Hackszine.com: Blogging Archives

Archive: Blogging

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September 25, 2008

Sweetcron - open source lifestream

There have been a lot of "lifestream" services popping up lately that aim to collect all of your Web 2.0 meanderings and assemble them into a slightly less schizophrenic view of your online life. It's a great idea, but the downside is that most of these are closed source and externally hosted, so you are essentially pumping all of your data into yet another system that you have no control over.

I was excited to learn about Sweetcron today. Created by Tokyo-based web developer Yongfook, it's a completely open-source, self-hosted take on the lifestream idea. Like most of the services, it's essentially a blog that also pulls your realtime participation data from sites like Twitter, Flickr, Digg, and Youtube. Unlike the service model, however, you can download it, skin it, and modify it however you like to suit your needs. You'll need a server to run it on, of course, but perhaps that's a small price to pay to take ownership of your digital life.

Sweetcron - Automated Lifestream Blog Software [via Brian]
Yongfook's Blog (and Sweetcron demo)
Sweetcron Downloads and Information at Google Code

April 6, 2008

Windows Mobile del.icio.us plugin

If you're a del.icio.us power user and you use Windows Mobile, you've probably missed the del.icio.us plugin that's available in desktop browsers like IE and Firefox. Dale Lane took this problem as a challenge and coded a nice little Pocket IE plugin that adds a del.icio.us submittal form to the browser's menu.

This is not as trivial as I expected - it took hundreds and hundreds of lines of code just to get a new entry in the Internet Explorer's menu that gets me access to the web browser object as an IWebBrowser2. And (perhaps especially so for someone who has been getting a little lazy with Java and C#! ), some of it is a little intricate and complex.
Still, once done I could use my access to the browser to launch my "post to del.icio.us" form and prefill it with the URL and page name of PIE's current page. From there, the form uses the public del.icio.us API to send all the info off to my del.icio.us list.

It's written in C++ and he's zipped up the full Visual Studio project. Based on the difficulty and lack of great documentation for doing something like this, this is actually a pretty solid find. If you want to make a PIE plugin, this would be a good place to start.

A del.icio.us plugin for Windows Mobile (or C++ is a pain)
Pocket IE del.icio.us plugin and source

May 24, 2007

reCAPTCHA: distributed book digitization while fighting spam

Thanks to spammers, we now are forced waste a substantial portion of time every day, typing in obfuscated wiggly letters to prove we are human. reCATPCHA is a slick idea for using the CAPTCHA system for doing something productive (...besides distinguising between homo sapien and homo computatralis).

With reCAPTCHA, the user is given two words, one known by the system and one from a book that previously failed character recognition. When the user enters both words, the sytem verifies the known word, proving human-ness, and submits the second word to a central database, which helps digitze books from the Internet Archive. With 60 million CAPTCHAs being solved every day, this could be a huge assist for portions of text that can't be handled by optical character regognition techniques. [via] Link

Related:
Negative CAPTCHA

May 12, 2007

Fun with speech synthesis

There's a new "Listen" link in the O'Reilly Network weblogs. It speaks the contents of an article, and sounds pretty nice. Dave Battino went on a search for some rhythmic posts, and made a fun remix out of it:

O'Reilly recently snuck a wacky speech synthesizer into our blogs: Clicking the "listen" link above will play back these words with a robotic voice. As a speech synth enthusiast, I immediately started looking for phrases that would produce funny rhythms. I found the first in Peter Drescher's recent blog about the Game Developers Conference

Command Line Interface for WordPress

Rod McFarland has put together some really cool AJAX-based CLI themes for WordPress. With his CLI 2.0 theme, you can browse blog entries by "cd"-ing through categories, typing "ls" to list article titles and "cat [articlenum]" to read a post. AJAX is used to make the whole experience seem like you are typing at a terminal, complete with tab-completion. He's even got a variant of the CLI theme that makes the interface look like a Commodore 64. How cool is that! [via]

Rod McFarland's Wordpress Themes -Link.
Download the CLI Theme -Link.
Download the Commodore Theme -Link.

April 23, 2007

Mapping the Blogosphere

Newblog-Crop
Amazing visualizations of the blogosphere @ Data Mining - [via] Link.

March 20, 2007

Twitter for Make/Craft/Hacks

Bre @ Makezine writes:

Some people are obsessed with twitter these days. We're not endorsing it, but if you're a twitterer and you want to stay up to date with the makezine blog, the craftzine blog, and the hackszine blog, then you can follow them on twitter and get updates about posts while mobile or on im. Whenever a new post goes up, it'll get twittered with the title of the article and the url of the post.

Unless you have unlimited text messages, you'll want to set it up with im or the internet. Twitter can generate a lot of text messages if you set up that option in the settings.

Big thanks to Kosso, rss wizard, who helped put this together.

Makezine on Twitter - Link
Craftzine on Twitter - Link
Hackszine on Twitter - Link

March 16, 2007

Twitter Your Home

Smart Home Hacks author Gordon Meyer has been experimenting with using Twitter for automated notifications and has hacked it to monitor his home. Check out how he gets a Twitter alert to let him know someone's at his front door.

Related:

Smart Home Hacks

March 7, 2007

Simplify Blogging Tasks with TextExpander

TextExpander for Amazon Affiliate Links

Over at the SmileOnMyMac Blog, Gordon Meyer (author of Smart Home Hacks) offers a great tip for speeding up tedious blogging tasks with TextExpander (Mac only):

Here's a great tip for bloggers and the like. I use TextExpander to create a handy macro for creating Amazon Affiliate links. It's much easier than using Amazon's web interface.

