After just over a week of it being dead, I brought it back, but hosted at WordPress.com. This is what I should have done in the first place, instead of moving to Tumblr. So, almost everything is back, but some of the images and other artifacts are gone. (Stupid, stupid….) And most of the code samples will show up unformatted and uncolored until I either Gistthem, or wrap them in the WordPress short code.
Now I just need to write something interesting.
I got a notification this morning that the Sociable plugin for WordPress had a new version available, and did I want to install it. I try to keep my plugins updated, so I upgraded. Sociable now has two modes: Skyscraper and Classic. Classic is what you’re used to, with a row of icons under a post. Skyscraper is a tall and thin tower that lives in the left-hand margin of your site, scrolling along with the page. Skyscraper is the new default, but going back to Classic is what is unintuitive.
In your admin page, if you hover over the new menu “Select Sociable Plugin” you will see three options: Select Sociable Plugin, Sociable Options, and Skyscraper Options. Selecting the first one brings you to a page explaining the difference between the two modes, with ginormous buttons at the bottom to choose which version you want. Clicking the button for either mode takes you to the options for that mode, but doesn’t actually change which mode is selected.
At the bottom of each mode’s options page is a checkbox labeled, “Activate…” and the mode name. I assumed that checking the one for Classic mode was all I needed to do, but clearing my cache and viewing the page showed that not to be the case. You must also uncheck the “Activate…” checkbox on the Skyscraper options page to enable Classic mode. If you don’t uncheck it, then you will still get the Skyscraper showing up on your posts. If you decide to switch back from Classic to Skyscraper, you have to uncheck Classic, then go to the Skyscraper options page and check that one.
Since this is a binary choice, they need to have ONE place to enable one and disable the other, or at least explain to you that you have to take the extra step.
Note Redux: I changed my approach, yet again. Scroll farther down to see the latest.
Note: I changed my approach on this, so scroll down to see how I’m doing it now.
I’ve been wanting a widget or an auto-post on the blog for a while that would show my most-listened-to bands over the previous week. Tumblr users have had something like this for a while, and there were efforts to do this for WordPress before, but they either don’t seem to work with the latest versions of WP, or they only pulled top tracks (not artists), or they pulled album covers, instead of text. All of that is to say that I couldn’t find anything pre-made to use.
So, I had to roll my own. I did so in about 10 minutes using the PHP Code Widget and the script on this page. The only drawback to this is you have to get a developer account with last.fm, but it’s free, so no big deal there. I installed the PHP Code Widget , then pasted the script into a new widget. The only changes I had to make were to replace the appropriate bits in the script with my info, and to escape a couple of double-quotes. Now if you look down the right side of the blog, below the Twitter and Facebook links, you’ll see a rolling record of my top-artists. In case you were wondering what I’ve been listening to. 🙂
The only thing I’m not sure about is how this will work with the two levels of caching I use (WP Super Cache and Cloudflare). I suppose we’ll see in the next few days, eh?
11/23/2011 Update: I decided that I didn’t like the way I was doing this, for a couple of reasons. First, each time someone viewed the page, it would be making a call to Last.fm for my stats. This is too often. Also, the values returned using the developer API were at odds with what you can get just going through the web. So what I did was write a Ruby script to pull the feed once a day, parse it and output HTML to a file. I then used the PHP Code Widget to include it. Far simpler, in my opinion.
Here’s the Ruby code:
[ruby]
#!/usr/bin/ruby
require ‘rexml/document’
require ‘open-uri’
include REXML
open("http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/2.0/user/joeyGibson/weeklyartistchart.xml") do |http|
response = http.read
doc = REXML::Document.new response
index = 0
File.open(ARGV[0], "w") do |out|
out.write("<html><head>n")
out.write("<meta charset="UTF-8"/>n")
out.write("<body><ol>n")
doc.elements.each("weeklyartistchart/artist") do |artist|
break if index == 5
out.write "<li><a href="#{artist.elements[‘url’].text}">#{artist.elements[‘name’].text}</a>, Plays: #{artist.elements[‘playcount’].text}</li>n"
index += 1
end
out.puts("</ol></body></html>n")
end
end
[/ruby]
and here’s the PHP that loads it:
[php]
<?php include("/tmp/artists.html"); ?>
[/php]
That’s it.
11/26/2011 Update: Well, I’ve changed it again. I discovered that the RSS feed I was pulling is not updated with any sort of frequency. It certainly doesn’t represent the “last seven days” as it claims to. At any rate, it differs greatly from what Last.fm shows on the web. So I decided to grab the HTML and pull out the interesting bits. I wrote another Ruby script, this time using Hpricot to parse the HTML, which took about 10 minutes. So now, what you see on the right should be the current values for the “last seven days.” Here’s the latest script:
[ruby]
#!/usr/local/bin/ruby
require ‘rubygems’
require ‘hpricot’
require ‘open-uri’
open("http://www.last.fm/user/your-username-here/charts?rangetype=week&subtype=artists") do |http|
doc = Hpricot.parse(http.read)
count = 0
File.open(ARGV[0], "w") do |out|
out.write("<html><head>n")
out.write("<meta charset="UTF-8"/>n")
out.write("<body><ol>n")
doc.search("td[@class=subjectCell]").each do |subjectCell|
break if count == 5
artistString = subjectCell.get_attribute("title")
artistString =~ /^(.+), played (d+) times$/
artist = $1
playCount = $2
subjectCell.search("a").each do |a|
url = a.get_attribute("href")
url = "http://last.fm#{url}"
str = "#{artist}, #{url}, #{playCount}"
out.write "<li><a href="#{url}">#{artist}</a>, Plays: #{playCount}</li>n"
end
count += 1
end
out.puts("</ol></body></html>n")
end
end
[/ruby]
I’m hopeful this is the last change.
09/28/2009 Update: Now added a link to the view from Android.
Last week I learned about WPTouch, which is a plugin for WordPress that reformats the theme for the iPhone, Android and other mobile devices. It was an easy install, and I am now happy to report that if you view my blog on a mobile device, you’ll see the new UI. Here’s what it looks like on an iPhone
If anybody has an Android phone, or some other supported mobile device, send me a screenshot so I can see what it looks like.
Thanks to Steve Ziegler, here’s what it looks like from an Android device. Thanks, Steve!
I paid my registration fee on Friday, and I’m really looking forward to attending. I’ve only been using WordPress since late June, but I’m already hooked. Anyone else going? I’ll be driving to Birmingham on Friday night, since things get going at 9:00 Saturday morning.
Below is a screencap of what part of my WordPress 2.6.1 admin page looks like when I view it using Firefox 3.0.1 on Leopard.
If you click on it to view it better, you’ll see the problem. The stats graph is shifted about 200 pixels to the right and about 150 pixels down. On Safari it looks perfect, but not on Firefox. This doesn’t happen with Firefox on Windows, so it’s some sort of quirk with the Mac version.
Has anyone else seen this, and do you have any suggestions?
Oh man, this is just too cool. I switched to WordPress just a few days ago and today I see that they have an iPhone blogging client that should be released “soon.” Just one more thing telling me that I made the right decision picking WordPress.
Joey Gibson's Blog 