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Sunday, March 7, 2010, at 9:36 AM

And now, my blog posts to Twitter

I have been very busy, what with my professorial duties, and making the Pet Labour Troll, and building my new house. But today I can at least spend a little time trying to finish coding this blog. To which end, I have just added some scripting that posts every new entry to my Twitter feed. If it works (and it ought to work), there will be a brand new status update as soon as I submit this entry, that says, “blogged on seangleeson.com: ‘And now, my blog posts to Twitter’” (because that is the title of this entry) along with a shortened URL.

Of course, there are myriad services and plugins already extant that do pretty much exactly the same thing. But just as with my Facebook app, the hangup there is the “pretty much” part. None of them does exactly what I wanted, with the wording I wanted, or my desired algorithm for shortening the text if it exceeds 140 characters. This one is just what I wanted. (Phoebe too, I think.) And using my own script means I can use my own URL shortener as well.

So now, all y’all who follow my Twitter feed (I believe there were five of you, last I checked) never need to miss a blog post!

Posted by Sean Gleeson
Topic: blogging, social networks, Twitter
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Comments on this entry:

There are 3 comments on this entry.

8 Mar 2010
11:45 PM

feebeeglee

You are so wonderful.

12 Mar 2010
12:42 AM

feebeeglee

Hey darlin, me again. Tell your students they have to make this for the next quiz: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0Xa4bHcJu8

2 Apr 2010
8:08 AM

Christopher Roberts

Great way to expand to reach a new audience. Go Twitter!

I hope all goes well for you :)

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Sunday, February 14, 2010, at 2:01 PM

Chitika and AdSense and House Ads and Celebrity Lingerie

I’ve got some extra-fancy code serving ads on this blog. Which ads you see on the page depend on how you got to the page. If you arrived here from a major search engine (e.g., Google, Yahoo, Bing) in the United States or Canada, you are seeing ads by Chitika. (I keep wanting to call them “Chikita,” like chiquita, but it’s Chitika.)

Chitika is pretty neat; their ads only show up for search-engine-referred traffic, and not for any other traffic. So, for instance, someone who got here via a Google search for “celebrity lingerie” would see some Chitika ads all about celebrity lingerie. But the folks who just came here because they like the blog, or followed a link from somewhere else, will never see any Chitika ads at all. I like that.

For all the pageloads that don’t get the Chitika treatment, I’ve got a Google AdSense ad in the sidebar. The last time I used AdSense was quite a few years ago, so I thought surely it must be vastly improved by now: better controls and filters, easier interface. But no, it’s pretty much how I remembered it.

I do like how AdSense text ads can be customized to blend tastefully with my site’s design, but I wish there were some better ways to control which ads I will allow. (Yes, I can block ads from any URL I don’t like, but wouldn’t it be so much better to block ads for products or services I don’t want to advertise?)

And finally, for those occasions when AdSense doesn’t have any relevant ads to display, I fill the sidebar spot with my own house ads, such as for games I have made, or websites I like. These won’t show very often, so I’ll show you a couple now. These two are for games I made:

And these three are for games by my bestest friends at Pixelatrix Games:

Posted by Sean Gleeson
Topic: blogging
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Saturday, February 13, 2010, at 9:51 PM

Writing a Facebook app

Over the past week, I have been learning how to write a Facebook application, so I could make our blogs post links on Facebook automatically every time we write a new entry. I noticed that there were services that did this already (such as Networked Blogs and Ping.fm), but none of the ones I found did exactly what I wanted, so I wrote my own. That’s just how I roll.

I had to read a lot of the Facebook Developers Documentation to get their API specs, especially the FBML language reference.

I’ve tested the code, and it works, but I haven’t actually gone live with the actual automatic posting yet. That will happen tomorrow.

UPDATE: Yep, totally works. Now I can do other stuff.

Posted by Sean Gleeson
Topic: blogging, Facebook
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Wednesday, February 3, 2010, at 9:32 AM

True Comment Number plugin for MT5

Yesterday, in addition to making my PHP workaround, I also wrote a Movable Type plugin I call “True Comment Number.” If you look at an entry on this blog that has comments, you’ll notice that I number them, starting with “1” for the first comment, and going up from there. This numbering was not working properly with paginated comments, so that’s why I wrote True Comment Number.

Anyone who wants my plugin may download TrueCommentNumber.zip and use it.

Continued... Show the rest of this entry.

What is it?

The True Comment Number plugin adds a new Template Tag, <$mt:TrueCommentNumber$> to Movable Type. This tag can replace the <$mt:CommentOrderNumber$> tag in the context of comment pagination.

<$mt:CommentOrderNumber$> is a good tag for numbering your comments in a list. It starts with “1” and keeps adding 1 for each comment. But the problem with <$mt:CommentOrderNumber$> is, it starts with “1” even when it should be starting from a higher number. Say you clicked on the “newer comments” link to see comments 51 - 100, then you would think the first comment would be numbered “51.” But <$mt:CommentOrderNumber$> would number it “1,” because it does not take the offset (i.e., the 50 comments being skipped) into consideration.

