Software

Posting daily activity

A while ago, I configured del.icio.us to post the list of bookmarks from that day on my blocg.  For some reason this stopped working for me.  I like these type of automatic posts, as it makes it easy to share various pages.

I decided to write a plugin for LifeType that will import a rss feed, and then "summarize" the rss items and create a post with this text.  I probably could have gotten the del.icio.us blog posting to work, but If I created the plugin, this woud allow me to include Google Reader shared items, or Twitter tweets in the post.

Google Reader does have the ability to share a list of items, but  unfortunately, the only way to get this list is with some javascript.  The problem that I have with this is that it is not possible to have the contents of the list remain static once posted.  For example, if I look at a post from a year ago, I want to see the list of shared items that were shared a year ago. What happens now is that the latest shared items will always be shown, even for old posts that include the javascript.

Once I installed the plugin (I will create a wiki page for this plugin), the next tricky part was to get the feed to only contain items from th last 24 hours.  del.icio.us doesn't have a way to limit the items in the feed by date, but I found this Yahoo Pipe that can do that.

The next thing that I want to do is include the items that I share in Google Reader.  One thing that doesn't make this as easy as I would have liked is that there isn't a way to determine the items that were shared in the last 24 hours.  Unlike the del.icio.us feed, the entries in the rss feed aren't dated with the date of when the item was shared.  Instead, the date is the original publish date of the article.

I think that have a solution for this, and will write about this when I test it some more.

AddThis

This tweet mentioned AddThis, and I went to check it out.  AddThis is a serivce that will generate buttons for web pages or blogs, where readers can use them to bookmark or share links. 

I have been using my port of Sociable for LifeType, but AddThis looked interesting enough that I created a LifeType plugin for it.  I will try it out for a while.  One concern that I have about AddThis over Sociable is that the javascript needs to be loaded from their servers.  So if there servers are loaded, this could affect my page load.

I will post a link to the wiki page for the LifeType plugin, once I create it.

Xbox and Windows Home Server

This is a pretty good article that describes how to serve up your content from your Windows Home Server to your Xbox.  It is working perfectly for me.

The one thing that I want to figure out is to have the video transcoded to play on the Xbox.  The Xbox only supports a relatively small subset of video formats.

[via MS Windows Home Server blog]

links for 2008-01-31

• jkOnTheRun: Google fixes IMAP issue with HTML mail for Windows Mobile
  (tags: Google imap gmail windowsmobile)

Travelling Blogger

I have been looking for a blog editor for my phone for a while.  This would allow me to post to my blogs without using the web interface or through a SMTP gateway.  Travelling Blogger looks to be a potential solution.

 This is a Windows Mobile application that lets you create and edit posts on a blog that supports the MetaWeblog xmrpc API.  Once I configured the information for my blog, it pulled down the list of my existing blog posts.  Then I was able to create a new blog entry.

 This was starting to look promising, but then I realized that it wasn't a WYSIWYG editor.  This means that I would have to enter all of the html tags manually.  Travelling Blogger doesn't support copy and paste from Windows Mobile 6, so it is not easy to transfer text from the built-in browser.

 I was willing to overlook this, and plan on using Travelling Blogger just to post simple text entries, but then it wasn't able to actually post anything to my blog.

 I guess I will just use the web interface, or just wait until I get back to my computer.