![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/user
You can also specify the order in which you want the videos. Note the "orderedby" parameter in the urls that follow:
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/user
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/user
So far, so great. Now, suppose you want to make a lifestream, and you want to include the videos that you've favorited. They've got a feed for that, too:
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/d
But it's not right. If you look at the data you get back, you see that it's not what you wanted. Those videos are going to be associated with the timestamp with which they were updated or published, not the time that you favorited them. And that's the time that matters to your lifestream! Given the way the programmatic feeds are organized, you'd think that there's a way to specify that, and that feed would be as follows, right? --
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/d
Nope. After living with a workaround in my lifestream for months, only today do I learn that YouTube did create the feed I needed, but calls it this: v=2. Yeah, like that jibes with their feed explanation.
Lifestream writers, the favorites feed (ordered by time favorited) that you want is constructed like this:
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/u
(Replace "username" with your username, of course.) Now I can go delete my workaround.
(the new "df" search)
A couple of years ago, I'd already claimed to be a long-time fan of Dave's Quick Search Deskbar, especially because of its popup dictionary search.
Since then, though, Merriam-Webster has changed the layout of their site so much, that they made maintaining the DQSD mwd.xml prohibitively expensive. I needed to create a new search, and I did. (The definitions aren't as good as Merriam-Webster's, but at least they work.)
Here's what you do, if you already have DQSD installed:
- Download df.zip (2 kb), and extract df.xml into C:\Program Files\Quick Search Deskbar\searches.
- Modify localaliases.txt to include the following line:
:|df
And now, you can have an easy, non-intrusive, dictionary lookup available anytime again. Just type the word to lookup with a colon after it, and the definition will appear in a popup window that gets dismissed when focus changes elsewhere. (I mention a shortcut key recipe I use for looking up words.)
In case you didn't already know, DQSD excels at many other searches, too. It defaults to Google, but I use it for Wikipedia, image, maps, the imdb, and a calculator quite often, too. It's just the popup definition lookup that needed my TLC.
Anyway, in no particular order, here's what I want to get done:
Customize Twitter Friends Feed: I need to customize my twitter friends feed so that it won't spam my feed reader with @replies I don't care about. I need to set my preferences on a per-twitterer basis. I really enjoy all @replies from some of my friends, but not all. Maybe I'll break down and find an app that already has the feature, but I prefer having just one place aggregate all the feed activity I'm interested in. [Edit: Biz is going to do this himself!]Make a Dictionary Popup: I loved the DQSD mwd popup definition result. But merriam-webster.com has a history of changing the layout of their page so that maintaining the mwd.xml search became onerous. It's time to replace that popup definition with one from aonaware. Here's the API call I'm most interested in: DefineInDict, with "gcide" for the dictId. [Edit: Completed!]- iTunes library rsync with OpenTape: As originally hinted.
- Download and install postgresql-8.3.5-2-windows.exe (You shouldn't need the whole install.)
- Add C:\Program Files\PostgreSQL\8.3\lib to your PATH for libpq.dll.
- Add C:\Program Files\PostgreSQL\8.3\bin to your PATH for ssleay32.dll.
- Hide System32's copy of LIBEAY32.dll (If you're on a DELL, and that one is far smaller and older than the others.)
- Download and install PyGreSQL-4.0.win32-py2.5.exe
Downloaded PyGreSQL first, before realizing it had dependencies to a postgresql install. Got some nebulous ImportErrors when I tried to "import pg".
from _pg import * ImportError: DLL load failed: The specified module could not be found.Great. What module? Searching the web, I discovered I needed to install postgresql. So I did, but I still got the error, even after updating the system's PATH variable. (Note, sys.path and os.environ("PATH") are two different things.) Eventually I discovered this great tip:
Try doing the failing import from the Python command line. (Start->Python 2.5->Python (command line)). Doing that will actually display a modal dialog that says exactly which dll could not be loaded. Yay!
Finally, I got the LIBEAY32.dll error mentioned above, the exact text of which follows:
The ordinal 2821 could not be located in the dynamic link library LIBEAY32.dlland once I hid the old LIBEAY32.dll, I got pg linking with the correct libraries, I was good to go. Hope this helps somebody.
