Friend Feed Syndication
Sun, August 30th 2009 at 11:25pm
I have been considering ways to aggregate my content from Twitter, Facebook, Delicious and Google Reader for a little while now. The best way seemed to be to make my own plugin that would pull data in from these various sources and allow me to display it on custom pages on my site. But the more I thought about it the more I realized that this is just what Friend Feed does already. It pulls all your “stuff” into one place and gives you a running feed of all that content.
So I thought I would just grab the RSS from Friend Feed important it and do some minor manipulation on the data for what I wanted. But I was quite shocked to see that Friend Feed inserts display styles and HTML into their RSS feed which makes it very hard to parse and manipulate the data. The Friend Feed engineers are meant to be top Google people and it was quite surprising to me the way they mixed all the display syntax into a data sharing format. It basically makes the feed useless for any application other than having a Friend Feed like box on your site.
So now I am back to designing/coding/using WordPress modules to do it. Gina Trapani’s Twitalytic looks awesome, and I am thinking of looking over that code and seeing if it will work as a general aggregator with interesting stats to boot.
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Thanks for Visiting
Sat, August 15th 2009 at 11:46am
After upgrading the site I decided to spend a little time actually tracking visitors to the site, which I have not really done in the past. So I signed up for Google Analytics installed the small blob of JS code and let it go.
The amount of data Google Analytics let’s you track in an easy way is pretty amazing. You can see entrance and exit pages, which links on a page were clicked on and a whole host of other things. It’s a huge step up from the standard Webalizer I used to use, which basically just shows how many visitors you have.
Anyway, I was actually quite surprised how many people visit the site (apart from me debugging 
) and just wanted say thanks for coming and I will try to post some more useful stuff soon.
I was also quite interested how many hits very old posts were getting. A lot of hits were going to “node/36″ which is a 404 now and linked to an old wallpaper I posted while playing around with Photoshop. It showed me how important old content can be when moving a site. If nothing else it can act as a gateway to get people into the rest of the site.
Just because I forgot about something I did a few years ago does not mean Google forgot about it. I just wish all the CMS systems will settle on a standard URL format so it would be easier to migrate to new systems and map old URLs onto you new system.
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Short URL’s
Sat, August 8th 2009 at 03:49pm
After installing WordPress one of the first things I wanted to do was make a custom Short URL generator for the site. However after doing a quick search for plugins I found out two modules that will do what I need. The first creates short links for all the posts on the site, the second provides a directory of links to external sites. Both modules route all the links through a custom domain I bought. more »
Moved to WordPress!
Fri, August 7th 2009 at 11:54pm
If you have been reading recently then you know that I have been having a few problems configuring Drupal 6 after upgrading from version 4.7. After looking through many configuration settings, and all the modules needed to do what I wanted I could see that Drupal was too much for what I needed.
more »
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WordPress For the Win?
Wed, August 5th 2009 at 03:03am
Well after giving Drupal 6 a quick shot I decided that it is no longer for me. Drupal has always been a kitchen sink kind of system, and that’s what it’s meant to be. After looking at all the configuration options, and how many issues I ran into during a simple upgrade and updating a theme I decided it was time to look for something a little more polished. Drupal is still great for creating a large community site, but if you are just looking for a blog or a central place for all your online stuff then it’s just overkill.
So with that I decided to give WordPress a try, and initial impressions are good. I have a blog up and running, and I am currently working on getting my old posts out of Drupal (much much harder than it should be) and importing into WordPress. I found a few tutorials for the move from Drupal, but most involve direct manupulation of the database, which in my eyes is a bad idea. So instead I am writing a small script that exports some basic Drupal post data into an XML file, then use the WordPress Import modules to import the data. So far it’s working well.
WordPress just seems much more focused on what I need right now, which is basically a blog. But it also seems to offer a lot of extensibility via modules and themes. I am about 60% of the way through creating a custom theme and it all seems quite well though out. Hopefully everything will be all back together by Monday. This will teach me to stop being lazy and just make a Linux server for testing next time, I was sure I could get everything upgraded in a day or two. 
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Upgraded to Drupal 6.0
Sun, August 2nd 2009 at 08:57pm
As you can see from the default theme I decided to upgrade the site to Drupal 6.0. I know that I have said in the past to never develop on your main site, but I thought what the hell. It’s not like this is a mission critical site or anything.
Anyway, I got a few database warnings when upgrading and the site is acting a little funky. I just cleared the site cache information and it seems to be working a little better. So hopefully that was it.
However I am considering clearing out all the info in the database and starting from scratch. I have over 1000 users and when I was looking at them 90% are spam users who must have got in before I disabled user accounts.
I will continue to post as I go so we can experience it together.
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Twitter Tags in other Contexts
Sat, August 1st 2009 at 12:59am
When thinking about formats and design of the new site I started thinking about the Twitter markup characters they use. Due the to the short size of Tweets length becomes important. Because of this they use some single characters to signify special words.
For example, the @ symbol is used to show that a Tweet is directed at a person. @veronica for example shows that your Tweet is directed at Veronica Belmont. The hash symbol (#) is used to signify Tags or important terms in your post. These conventions were not invented by Twitter, but they could still be useful in other situations.
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CodeMonkeyX.net: Version 6
Wed, July 29th 2009 at 03:21am
Been working on a new design for the site over the weekend and I am really happy with what I have so far. I took a few cues from twitter, after using it for a week or so I really love the simplicity of how everything works. It really motivated me to try and think of simpler ways to do and display things.
As part of the design I felt a little nostalgic and wanted to put a version number or founded on date on the new design. So I went to the Wayback Machine on the Internet Archive to view past versions of my site. It’s was really fun reading some of the old posts, what I thought was important then and the terrible design.
When you look back at things from several years ago you wonder if you will be looking at the stuff you are doing now and laughing at it ten years in the future.
The design is just a starting point right now, and the main thing I need to do is figure out how to get rails to do everything I want.
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Drupal or SquareSpace
Thu, June 18th 2009 at 10:08pm
As you have probably noticed I have been more active in the past week on the site. Maybe it’s the sunny weather?, maybe it’s the fact I have stopped playing WoW every night? Who knows. But either way I am working on the site again and after coming back after an extended time this older version of Drupal seems inadequate. It’s time again to upgrade, but to what. There are a few new options around so I have been looking into a couple of them.
Revision3 and Twit.tv are two of my favorite sites to visit, and as any fan of those site will know they bombard you with SquareSpace ads. So know that I am looking into options I decided the give them a look first. After signing up for their free trial I was quite impressed with the WYSIWYG editing features. I quickly had a decent looking blog site up and running in a few hours.
The thing I like the most is just that they take care of all the little things for you, like layout CSS, blockquote formatting, and story entry. These little details always seem to end up taking the most time.
The post entry system is also nice.
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Comments
Sun, July 8th 2007 at 11:47pm
Today I was going to re-enable comments on the site. It’s not like this is a heavy traffic site or anything, but I did always enjoy getting feedback from the people who visit the site.
But that was before I looked at my user list. My user list is packed with obvious bot names. And it seems like some of the users have visited a couple of times recently. So I know that if I enable comments again I will just be flooded with comment spam.
Seems like a new version of Drupal is coming out soon, so maybe I will upgrade to that and try some of the anti spam modules out there. Probably just one of those anti-bot images when user register will work out.
Another option would be to start a forum up again, but sometimes I find it depressing when I only get 1 post a week and it’s mine.
So I will see what happens.