Open Hatch

Archive for the ‘Techie Stuff’ Category

Blah blah blah blah technology blah show

I’ve been wanting to make this for a long time, ever since learning that this Google search will find mp3s or wmas in open web directories:

{-inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:”index of” +”last modified” +”parent directory” +description +size +(wma|mp3) “Twilight Zone”}

Where “Twilight Zone” would be a band or song title you’re looking for.

What I’ve wanted to do is make a search box which would pass all those paramaters to Google for you so that you don’t have to remember all that; just type the band or song title and go.

I Finally found this page which does the trick, looked at its source, and then customized it for myself. I’ve placed it in a page accessible from the “Menu” or Pages section of this blog in the upper-right. Here again is the direct link.

In reference to the desired features expressed in this entry (and not minding those amusements), I found personal journal software that has them. I think this application is great. Makes keeping a digital journal (I’m bereft of more fashionable journaling abilities) much less intimidating, once you grasp how the thing is laid out and organized. I only found a hang quirk deleting old entries with it (but who wants to do that? Honesty, honesty..) but they still delete OK, and other than that it’s much better than a lot of things I’ve tried. Intuitive, not too fussy, secure, and exporting to one big Word or .rtf or many other kinds of files is a snap (again, if you get the hang of the program).

After purging myself with the following screed, I had an idea.  Blogger allows you to set up a secret email address to a blog, which, if you send to, will generate a blog post from whatever email you send.  I think I have seen some blogs that incorporate this functionality in conjunction with programs that create what would seem like a rational english post but is truly only an algorythmically created robot message advertizing some service [yes, reading the next article I will link, some people abuse human-created content from others by outright stealing blog posts through xml newsfeeds, and mixing their little spam messages into the posts!]  Well, certain of email addresses in my administration have been DESTROYED by spammers.  Who send shameless messages.  And sometimes outright useless gobledy-gook.  So let’s at least have a public record somewhere to display all the shame of it.

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[Update: Maybe it's not in beta, but released. I'll look further into it later..]

I think this thing, in testing, is a tool to track what comments you make at other people’s blogs. Most blogs allow you to provide a URL to your own blog when you comment. I presume this tool would have you provide a URL to your own comment tracking database instead, which would auto-generate an entry in a database, then add it to a dynamically generated list of links at your own blog to your comments at other blogs. I’ve thought of programming that, but figured someone else probably has and is doing it better.

Right now it’s in beta. I’ll watch this one.

Another cool thing: a blogroll service where you just enter the URL of a blog/site you found that you like, and it adds it to your dynamic blogroll (list of blogs and sites you follow), which I believe you can dynamically load at your blog. Otherwise I have to wander into my template through several links, then republish, and I think it’s that way for most blogging tools, not just movable type.

I wrote a script that creates thumbnail galleries I can put in a blog. I made it so I can just upload images into their own directory, invoke the script with a .php include, and it will make all the thumbnails and the gallery for me. Following is an example gallery from the script.

The main script is here and the library script it uses is here. You are free at least to use the former for any purpose; I saw no restrictions on the latter by the person who wrote it.

I was just searching for a php script to intergrate image galleries into a blog (I started writing one and figured out how to include .php scripts in a blog – I had tried it before but forgot to have the index template of my Movable Type blog output a .php script, so the include wasn’t called), and found this page which led me to google’s Summer of Code program (very cool!) which led to me finding XWiki which apparently has WYSIWYG editing. I haven’t looked into whether MediaWiki has this per my last entry on this topic, and glanced back at the wikiog I found: the page for it is loading extremely slowly, and other pages are loading fine. I hope that’s just a fluke.

Impressive: someone has made a wiki/blog out of XWiki.

This morning I’m thinking again about my want to create an ambitious internet application where people can post their art, and art in development, and have peers give feedback. I may also want it to be a repository of people’s reviews and information about media (much like the web site IMDB) for reference and inspiration. I think this would be a very long-term/far-off project because I’ve decided to pursue acting and video game art instead of programming.
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