That’s where <$mt:TrueCommentNumber$> comes in. If you are looking at comments 51 - 100, it will start at “51.” If you are looking at comments 2801-3000, it will start at “2801.” It will always give you the true order number of the comment.

What does it do, exactly?

The <$mt:TrueCommentNumber$> tag works almost exactly like the existing <$mt:CommentOrderNumber$> tag. In fact, for regular publishing, it will return exactly whatever <$mt:CommentOrderNumber$> would have returned. No difference at all. Except that if it is in the context of a batch of comments that have been retrieved by an an AJAX script, it will add the “offset” value to the comment number.

How do you use it?

You can use it in your “Comment Detail” template if you want comments numbered. For a very stripped-down example…

<div id="comment-<$mt:CommentID$>" class="comment">
    <span class="comment-number">
        #<$mt:TrueCommentNumber$>:
    </span>
    <div class="comment-content">
        <$mt:CommentBody$>
    </div>
</div>

Does it work?

It works for me, on Movable Type version 5. I have not tested it on any other versions, and make no warranties of any kind. If you want to modify it in any way, go right ahead.

Have fun!

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Posted by Sean Gleeson
Topic: blogging, MT5
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Tuesday, February 2, 2010, at 6:56 PM

MT5 comment pagination fix

I just fixed a couple more Movable Type things. I reckon I must have the only working copy of MT5 in the whole world. Today I did a number of fixes to the new-fangled comment pagination feature.

Comment pagination is pretty cool. We’ve all been to blog pages with hundreds and hundreds of comments, and seen how such a huge page can clobber your browser. But the Movable Type comment pagination lets you only show a limited number of the most recent comments on your page, then uses AJAX to navigate to newer or older comments, without reloading the whole page.

The only problem was, it didn’t work. There were two or three problems I had to track down and fix. First of all, my blog (at seangleeson.com) is on a different domain from my MT installation (at mt5.gleeson.us). But the comment pagination script relies on an XMLHttpRequest, and as we all know, cross-domain XMLHttpRequests are illegal! The blog page was requesting a batch of comments from mt5.gleeson.us/mt-comments.cgi, and getting denied.

I fixed this problem by putting a very simple PHP script at seangleeson.com/commentlisting.php. All this script does is act as a go-between, a middleman. It gets the request from the blog page, passes it along to the MT script, gets an answer from the MT script, and passes it back to the blog page. So now the blog has a legal place to send its XMLHttpRequest.

Continued... Show the rest of this entry.

Here is the code of commentlisting.php:

<?php
$R = 'void(0);';
$E = $_GET['e'];
$L = ($_GET['l'] ? $_GET['l'] : '50');
$O = ($_GET['o'] ? $_GET['o'] : '0');
if ($E) {
    ob_start();
    $U = "http://mt5.gleeson.us/mt-comments.cgi?";
    $U .= "__mode=comment_listing&direction=ascend";
    $U .= "&entry_id=".$E."&limit=".$L."&offset=".$O;
    $C = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($C, CURLOPT_URL, $U);
    curl_exec($C);
    curl_close($C);
    $R = ob_get_clean();
}
header('Last-Modified: '.gmdate(DATE_RFC1123, time() - 6));
header('Expires: '.gmdate(DATE_RFC1123, time() + 6));
header('Accept-Ranges: bytes');
header('Content-Length: '.strlen($R));
header('Content-Type: text/javascript; charset=utf-8');
echo $R;
?>

And once that was in place, all I had to do was edit the JavaScript, to send its requests to commentlisting.php instead of mt-comments.cgi, thusly:

jsonUrl = [
    "<$mt:BlogURL$>commentlisting.php?e=",
    entryID,
    "&l=",
    commentsPerPage,
    "&o=",
    _getCommentOffset()
 ].join('');

And then it worked. Well, it worked after I wrote my True Comment Number plugin.

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Posted by Sean Gleeson
Topic: blogging, MT5
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Sunday, January 31, 2010, at 11:35 PM

MT5 lastn comments bug hack

Once again, I have had to hack Movable Type’s Perl source code to fix an error they made. The <mt:Comments> tag that loops through the comments takes an argument “lastn” which is supposed to tell it how many of the most recent comments to retrieve. But instead of retrieving the n most recent comments, MT was retrieving the n oldest comments! Exactly the opposite of what it was supposed to do!

This bug has been known to the MT community for quite awhile. Apparently, it cropped up in version 4.3, and here we are in version 5 and it’s still there! I didn’t see anyone with any good hacks to fix it, so I figured this one out myself. I do dislike hacking the source code (I have said this before), but when you gotta, you gotta.

Continued... Show the rest of this entry.

I added a single line of Perl code to

/lib/MT/Template/Tags/Comment.pm

at around line 301. This hack fixed the problem:

if ($so) {
    $args{'direction'} = $so;
} else {
    $args{'direction'} = 'descend';
}

## Added this line to fix bug:
$args{'direction'} = 'descend';

my $cmts = $e->comments(\%terms, \%args);
my $offset = $args->{offset} || 0;
...

