this post! 
Get your copy: http://deepestsender.mozdev.org/
Update: For some reason, it seems to hang during the post. It DOES actually post the article, but it doesn’t return with a “Success” message. Could be my setup and not Deepest Sender, I don’t know. I’ll look into it and let you know!
It could have something to do with how WordPress actually posts the writings… I know that Movable Type has a similar plugin, but it only puts the post in the system, it does not actually publish it. Publishing requires the implementation of a cron job (something I do not fully understand at the moment, so have not used
) to execute the “rebuild your site” command from time to time. Could be the same way with this system, but I honestly do not know. 
Well, I don’t think so actually, but thanks for mentioning it…
It does indeed publish the post, but still hangs sometime. I think it has to do with the update pings to technorati, etc.
Wordpress is a bit different that MT in that it doesn’t actually write out any HTML files, like MT and Blogger do. Its all database driven and each page is “created” on the fly so to speak.
The cron job that you are speaking of is simply a scheduler – like “cronology”. Windows would do the same thing with a “Scheduled task”. Forgive me if I’m telling you things that you know.
Cron is basically a “daemon” – an always running process – that executes queued commands at specified times. These commands are stored in whats called a crontab file – basically a tabulated file of chronicled jobs.
If you have shell access, you can do this:
% crontab -e
This will have you editing your cron file. BTW – the % is just meant to represent your shell prompt, you don’t actually type that. Your shell prompt may look like a filespec “~/home>” or even a the machine’s name “grouchy>” or something similar.
Anyway, once you are in the crontab file, put in:
0,15,30,45 * * * * cd (path to mt); ./tools/run-periodic-tasks
This will republish your blog every 15 minutes at 0,15,30 and 45 past the hour. The astericks are just wildcards for hour, day, week and month.
If you only wanted to do it every half-hour, you could just do:
0,30 * * * * cd (path to mt); ./tools/run-periodic-tasks
That should do it at :00 and :30 each hour of each day, etc.
If you don’t have shell access, you probably have some kind of control panel that allows you to setup a schedule for crontab jobs. Using that control panel, you would select the schedule that you want and then put:
cd (path to mt); ./tools/run-periodic-tasks
as the command that you want to run at the scheduled times.
Anyway, again, sorry if I’m telling you stuff you know.
Good luck, and thanks!
-A
Uh, last time I checked, don’t you actually post to a blog anyway from within Firefox or IE anyway? Why is this so special?
But, the crontab thing is completely different…
-A