Category — Blogging

Well, I’ve finally written my first widget for WordPress.  Introducing Movie Widget!

I wanted a quick way to randomly display titles from my DVD collection on my blog.  I use Movie Collector to manage the collection, so I exported some XML from the program and started parsing it up.  Eventually, this little widget was born.

I mostly wrote this for myself (in fact, it started out as just custom code in my theme) but I’ve been wanting to try my hand at writing a widget for a while, so I figured I would widgetize the code.  Once it was a widget, I decided that widgets are made to be shared and that I should make it available to anyone else who happens to use both Movie Collector and WordPress.

You can get the plugin here.

So, I was writing a post on how I was checking out Contribute CS3, but it didn’t go so well.

Adobe bills Contribute as

Adobe® Contribute® CS3 enables content authors to quickly and easily update existing websites and blogs while maintaining site integrity — with no technical expertise required.

A lofty goal to be sure. Honestly, I was very excited to try it. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to provide very much value add to the whole blogging experience.  To make matters worse, just as I was in the process of saying that it didn’t provide better:

• Writing experience
• Editing
• Spell checking
• or Previewing

when the program just up and pooped the bed.  Yup, just froze up on me.  In fact, here is a little pic of it doing just that.

Talk about disappointment!  Helpful blogging tool for the technically challenged?  I think not.  The thing didn’t even HAVE the word blog in the darn spell checker.  Need I say more?

And, while I’m at it, what’s so hard about writing a new post in WordPress, or MT or Blogger for that matter.   If for some crazy reason their WYSIWYG editors scare the pants off of some one, just use email submission.  Easy, quick and done from their email application of choice!

Still, I wish that Contribute had the chops to go the distance.  I think there is room for a tool of this nature – there’s a lot of space between Dreamweaver and Outlook.  Maybe CS4 will see a better incarnation.

PS – After the crap that I gave Contribute for not having Blog in the spell checking dictionary, WordPress doesn’t have its own name in the dictionary either…  Wow, I think that’s the first thing I’ve ever said about WordPress that can be construed as even remotely negative.    Not bad for nearly 2 years!

This is a great little utility for encoding and decoding URLs.  It quickly turns gobbledygook like:

http%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2Fdata%2Ffeed%2Fapi%2Fuser%2Fmilowerx%2Falbumid%2F5123888780136287569%3Fkind%3Dphoto%26alt%3Drss%26authkey%3D5M3WrH3fEkY"

into something more useable like:

http://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/api/
user/milowerx/albumid/5123888780136287569?
kind=photo&alt=rss&authkey=5M3WrH3fEkY

AND, vice-versa for using URL’s programmatically.

Hey!  Wow, two posts in one day…  I guess I should buy a lottery ticket or something.

UPDATE!

There is now a “better” way to embed Picasa slideshows in your WordPress posts.

• A direct embed now works with WP (as of v2.6.2 AFIK). Check out this new post for some additional info.
• The easiest way, IMO, is to use my new plugin, Postcasa. All you have to do is put the Picasa RSS link between this simple shortcode, and the plugin does the rest.

Example:

[postcasa]http://MyRSSurl[/postcasa]

easily becomes:

Original Post

My brother wanted to put a Picasa slide show in his blog.  He can’t help it – he’s a big Google Fanboy. 

Anyway, after searching around and trying at least 8 different plug-ins to try and get this to work I finally came upon the correct secret mixture to make it work.

Some of the plug-ins that didn’t work had these problems:

• Plug-in hasn’t been updated in several WP versions
• Plug-in didn’t work properly with the latest version of Flash
• RSS based plug-ins couldn’t actually download the feed because:
  • Security didn’t allow getting the feed and storing it locally
  • The feed had changed since the plug-in was released and it made the parser barf
• It required activating PHP code in each post, which is a security nightmare, IMHO

Well, for those of you who have been banging your head on your keyboard trying to get this working, here is the key:

1. Run over and download Kimili, a great embedded flash plug-in.  Kudos to Michael Bester for excellent piece of work.  There are others like it, but this one is full featured and seems more stable than others that I’ve tried.  Upload and activate the plug-in.

2. Use the new Picasa embedded slide-show tool to generate the embedding code – for example:

<embed> type="application/x-shockwave-flash" flashvars="host=picasaweb.google.com&RGB=0×000000&feed=http%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2Fdata%2Ffeed%2Fapi%2Fuser%2F
milowerx%2Falbumid%2F5123888780136287569%3Fkind%3D
photo%26alt%3Drss%26authkey%3D5M3WrH3fEkY" src="http://picasaweb.google.com
/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf" mce_src="http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" height="267" width="400"> <embed>


3. Now for the “kinda” tricky part…  You need to translate that code into code for Kimili.  Fortunately, it really isn’t that hard.  Kimili uses the syntax:

[ kml_flashembed movie="filename.swf" height="250" width="400" / ]


and uses fvars to pass parameters to the embedded flash video.  The Picasa code uses the slideshow.swf file as the “movie” and everything that is in flashvars should be put into fvars.  Make sure that you leave out the type parameter but include the height, width and pluginspage.

4. The final translated code should look like this:

[ kml_flashembed movie="http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf" height="267" width="400" fvars="host=picasaweb.google.com&RGB=0×000000&feed=http%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2Fdata%2Ffeed%2Fapi%2Fuser%2F
milowerx%2Falbumid%2F5123888780136287569%3Fkind%3Dphoto%26alt
%3Drss%26authkey%3D5M3WrH3fEkY"
pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"/ ]

You can see the results of all this hard work here.

They say that making several posts in a row with only a single picture and a few measly words of comment beneath is the Blogging equivalent of Al Sharpton’s presidential bids – you know that you’re out of the game, were probably never really in the game, yet for some sick, twisted reason you just can’t stop trying.

Ok, I admit it, “They” don’t say that at all – I just made it up, but it sounds about right to me.

There, now I’ve posted something more interesting than a darn picture.

So, I just moved my Blog from one system to another hosting service, Dreamhost.  They are one of the best hosts I’ve ever worked with – and that is saying a LOT!  Its a Unix-Only hosting service, but has amazing prices and wonderful policies of automatic disk space and bandwidth growth built-in to their plans.

I’ve arranged a discount for anyone who wants to sign up with them – they are pretty cool about that kind of stuff.  You can use Promo Code: DHMILOCO or simply start surfin’ through this link to get the discount.  Its anywhere from $30 to $50 depending upon the package you pick.  Given some of their sales going on, you can actually get service for next to nothing with this promo code!

Since I’ve just changed hosts too, please let me know if you see anything not working with the Blog!  Thanks!

A new version of Performancing is finally released – Version 1.2.

From their website, this version contains:

1. Image FTP Upload
2. Basic Metrics Chart viewing
3. Blogger.com improvements (Currently there are issues with the blogger.com service)
4. API url autodetect
5. Much improved stability and performance.
6. Fixed PFF from prompting password on firefox startup (for masterpassword users)
7. Optional “Powered by Performancing” tag insertion.
8. Better category support for other blogging platforms.
9. Quick File FTP upload (under Performancing in the context menu).
10. Bug fixes for trackbacks.

But, personally, I like the emphasis that they have put on getting inline spell checking to work properly. They outline it a bit more than they have in the past. Using Spellbound, I now see little red squiggles under all my poorly spelled words. While this is a nice thing to have in conjunction with Performancing, the fact is that it works in all of your text areas! No more copy and paste from a form into Word to check my spelling! A big “cheers” to the Spellbound crew for that, and for the Performancing crew for turning me on to it!

I’m also looking forward to testing the image upload feature…