Sorry if these techie posts bore you. They bore me. But I have to blog them, if only to remember everything I did. I have to re-do all of my hacks if I update the software.

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Posted by Sean Gleeson
Topic: blogging, MT5
Permalink • Show 4 comments • Add your comment

Comments on this entry:

There are 4 comments on this entry.

1 Feb 2010
5:37 PM

jer@nyquil.org

Looks good on my Android phone. I’ll check it out when I get home from my walk to the (closed) butcher shop.

1 Feb 2010
5:40 PM

Sean Gleeson

But why are you walking to the closed butcher shop? Is it a breaking-and-entering kind of thing?

1 Feb 2010
6:30 PM

jer@nyquil.org

It had no reason to be closed.

I walked there to buy some meat. Annoying.

6 Apr 2010
3:20 AM

Peter

Instead of hacking the code, you could just provide a sort order. I had the same bug, but modified my template so that instead of this:

| last by ,

I had this:

| last by ,

Worked like a charm!

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Thursday, January 28, 2010, at 9:53 PM

Designing the theme

I am working hard at designing the MT5 theme for seangleeson.com. Mostly this entails editing templates for all the page elements, and writing CSS code.

Yes, I do realize that I have broken a lot of stuff. Most of the links you see on this page don’t really work yet. But I am getting all of that working real soon!

Posted by Sean Gleeson
Topic: blogging, MT5
Permalink • Show 2 comments • Add your comment

Comments on this entry:

There are 2 comments on this entry.

30 Jan 2010
12:41 PM

feebeeglee

I love you! Thank you for working so hard on this stuff, darlin!

31 Jan 2010
2:17 PM

Sean Gleeson

Back atcha, darlin!

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Wednesday, January 27, 2010, at 12:02 AM

Swell 3D is on MT5 now

I just finished migrating swell3d.com to the Movable Type 5 installation. Now I will start working on this blog’s theme.

Oh, and the nice people at Technorati wanted me to put the string 8EKGUHTYM4AA into a post, so this one’s for you.

Posted by Sean Gleeson
Topic: blogging, MT5
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Sunday, January 24, 2010, at 8:21 PM

MT5 configuration across domains

Hi. I haven’t blogged in a few years. Good to see you all again.

I’ve just installed the brand-spanking-new Movable Type 5, to run seangleeson.com and feebeeglee.com. I shall be spending quite a bit of time creating style sheets and templates for our new family of blogs in the upcoming weeks, and blogging about any issues or insights which occur. Then, I will work on migrating the slumbering swell3d.com to this MT5 installation, and possibly even merging in our old WordPress blogs (at blog.gleeson.us, sean.gleeson.us, phoebe.gleeson.us, and homeschool.gleeson.us). I also want to start a Web development blog at mr.gleeson.us. So this is the first step of a long journey.

But here is something about MT5, which has caused problems right from the beginning: why the devil don’t they want me to have blogs on multiple domains? As recently as MT4, you could put a blog at one domain (like feebeeglee.com), and another at another domain (like seangleeson.com) and and have them aggregated at a third domain (like gleeson.us), the way I am doing. But the new MT5 has dispensed with this very helpful ability.

Continued... Show the rest of this entry.

Now, blogs cannot stand alone; they have to be a part of a “website,” which acts as an aggregator and receptacle for non-blog content. That’s okay with me, but for some screwy reason, every “blog” must be a subdomain or directory of its “website” parent’s domain! For instance, if the “website” is at www.mysite.com, MT5 insists that its blogs must be at www.mysite.com/blog1/ and www.mysite.com/blog2/ (or — even worse — at blog1.www.mysite.com and blog2.www.mysite.com), but not simply at blog1.com and blog2.com.

Why can’t a blog have its own unique domain? There is certainly no technical reason for this restriction. I know this because I just spent a day hacking MT5’s Perl code to get it to work, and it caused no technical problems, it works like a dream.

The actual code hack didn’t take a whole day, in fact it’s just one extra line of code in the Blog.pm module in the MT lib.

sub site_url {
    my $blog = shift;
    # This next line is the one I added:
    return $blog->raw_site_url;
    ...

But before I did that, I spent an unfruitful day trying to write a plugin that would do the same thing. I don’t like hacking source code, because it makes updating so cumbersome. So a plugin would definitely have been the preferable solution. But when one attempt after another to modify the Blog object with a plugin failed, I finally gave up and just hacked away at the source. It felt good.

What I really hope is that the very next release of MT corrects this problem and allows cross-domain blogs. Because now I will have to hack every MT update until they fix it.

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Posted by Sean Gleeson
Topic: blogging, MT5
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« games | Main Index | Archives | programming »

Recently in metablog Category

And now, my blog posts to Twitter

Comments on this entry:

Chitika and AdSense and House Ads and Celebrity Lingerie

Writing a Facebook app

True Comment Number plugin for MT5

MT5 comment pagination fix

MT5 lastn comments bug hack

Comments on this entry:

Designing the theme

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Swell 3D is on MT5 now

MT5 configuration across domains

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