I like this look, because it's uncluttered. There are only two noticeable links when you hover over stuff. The text in the middle is a link to the original entry, and the little icon to the right takes you to my account at that site.
However, I decided it would be handy to be able to have lifestream pages that show only entries from livejournal, my family blog, delicious, or plurk, or any of the others. I made it so. Yay! There they are!
But now the problem: From where should I put links to them? It's the same issue as with the lifestream legend. The lifestream legend is meant to be just a little table to help the reader know which services are being tracked. It's a handy thing, but it doesn't belong on the lifestream page. So I left it out.
But it seems like I should be able to put links to the filtered pages somewhere. Hopefully from the lifestream itself, because that's the handiest. But a new link from that page will hurt the current design. Here are some examples that would put the link just to the left of the little icon at the end:
I don't know what I should do. In the picture above there's a picture of a funnel, which apparently is geek code for "filter." Below that is an icon of a page with a green "go" arrow (from famfamfam), and below that is a down arrow unicode character. Below that is a nebulous, mysterious box. I'm not really pleased with any of these. I like the feature, but just don't know how to expose it.
Do you have any ideas of what would look good? Should I leave those links out of the lifestream and put them in from the legend? Maybe I should change the link of the icon at the end to be to the filtered page instead of my account page at the remote service?
[Edit] Currently, I changed the link of the icon at the end to point to the filtered page. I'll see how that works.
I think I can be thought of as a late early-adapter. I thought I had a lot of original ideas as I made my lifestream, but it turns out that more often than not, somebody else had already implemented one of the ideas. Happily, no one seems to have made all the same decisions as me, so my effort wasn't wasted. For me, my lifestream really is the best lifestream ever! Here's why:
[Edit] I changed the icon link. Now they point to a filtered lifestream page.
The Best of Both Worlds
Jeremy implements his as an aggregation of RSS and Atom feeds with no persistent storage of previous entries. So, as newer entries are made, the oldest entries are lost forever. His lifestream is always only the most recent few entries. Jeff, on the other hand, implements his with APIs, so he has access to the complete history of entries for any account. I maintain mine with feeds, but I imported my entire history from many accounts. My lifestream is huge, and spans years, even though I just started it a couple of months ago.
Also The Best of Both Worlds
Jeremy's lifestream is handy, because it never becomes unwieldy. It'll always be about the same size. Jeff Croft's and Emily Chang's persist every entry and thus continuously grow. They paginate their lifestream. You can view page 234 out of 399, for example.
I decided that 98% of the time, I'm only interested in something I wrote down in recent memory. Say, the last four weeks. So I made that the index page of my lifestream. Just the 28 most recent days of my online activity. It make for a nice, small page.
But the other 2% of the time, I'm searching for something older, or I'm feeling nostalgic. So I put my entire lifestream on one page, too. Sure, it's big, and I'll never browse it from a phone, but modern web browsers are perfectly capable of downloading it and rendering it, and will be able to do so for years to come. The entire history really has the same appeal to me as being able to search through a diary.
Even if I decide to paginate it eventually, it'll be easy, the backend will facilitate that.
The Details Matter
Since I provide my entire lifestream on one page, I also made sure to include the year for dates that precede this year. (Eg., October 5th, 2006. Note that that uses the intra-page anchor, another important detail.)
My lifestream has a discoverable RSS feed too.
But you know what? Nobody'd want a feed of a lifestream that constantly updates for individual entries. That's one thing that really bothers me about sweetcron feeds. They're just too noisy. Update, update, update!
So the RSS feed for my lifestream only provides weekly updates. That's what I'd really want from a lifestream feed. Just some sort of nice regular overview of all the activity over a certain period of time. And its permalinks are intra-page links into the huge complete history page.
Some of the accounts that I include in my lifestream don't support user activity feeds. For example, YouTube's feed for each user's Favorited videos doesn't have "date-favorited" information associated with it. Since I wrote my own lifestream engine, I was able to work around that problem. I doubt that most lifestream services like FriendFeed would go to the lengths I did in ensuring that I get exactly the information I want, regardless of whether or not the site's feed or API supports it.
It Helps Me Find Things
Searching for things half-remembered turns out to be pretty successful at the lifestream. I sometimes don't know if I posted a link to delicious, or if I plurked it.