After defining a shortcut in TextExpander, adding an Amazon product link to his blog with his unique Amazon Affiliate information is as easy as copying the product's ISBN or ASIN the clipboard and activating the defined trigger, a task that could be repurposed for a variety of other repetitive processes.

Related:

Merlin Mann's TextExpander video tutorial for MacBreak

March 1, 2007

Pipe Your News Ticker

Pipes Picayune

Via the Hacks Authors' Blogs feed, we find Jim Bumgardner's Pipes Picayune & Daily Tube mashup news ticker:

Headlines from a BBC RSS feed are fed, via Y! Pipes, to my news ticker, which is implemented in Flash. Click on the spinning newspaper to read the story in full on the original website. This widget can work with any RSS feed, but I'm using the BBC because they tend to write short pithy headlines which fit my faux newspapers better.

You can include this widget (as well as others offered in Jim's bog post) in your own blog by copying the <iframe> code and specifying which feed you want to use.

UPDATE:

In the comments, Jim points out that he's now added an easy-to-use form for generating custom RSS tickers. Check out this feed of Hackszine:

Related:

February 27, 2007

Hacks Authors' Blogs: One Feed to Rule Them All

Hacks Authors' Feed

Ed note: In this guest post, veteran Hacks series author Paul Bausch takes on a challenge that's been on my todo list for a while, providing a solution that should be of immediate interest to all readers of this site and just might serve as a seed for future hacking around here.

I have a shelf full of O'Reilly Hacks books across a wide range of subjects. I contributed a couple in the Web Applications category, but I also have Hacks books about digital photography, hardware, scripting languages, gaming, and operating systems. The series has introduced me to a number of authors who are doing unusual things with technology in their particular area of expertise. I thought it would be interesting to follow each of these authors outside of the Hacks series by subscribing to their blogs, collectively. I figured it would be a good way to keep up with areas of technology that I'm not necessarily tuned into. I have a collection of blogs that I read to keep up with what's happening in Web Applications, but I don't have a sense of what's going on with gaming, for example.

So I went on a mission to gather the Hacks authors' blogs using the tools I know best: Web Applications. I started with an Amazon power query for books by O'Reilly with "Hacks" in the title via the Amazon API, and ended up with a list of 80 authors' full names. I plugged each name into Google by hand, adding the word "blog" (or if that didn't turn anything up, "hacks"). Then I visited the blog to make sure it was the Hacks author I was looking for, clicked the orange feed button in the Firefox address field to get the feed URL, and copied the URL to a text file. I ended up with a list of 40 feeds. (A 50% blogging rate among an arbitrary group isn't too shabby.)

I plugged the feeds into Google Reader, and renamed each feed the author's full name. Here's what the final list looks like (click for larger view):

Here's the list of feeds as OPML if you'd like to try it: Hacks Authors.

I've only been tuning into this list for a few days, but I'm already getting to know these authors in a new way. And I was right—I am finding out about developments in tech areas I don't normally tune into. I especially found Brian K. Jones's recent post about Fighting Specialization appropriate, something I wouldn't have seen otherwise.

Related:

February 16, 2007

Twingly Screensaver - The RSS world is yours!

This RSS globe screen saver looks like the google demo you see at their headquarters and at conferences - this globe spins around and shows pillars of activity in blog world. Fun eye candy for a spare computer, and a reminder that a lot of the world is still not lit up.

Twingly screensaver is visualizing the global blog activity in real time. Forget RSS readers where you see only what you're interested in. With Twingly screensaver you get a 24/7 stream of all (viewer discretion advised) blog activity, straight to your screen.

Twingly Screensaver Beta - [via] Link.

February 11, 2007

Back Up Your Blogger Blog

A quick way to back up your blogspot hosted blog is to use the built in search tool to dump your blog's entire contents. Using wget, this is something that could be easily incorporated into your nightly backup script. If you know your blog has fewer than 1000 entries, just use the following URL to dump everything in XML format:
http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?max-results=1000
From Google Operating System:

To download all the photos uploaded to your blog, DownThemAll comes to the rescue. The Firefox extension lets you download all the files with a certain extension from the current page, so it's a good way to download all the images from the previous listing.

With the full XML feed and the images, it's just a matter of writing a quick perl script to parse and import your entries into whatever format or system you wish to work with. -Link.

Related:

Automate Your Backups

February 9, 2007

IMify to Stikkit

IMify Stikkit

IMified and Stikkit seem to have heard my request. You can now post to Stikkit via IM.

February 8, 2007

Reply with Commenter Name at Lifehacker

Lifehacker Comments

Inspired by our post about personalizing your Flickr replies, the ever-resourceful and reader-focused Gina Trapani just whipped up her own code to add similar functionality to Lifehacker comments. Her Lifehacker Reply with Commenter Name Greasemonkey script adds a "[reply by name]" link to each comment on Lifehacker.com and inserts the commenter's name (prepended with an @ in v 0.2) into your response when you click that link.

Taking it one step further (thanks to the GNU Public License assigned to Gina's original code), Lifehacker reader Ali Karbassi modified the script to include links to the actual comment boxes you're replying to.

Nice work all around. It adds a nice personal touch to the comments thread, and it's great to see community improvements to the site's innovation. I know it makes my reader experience more enjoyable, both functionally and emotionally.

Links to Lifehacker Greasemonkey Scripts: