Scatter Cushion Affair again today. Strange Capitalisation there, S.C.A. What could it mean?

VIRGIN MOBILE DIGITAL TV (or VMDT) Our Telewest STB gave up the ghost the other day, a faint duvet covered mass floated up into the nether. So, today came the cable guy and it wasn’t Jim Carry, thankfully. The box had to be replaced, but he replaced it with the exact same model, bastard, it really is a crummy piece of crap that thing, slow as molasses, whatever molasses is. The strange thing is though, the guy rang on the doorbell again some 15 minutes later my first thought being that yet another telewest employee had misplaced something because a year or so ago a telewest engineer lost his test modem and came to our house panting desperate that it might have been left here. lol. But no, he said that he had just done a test and my cable modem’s signal was too strong. Wha? The mind boogles, how did he test that from outside? Well, I haven’t had any stability issues with my internet access at all for god knows how long, but I let him do it anyway, he attached some kind of extra screw on thing to the CAT5 screw on thing. But now i’m wondering, have I just been bugged? Have MI5 requested that I be spied upon? Eek, its so Veronica Mars.

ETCO AT MY BASTARD FRIEND Has anyone figured out how to add MT 3.3.1 style Tags to entries from within ecto yet?

WORDunimPRESSed I’m going to change my website for the new season… sometime. I want to take longer over it this time, unlike what I usually do which is suddenly think to myself, “Hey! I fancy changing my website” and then spending less than a day on it, including both the illustrator nonsense and the coding up. I do have some dandy (that’s a hint) ideas for it already. Anyway, one of the things I was going to do as well was to migrate from Movable Type to Wordpress because that seems to be the IN thing these days. But after reading Dave2’s experience I’m not sure there’s any point. Ah well.

MANTS! Gabi is ill She’s been ill for about 4 days now, I’ve given her some medicine each day and at first she seems better, but then the next day she’s fallen back ill again. It’s so sad. She’s my girlfriend in Animal Crossing and I love her to bits. It’s eating me up to see her suffer like this.

Had a spare moment so installed MT 3.3.. Seems fine overall, actually, i haven’t done much with it yet, not even sure what the new features are.

Apart from it now has proper tag support but I knew I would have issues with the old tags plugin I used before. Signs looked great at first, the upgrade routine converted my tags to the new system. But it didn’t half make a naff effort, all sorts of weird things went on. And weirdest all my entries were given the tag “0″ or “1″ or even “2″. Lucky them huh?

So, if like my you used to use the Tags.pl plugin by some fool called Brad Choate, I think that was the one, I’ve already deleted it lol. I’ve written some SQL to do a proper upgrade of the tags. The SQL is pretty easy and straight forward so I dunno why MT couldn’t do it.

So, go into phpMyAdmin or simiular, select the database and click on the SQL tab to execute stuff. Oh actually, before you do that, look inside the table “mt_category” and see if its full of categories with “<!–tag–>” as the description. If there is you have been using the same plugin, so go on and do the following…

Stage 1: BACKUP THE DATABASE

Stage 2: First 2 Operations are quite dangerous so be careful c+ping. These will completely delete all of the new tagging data that the upgrade procedure made, and any you’ve created since upgrading to 3.3.x. Oh, on all blogs as well.

DELETE FROM mt_objecttag;
DELETE FROM mt_tag;

Stage 3: Now to copy the tag names

INSERT INTO mt_tag (tag_name)
SELECT category_label FROM mt_category
WHERE category_description = “<!–tag–>”;

Stage 4: Now to pair the tags with the entries

INSERT INTO mt_objecttag (objecttag_blog_id, objecttag_object_datasource, objecttag_object_id, objecttag_tag_id)
SELECT placement_blog_id, “entry”, placement_entry_id, tag_id FROM mt_tag, mt_placement, mt_category
WHERE placement_category_id = category_id
AND tag_name = category_label;

Stage 5: Important, to finish we clean up (delete) all the old style tagging from the old tags plugin. Before you do this its probably best to check that the above actually worked.

DELETE mt_placement FROM mt_placement, mt_category
WHERE placement_category_id = category_id
AND category_description = “<!–tag–>”;

DELETE FROM mt_category
WHERE category_description = “<!–tag–>”;

All done. You know what though? I’m not actually sure what advantages the new tagging system offers, or how its going to work with ecto… if at all

It’s suffocatingly humid in my room, i’ve got a noisy A/C but i always feel kinda guilty turning it on Watching this show Paul Merton’s made about silent comics I was reminded about the dvd release of the silent sci-fi Metropolis from a few years back, it had an extremely dire soundtrack, which sounded like some horribly cheesy 80’s synth pop, but without the charm that could often entail. I then had a sudden idea/urge/what-if to make my own soundtrack for Metropolis. When playing it back you’d have to be quick to play both the film and my soundtrack at the same time… but it could work? Ack, who am I kidding, I’ll never get around to doing it. Such a dreamer I am.

I’ve another idea. This is a blogging engine idea, but it’s so obvious that I’d be very surprised if it hasn’t already been done, but as I haven’t seen anything of the like so far I’ll explain it anyway. What if, when commenting on somebody’s blog, if you have logged into their site using open-id, or typepad or any one of those authentication systems their blog pings back to your own blog to tell your blog that you’ve made a comment on their site, and also send a copy of the comment text along with the ping. Then, your blog could keep an archive of all the comments you’ve made on other folks blogs, maybe even have a latest 5 comments down the sidebar or somewhere. I’m so positive that could be useful that I think I might even have a go coming up with some kind of MT Plugin. That is… if it hasn’t already been done, I’m sure it must have? Of course, the big caveat is that everyone will have to implement the plugin on their own blog before it can become useful.

It’s Eddies first birhday tomorrow, aww. I’ve made him a card, unfortunately my epson printer is absolutely useless with certain dark shades and the blue sky just came out black. Stupid thing. Nay mind. Don’t look too closely at the mock-reflections, particularly the present, its totally fake looking and all screwed up. haha, well, i don’t think Eddie will notice. Also, i dunno why but it seems to be incredibly difficult to find a good picture of a bone online, that low res yellow thing was the best I could find!

The comments system has been kinda screwy on my site for, well since forever I think. I was messing on my site the other day and figured whilst I was at it I may as well have a look at the comment issues. The current problem is that it doesn’t seem to pick up on avatars anymore. I didn’t get very far with the investigations when I discovered that the openid-comments plugin had been screaming at me for attention. I’d never looked at the MT’s system activity log doodar. The following message appears many times, over and over…

Plugin error: /home/scissor/public_html/itchmerry/cgi-bin/mt/plugins/openid-comment/openid-comment.pl Can’t locate object method “add_tag” via package “MT::Template::Context” at /home/scissor/public_html/itchmerry/cgi-bin/mt/plugins/openid-comment/openid-

Cuts off there annoyingly. The method its looking for is in the file mt/lib/MT/Template/Context.pm which is all present and correct on the remote site, so I dunno what it’s farting on about. Also, when I was playing with the site I installed MT on my mac all set up the same as I have it remotely so that I can try things out nice and quickly. Transferred the MT DB from the remote site to mysql on my mac using MySQL Administrator so that its exactly the same site as it is online and it all works fine, including avatars. So that’s annoying too. I hope MT 3.3 is out soon, then I’ll completely gut the install on the website and set up it from scratch. Apart from the DB obviously.

Neil, the little scally-wag is asking the world what MT Plugins they have installed. As i’m a earth-bound MT using person I guess I should join in…

BigPAPI

Allows other plugins to run-amock all over your MT interface.

MT-Enclosures

For podcasting. Scans the entry for media files and adds the relevant enclosure fields to the webfeed.

mt-relatedentries

So you can show peeps a couple of similar blog entries based on the entries tags

Gravatar.pl

Displays your ugly mug next to your comments

TechnoratiTags.pl

Embeds entry keywords into an entry in such a way as to be read by technoratis bot

OpenID Comments

So you can log in to my site with your openid, bet you didn’t even know you had one

Tags

Converts keywords to tags, actually it converts them to sub-categories. Forgotten why that’s a good thing now.

That’s a point, i still haven’t styled definition lists.

I’ve been messing with tags again today, removing the more pointless ones from entries and removing spaces from those with multiple words. Also, strangely it seems that MT-Tags does actually add keywords as a sub-catagory of “tags”, even though when I first installed it I ended up with a million and 1 primary catagories. So i’ve tidied that up now and I feel a lot better for it.

So yeah, I was playing with my tag cloud thing and randomly clicked on one of the technorati links, one that took me to http://www.technorati.com/tag/meadowhall and ooh, all of them but 1 are mine. No wait, I don’t remember ever calling my blog after my real name “Mark Gilbert”, so what’s this. OMG, what are the chances of that, a name-sake also blogging about meadowhall. Wait, even more OMG, he lives in sheffield, and he blogs about similar things as I do. Have I got a split personality? Am I running 2 blogs and neither personalities know of each others? I’m scared. Funnily enough my other blog isn’t half bad, think I’ll subscribe and keep up with what my split personality is getting up to. He must quite like my name, i mean his name, mine his um, the name to have bought the domain. Myself, I hate it, but that’s probably a low self-esteem thing. I wonder if we’ve ever bumped into each other.

I haven’t been using del.icio.us an awful lot, I saw the potential but just never bothered. But now I’ve added a del.icio.us bookmarklet to safari and I’ve written a script to post my bookmarks to this here blog.

del.icio.us do actually offer their own tool for posting links to your blog but it’s rather obscure and doesn’t offer much in the way of customisation. Also it only lets you post them daily and I really do think that’s overkill, subscribers to your blog feed really don’t want your links thrown at them every single day. So i’ve made a quick php page to do it on demand, and i’ve added a cron job to cpanel which runs this once a month..

curl http://www.itchmerry.com/i’m/not/telling/you/where/it/is

Download delPost_php.txt here. You will need to change the extension before using it obviously.

When I started writing it I didn’t realise that php has an xml-rpc library. My php just constructs the xml as a big string and throws it at your blog server. But hey, it works? Just. Also, the del.icio.us api, such as it is, doesn’t offer a means of grabbing bookmarks between a date range. Either specified days, or a specified number of the most recent. My code currently grabs the 10 most recent. As I don’t use the service all that much I probably won’t add many more than 10 per month anyway. But to really be the months bookmarks the php code will need to pull each day of the month one after another, this would need some experimenting as it could take yonks to finish, and be a bit haphazard.

UPDATES: Version 0.0.5: Them silly amps + now displays html entities in the response.

Version 0.0.4: A few bug fixes + now includes “for the week of…” in the post’s subject.

Version 0.0.3 now collects del.icio.us links from a specified number of days. It takes longer because it’s calling back and forth from del.icio.us for each days worth. 7 Days seems ok though, so i think i’ll set it to fire weekly rather than monthly.

Turns out that php’s XML-RPC library is still at the experimental stage and isn’t included with the default php install. I’ll stick to constructing raw xml in code for now.

Been playing some more with my tag code of wonder. It’s now more scalable and customisable. Plus it seems to work on IE now.

FluffyTags.js is the main scriptures (right click and save target). Here’s a quick example…

<ul id="taglist" class="listoflinks">
   <MTTags>
      <li title="<$MTTagCount$>">
         <a class="tagtext" href="<MTTagArchiveLink>"><MTTagName></a>
         <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/<MTTagName>"
         rel="TAG" title="TAG:<MTTagName>"><img width=16 height=16
         src="/images/techiconsmall.png" /></a> </li>
   </MTTags>
</ul>

<script type="text/javascript" src="FluffyTags.js"></script>
<script  type="text/javascript">
   var oParent = document.getElementById("taglist");
   tagCloud(oParent, //Element to start crawling from
      100, 255, 100, //colours (R,G,B 0-255) for low tag counts
      20, 200, 20,   //colours for high tag counts
      10, 40,        //text size range pt (low, high)
      2,             //count below this is insignificant
      200, 200, 200, //colours for insignificant tags
      10);           //text size for insignificant tags
</script>

Note class=”tagtext” in the MT stuff, my code looks for an element with this class to change the colour and text size of. The tagCloud function is what you call from the page and it takes a fair number of arguments which i have commented upon in the above example. I’m sure there’s lots of bugs.

Ok, so as well as having a bit of a problem with heading tags in ecto, i’m also confused about Tags.
When i noticed the Tags panel in the edit window i had presumed that it was for adding keywords. Turns out it’s for adding technorati tags and they don’t get added to the meta-keywords. Sob. How do you add keywords via ecto?

Took me days to get ecto working the first place, i had overlooked setting an API password on my MT installation. Silly me.

Technorati Tags: Ecto