It Encourages Me To Write Better
I always think twice before I write a clever title to a tweet, plurk, or blog entry. I realize now that I may well be searching for that entry in the lifestream later, and the lifestream may only have the title. (The lifestream also contains actual content from the entries, but the content isn't presented in the web pages. So maybe the content will be searchable too, eventually.)
Cleverness is out. Accessibility and searchability are in when you have a persistant searchable lifestream. Now, I strive for clarity in my titles.
I also stopped services that cross-post from one service to another. Having the lifestream made the idea of cross-posting even more redundant. If my livejournal friends don't want to see my tweets, I won't force them to with LoudTwitter.
RSS and Atom feeds are a lot of fun! The most common use of these feeds is to subscribe to them in a feed reader so that you can browse through individual articles from multiple sources in chronological order.Another fun thing to do with them is to create a lifestream. That's a collection of feeds associated with a person. The first one that caught my attention was Jeremy Keith's. Mine is stylized identically to his, but the back-end is different, and the functionality is different. I'll cover that in a different post.
Creating my lifestream put me in a position to discover which tech companies provide the most and least useful services. For example, I think it's awesome that Hulu provides a feed for which videos I watch. It's also awesome that Netflix offers different feeds (sent/enqueued/etc.) for their users' queues.
Here are the three companies that I thought would get it, but really ended up frustrating me:
- Amazon does not provide an Atom or RSS feed for its users' wishlists.
- Shelfari (owned by Amazon) does not provide a feed for its users' shelves.
- YouTube does not provide a user-oriented feed for its users' favorited videos.
Their users want to draw attention to the best of the products these companies promote and offer. But Amazon, Shelfari and YouTube don't provide the mechanism. That's a bit like saying, "we don't want more eyeballs on our products."
Ideally, you could have a feed of the items you added to your Amazon wishlist, sorted chronologically by the date you added the item to your wishlist. Amazon doesn't provide that. That's really frustrating, because if you go to your wishlist page, it says, "added [date]" right there, next to each item.
http://webservices.amazon.com/onca/xml?Version=2006-06-07&Sort=DateAdded&
Service=AWSECommerceService&ResponseGroup=ListFull&Operation=ListLookup&
ListType=WishList&ListId=[id]&AssociateTag=[assoc]&AWSAccessKeyId=[key]
Extract item.Item.ItemAttributes.Title and item.DateAdded from each item, and insert them into a custom feed accordingly. Voila, the feed that Amazon should be providing itself.
Shelfari suffers from the same problem as with Amazon. You can get a widget. But you can't get a feed that says when you added the book to your shelf, or when you started reading it, or when you finished and reviewed the book. Users have been asking Shelfari for that for nine months.
I don't have a workaround for this one. It's better to just use a services that provides the right feeds, like librarything.com or goodreads.com.
YouTube has awesome feed support. That keyword support is brilliant. So it breaks my heart to say that they really missed the boat when it comes to favorited videos. YouTube does support a feed of video that have been favorited by a user.
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/
But the videos aren't sorted by when they were favorited. That's really frustrating, because when you go to your profile page, it says right there, when each video was favorited.
The profile page presents the info, but the favorites feed doesn't. Instead, they're sorted by when the videos were most recently commented upon.
If we're going to subscibe to a user's list of favorited videos, it's pretty safe to assume that we're interested in when that user favorited those videos. If they favorited something recently, we want it at the top of that feed. Simple.
My only workaround for the current feed involves parsing their feed, and comparing each item against a previously gathered list of known favorites. If there are any new favorites, add them with the current timestamp.
[Edit] Youtube eventually made the feed we need.
Summary
We, as users, shouldn't have to be coding around the services that these companies offer. The companies should recognize the obvious value inherent in useful user feeds that point to their most popular products.
C'mon, Amazon, Shelfari, and YouTube. Give us our feeds.
It seems like a good jumping off point. I'll improve it with various advanced features I've already implemented elsewhere like:
- Conditional GETs.
- Authentication, (cURL example)
- Accessing all feeds with a simplified interface.
Conditional GETs. Mark already did it.Authentication. Mark already did it.Content Normalization. (That's what I meant.) Mark already did it.
There's nothing left for me to do, but the stuff I can't do. Make it pretty.
