By epb on August 2, 2009
You can use Yahoo Pipes to create an aggregated RSS feed from a CSV file you maintain. It’s fairly easy too, which is awesome. For those who are not familiar with Yahoo Pipes, it’s a beta product by Yahoo that makes it easy to create simple mashups of content available on the Internet, read more about it on the Yahoo Pipes homepage if you so please.
Continue reading “Yahoo Pipes + CSV = Aggregated RSS”
Posted in Small Project | Tagged pipes
By epb on July 19, 2009
Answering a question that was posed at work regarding RSS feeds and Yahoo Pipes.
Q: How can I make an aggregated RSS feed in Pipes?
A: If you have a set of RSS feeds you’d like to include in an aggregated feed, simply drag the fetch feed module into the workspace and click the addition (plus) button to add more source URLs for the module. Then send the output to the pipe output. When you name and save the pipe, you’ll be able to get it as an RSS feed, or in a multitude of other formats.
Posted in Small Project
By epb on July 2, 2009
Occasionally, you’ll have a project where one of the last minute ideas is to add a manageable list of links to a webpage or series of webpages. Nothing fancy, just a list of links that can be plopped into a layout.
Well, this little project allows you to quickly set up a web-based administration for simple link lists. This isn’t a full blown manager, but simply a piece of a larger project. Should readily integrate into existing solutions if you’re willing to do some code. At any rate, you provide the links in an easy to use back-end and then can pull that list in a variety of formats by hitting index.php (or whatever you choose to actually pull the list, it’s fairly easy to change.) Currently by default it can give you a raw html list, an rss feed, or the list in javascript form. Simply unpack it, make sure the data folder is writeable, set the password in config.php and then hit admin.php and off you go. A demo is available. It’s reset every half hour, and the password is ‘demo’.
I plan to release a version with some link generators for this in the coming weeks, until then you’ll need to hand-write the actual URLs to pull the lists.
Download Project – linker
Posted in Small Project
By epb on June 21, 2009
I’ve set up a little thing while playing with wildcard DNS on this domain. A faux-news story that you can modify by changing the sub-domain in the URL. Here is an excerpt from Bill Gates and Steve Jobs:
METROPOLIS – In the slums of Metropolis Bill Gates’s villainous deeds have been put to a stop for the foreseeable future. The hero, Steve Jobs has been credited for this tremendous feet.
It all transpired a few days ago when Bill Gates robbed First Banana Bank on the corner of 4th and Pacific.
Now how it works:
http://bill.gates.steve-jobs.sh.rrbits.com/
To modify it, simply change these two pieces of the URL. As you can see here, the hero’s name is given right before the .sh portion of the URL with hyphens (or dashes if you call them that) replaced with spaces and the villain’s name before that separated by periods. So to make it the opposite, you’d make the URL http://steve.jobs.bill-gates.sh.rrbits.com/ try it out with your friend’s names or with off-the-wall names and send it to your friends.
Posted in Small Project | Tagged slightly random
By epb on June 13, 2009
One of my work responsibilities is the administration and development of a WordPress MU installation, Puget Sound Blogs. Someone suggested adding a feed of the most recent comments onto the front page, but obviously this isn’t terribly easy to do with WPMU, unless you have the sitewide comments plugin. http://wpmudev.org/project/Sitewide-recent-comments
Now the problem with this plugin becomes: What do I do to import my old comments. It’s fairly easy to simply export and re-import the comments, but I found this to be rather time consuming. So I wrote this script to do it all for me. Keep in mind that you’ll need to change which tables you use if they are different and whatnot, but it sure saved me a lot of time anyway.
Continue reading “Easily import sitewide comments – WPMU”
Posted in Uncategorized |
By epb on May 28, 2009
It seems most appropriate to post my screenshots of Ubuntu Linux 9.04 with Compiz-Fusion right now right after replacing Windows 7 Beta 7000 with it. I went through and turned on quite a few custom effects, including my windows burning up when they are minimized or restored.
I suspect that it’s having all these animations and effects on that make the WordPress editor terribly unresponsive. Or it could be something completely different since CPU utilization only spikes when I interact with the windows.
Continue reading “Ubuntu 9.04 With Compiz”
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged linux, screenshots, ubuntu
By epb on May 20, 2009
The other day I got bored and recorded a quick 2 minute gameplay video of a fight between Marisa and Alice (Marisa played by yours truly) in Immaterial and Missing Power. 
Sorry in advance if it’s a little loud, I use crappy $5 headphones. 
Continue reading “Gameplay Video: Marisa vs. Alice”
Posted in Games | Tagged marisa, touhou
By epb on May 16, 2009
In my testing to get phpBB 3.0.4 to install correctly with PHP 5.3.0RC2, I finally found the culprit causing it to abort during the requirements phase of installation! Continue reading “phpBB 3.0.4 doesn’t install when…”
Posted in Uncategorized
By epb on May 15, 2009
Hmm… well it’s not crashing outright according to GDB, so I can only imagine it’s encountering a fatal error along the installation process.
Update: It’s dying on the line that reads $install->load(); However, it doesn’t toss an error when it does so. Interesting. It does not crash there, however, if I modify it to be passed two empty strings as parameters.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged php, web
By epb on May 14, 2009
I went ahead and decided to try installing phpBB 3 on PHP 5.3.0RC2 running CGI. The initial build of PHP 5.3.0RC2 went incredibly smoothly, and only a handful of tests failed when I ran `make test.` Got it installed in my web server’s chroot environment and phpinfo runs fine. (After accidentally configuring CGI to use the CLI binary, hehe.)
After that phpBB3 however it gives me the white screen of death when I try progressing into installation. No matter what I do, I can’t seem to get an error message out of it. I’ll try to get some discernibly useful information from it in the coming days. I suspect it’s crashing but the chroot doesn’t have direct access to debug tools, so I may need to set it up elsewhere first.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged php, web