Flickr posts

I’ve added a few improvements to the flickr post script, as demonstrated in the previous entry. Posts now get tagged with the Flickr photo’s tags as well as the “photos” tag, and it adds a copyright notice (depending on the license of the photo on flickr) to the end of the posts. I also updated it to work with the latest version of the phpFlickr library.

I am a robot. Do what I say.

Yay! My second script fired off properly, too! Every Sunday at midnight, my box will post my StumbleUpon favorites. The StumbleUpon RSS feed doesn’t provide the date or time, so the script is keeping track of what was posted the week before and only posting new favorites. Since it’s never been run before, today’s list probably spans a bit longer than a week.

I wish Netflix had a way to retrieve the star ratings for movies I’ve rented. I was considering setting up a monthly “movies I’ve watched” script, too, but it’s a bit impersonal without the ratings I’ve assigned, and I’m too lazy to compile it myself.

I might set one up that posts when I complete a goal on 43things, but I haven’t really been using that much. Maybe I’d use it more if they published their data as an ics file, so I could view my goals on my iCal todo list. Though, I suppose I could write that, too…

131,000 words

“Successfully posted 131 photo(s) to LiveJournal”

All photos in my Flickr photostream that had descriptions now have corresponding LiveJournal entries. They’re all backdated, so they shouldn’t flood your friends pages. Feel free to browse the newly-populated photos tag.

Of course, after all the testing I did, I didn’t realize until half-way through running it the final time that putting the CSS for the drop shadows in the stylesheet means they wont show up if you’re not viewing them through my style. Since the entries are backdated, you have to go out of your way to view them outside of my style anyway, so it’s no big deal. Future entries created by the script will include the CSS for the drop shadows inside the entry so they’ll show up on your friends pages / RSS readers too.

Edit: Ok, it looks like the LJ docs are wrong about backdated entries not showing up on friends pages. I went back and deleted the less-interesting pictures, bringing it down to 20 posts (about a page) you have to wade through to see the rest of your friends posts. Sorry about that.

Tumbling down

I played around a bit with Tumblr, and while it’s a bit too simplistic for me, it did have two features I really liked:

* Automatic formatting of IM conversations
* Automatically creating posts when an RSS feed (my flickr photostream, stumbleupon favorites, etc.) changes

As you can tell from the previous entry, I’ve implemented the automatic formatting using LiveJournal’s S2 programming language. Any post tagged “chat” gets turned into an HTML list with colored names.

For anyone curious on how it works, the following code gets run to output each journal entry:

Blocked!

Looks like the code I wrote for www.c99.org that used the LJ API to pull the list of tags / dates for the calendar was polling the LJ server too frequently and I got myself blocked as a bot. I opened a support request after fixing the bug, so hopefully I’ll get unblocked soon.

In the meantime, I wrote a custom S2 layer based on Quite Lickable so my LiveJournal template looks identical to the www.c99.org template, and I’ve redirected the front page of www.c99.org to my LiveJournal. The only issue is that LJ doesn’t seem to allow JavaScript in their templates, so the drop-down menu for “Games” doesn’t work.

SVN shakeup

I finally got around to moving my Subversion repository onto DreamHost. After a LOT of fiddling around with svndumpfilter, I’ve split all the projects up into their own repositories. The URLs are still the same, but anyone that had any code checked out of the previous repository will need to check it out again, as the revision numbers have changed.

Woah you post things at 3AM?

Userpics and moods are back on the blog page, and I corrected a bug that was displaying the times in the wrong timezone. Now posts made at 10AM don’t show up as being posted at 3AM! 🙂

Approaching web 1.8

Rolled out another update to c99.org, this time improving the Blog page. I’ve added a sidebar with a calendar and list of tags, which are pulled using the Livejournal XML-RPC interface. I also grouped the entries by date and removed the userpic.

Also, I noticed LiveJournal has a new style called Quite Lickable that almost matches c99.org’s layout, so I switched my LJ style to that.