Shame on you. Shame!
Here's your chance to atone for your intimation. What would you have Karma Medic say?
Given a plurk with plurk-qualifier verb, like "shares" or "loves" or any of the others, what's a reasonable non-committal response for her to give? She can read the plurk qualifier, so she can make a somewhat appropriate response. (Offensive responses can be funny, but they wear thin pretty quickly, so I probably won't be adding those.)
Also, when the original plurk has no specific qualifier, how should she respond?
Please, suggest away! What should KM say? Help her help you!
I'm pleased with the way Karma Medic has turned out. She help me and all her other friends. Since I created her, I also gave her my password and authorized her to post in my stead, when I'm away.
Suppose I die in the near future. I'll keep posting to Plurk (because she'll be doing it), and she'll keep replying to my posts, because it's her job to reply to her friends' plurks.
While I'm dead, I'll be having conversations with myself at Plurk.
Here are the three alternating things she'll do when she's plurking on my behalf:
- Post a line that I've queued for her ahead of time. (I've got a running set of these. Complete with online interface for adding more, whenever I think of it.)
- Post an image that flickr has determined to be very interesting.
- Post an interesting image from a specific tag group from flickr.
- awesome, dark
- awesome, light
- san francisco, beautiful
- robot, awesome
- steampunk, cool
- space, beautiful
- rock, climbing
- seattle, beautiful
But if you use a modern version of Wordpress, you should take advantage of the do_action('commentsrss2_head') hooks* in the feed-rss... .php files.
Here's what you'd do: Add the following code to your theme's functions.php file:
function add_my_rss_image()
{
echo '<image><title>', bloginfo_rss('name'), '</title>';
echo '<url>', bloginfo_rss('stylesheet_directory'), '/images/button.gif</url>';
echo '<link>', bloginfo_rss('url'), '</link>';
echo '<width>88</width><height>31</height>';
echo '<description>Description of your blog.</description></image>';
}
add_action('rss2_head','add_my_rss_image');
add_action('rss_head','add_my_rss_image');
add_action('commentsrss2_head','add_my_rss_image');
Take care to actually put an image file in the path specified, and adjust the width and height accordingly.
Et, voila! Now your feeds have images, and they're forwards compatible with future versions of Wordpress. Oh, did I say future versions of Wordpress? Excuse me, I have to:
svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.6/
Blam! Upgraded. Sweet.
* Also rss2_head and rss_head, just so I cover the appropriate Google terms.
If you use Plurk, you know how fun the service is. It's one of the most addictive sites around. But I'm not here to convince you to try it. I'm here to help those who are already there.
Plurk utilizes a point system called Karma. It's a finely tuned system that appeals to those personalities that are competitive or like to collect. I love the reward system associated with karma. I despise the penalty system associated with karma. For example, if you're away from the service for a few days, you lose karma.
If you're already on Plurk, you need Karma Medic. Karma Medic's plurk user name is dblumebuddy. Karma Medic watches out for all her friends. If they're away from the service for too long, Karma Medic administers Karma in their absence.
Finally, you're allowed to leave Plurk and return to it without feeling like you've been unduly punished.
[Edit 07/28/2009] It's been over a year now, and Karma Medic has discontinued her distribution of karma. She's decided to continue singing, though. Many thanks to Plurk itself, for making the Karma system less punitive than it was a year ago.
Instructions
1. Friend (not Follow) dblumebuddy.
2. There is no step 2.
Karma Medic will* accept the friend invitation, and will begin watching out for you in about two hours.
What Happens
Karma Medic is a cron daemon that watches out for her friends every hour. She notices the following sorts of things.
- If you been plurking, that's great.
- If you Karma isn't going too far into the negative, that's OK, too.
- If she's helped you recently, she'll move along.
But, if you haven't been plurking, and your karma's going dangerously low, she'll administer a little karma love in the form of a plurk response.
Also, she likes to sing.
Leaving Karma Medic
There are two ways to leave Karma Medic's services.
- Unfriend Karma Medic. Karma Medic will forget everything she ever knew about you within an hour.
- Stop plurking. If you leave Plurk by just walking away for a few weeks, Karma Medic notices and stops watching out for you.
The Details
Karma Medic is a completely transparent service. You can see everything she knows. She was written in Python and uses YAML and JSON.
She can only see public plurks.
I intend to release Karma Medic as open source under the MIT license at Google Code. I just need some free time. She uses the Python variant of the Unofficial Plurk API.
*She's only accepting up to
So what are you waiting for? Go friend her! Help her help you!
There were already a couple Python scripts out there that connect to Plurk, but nothing that constituted anything like an API like Ryan Lim's PHP version.
It's only a partial port, and it's not documented yet. But it's pretty easy to understand and it's usable. If you use it, please conform to Plurk's Terms and Conditions.
Here are some examples:
import plurkapi
p = plurkapi.PlurkAPI()
## View some plurks
for plurk in p.getPlurks(your_userid):
print plurk['content']
## Retrieving Karma
p.login(nickname, password)
print "%s has %1.2f karma." % (p.nickname, p.uidToUserinfo(p.uid)['karma'])
Bugzilla's bug 434022 is annoying. When creating a link with LiveJournal's Rich Text editor in Firefox 3.0, it appears that the link was correctly inserted, but if you examine the actual link created by viewing it in HTML mode, you'll see that a nonsense placeholder link, like, "javascript:void(0);/*1215422220401*/", was made instead.
I used to make lists with 3x5 index cards. (I have much love for that physical medium.) Then I wrote a bare-bones web 1.0 todo list. These things worked, but they had problems.
The 3x5 index cards aren't convenient for making my annual self-review at work. I'm not interested in sorting through the ones I kept. Besides, I like tossing them in the recycle bin when I'm done with them. It's rewarding.
The web service is under-featured, and I can't write any company proprietary tasks on it because it isn't contained within our intranet.
Enter TodoPaper.
A colleague at work uses the Macintosh product TaskPaper to keep himself on task at work. He showed me how simple it was to use, and I was instantly hooked with the utility of it. I thought about writing a Windows version of the product, but then I found TodoPaper.
Pure Utility
TaskPaper and TodoPaper use the same document format and data entry techniques. The document type is a plain text file, and formatting relies on simple rules. (Simpler than wiki markup.)
- Heading end with a colon.
- Tasks start with a hyphen.
- Tags start with an at sign (@).
- Tabs can be used to specify hierarchy. (Collapsible, too.)
Secret Project:
Structure:
- Basic element shape @done(2008-06-13)
- Programmatic generation of thrusters @done(2008-06-14)
- Home base coordinates
- Hit points @done(2008-06-13)
Behavior:
- Idle duration @done(2008-06-16)
- Wandering
- Target acquisition
- Chasing
Why didn't I write my own? Because Jordan Sherer already took care of the details. In addition to the basics mentioned here, which is mostly what I really need, he made the presentation very customizable, supports tagging, filtering and searching of the tasks, and even has some expert level features, like a quick-entry dialog that comes up when you press a keyboard shortcut in any other application.
TodoPaper even has an online forum, and Jordan's very active and responsive to his users' requests. I have every belief that he's going to continue to support and improve on the product. The product and its workflow has sold me.
Full disclosure: I should receive a free license to the application. I'd have written a positive review for it anyway.
Secret Project
Originally uploaded by dblume.
Having children and a NetFlix subscription have put the brakes on my secret projects.
But it looks like a new one is forming itself.
I took my daughter to Score today, and doodled on a sheet of grid ruled paper while I waited for her, and while my son was reading his "Little R" book in the back seat.
This'll be an easy secret project, but it'll still take a couple of months before it sees the light of day.
Unfortunately, I don't think it'll ever be available for public consumption. Just a little joke between me and my computer.
- 09:05 It makes me happy that C++ is getting closures and lambda functions. A little javascript and python goodness! tinyurl.com/2rbq9k #
- 16:01 Not sure I can wait until WordPress 2.5.1 before updating. Mmph! #
- 17:44 svn sw svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.5/ BAM! Done. #
Completely different, but something that makes me just as happy: This video of voiceless talking hits me as hard as the first time I saw the multi-touch demo from the TED conference in Monterey.
Being able to help people with ALS in the near term rocks. The longterm potential for hardcore geeks is just icing. (Imagine how frustrating it'd be for teachers when their students are collaborating during tests without looking, moving or talking!)
- Mood:
happy
