bulknews.typepad.com

Bloggers' Best Practice: Take Pictures before Eating

Read Bloglines via Gmail

Inspired by Gmail as an RSS reader, I wrote a script bloglines2email that:

• fetches unread news feed using Bloglines API, and
• send each item as an HTML mail to your Gmail account

Yay, this works really nicely. Gmail enables you a full-text search, labelling (or tagging) and star/unstar for clipping. And most of all, Gmail interface gives you much better user experience (it's fast, it has keyboard short-cuts, etc.)

Source Code

I put the script into my subversion repository, so you can check it out by svn co svn://svn.bulknews.net/public/bloglines2email/trunk bloglines2email

You'll need some CPAN modules like WebService::Bloglines, XML::LibXML, Template-Toolkit, YAML and MIME::Lite. After installing modules, you'll need to setup your configuration file as bloglines2email.conf (there's a .sample file in svn directory) to specify username & passwords for Bloglines. Running bloglines2email script with crontab will periodically send updated items as HTML mail.

Warning: If you have massive feed subsriptions on Bloglines, Gmail might not like it and they might suspend your account temporarily.

UPDATE: Recently I added an configuration option 'group-items' to send multiple items per feed as one email. That decreases the volume of emails sent, and enables easier browsing on Gmail thanks to conversation threading based on Subject (now that it uses feed's title as Subject in grouping mode). Check out svn if you wanna try)

screenshots

MT 3.2 launched!

MT 3.2 is launched! Congrats to the team (Jay, Ezra, Brad, Anil, Walt, Nick and others) for the pretty slick and the best release of Movable Type ever. I'll spend some time in this weekend to upgrade mine to 3.2.

Well, I assume that you're wondering why I have to spend some time for upgrading since in most cases upgrade to 3.2 is just so easy, however my MT installation is based on MT 2.51 (!) with my local patches. It also uses MySQL 3.x with euc-jp character set. I have to talk also with SAKK MT localization team what's the best way to do that.

I'm pretty excited and can't wait for the day I can use 3.2. I guess 99% of my local patches to the code (like killing trackback/comment spams from Main menu, DSBL lookup, banning ASCII-only comments, programmable JavaScript interface for Google AdSense Alt ads) can be easily done with the new plugin architecture.

(The picture was taken by Yann from EMEA)

Nintendogs U.S.A

Link: Nintendogs for Nintendo DS.

Finally, Nintendogs is available in U.S. I've brought my Japanese version of nintendogs but not played it for a long time... I'm not sure about the compatiblity between US and JP version (I'm afraid there's not), but if somebody has got one, let's play it together.

TypePad RSS 2.0 Template for Advanced Template users

Here's an RSS 2.0 Index Template for TypePad users who uses Advanced Template. The key here is new MTEntryEnclosures tag to include enclosures in the entry for Podcasting stuff. Save this template as Index Template and link to "rss.xml" under your directory. For customers without advanced template, you don't need to add this: it's automatically published.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<rss
xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/"
version="2.0">
<channel>
<title><$MTBlogName remove_html="1" encode_xml="1"$></title>
<link><$MTBlogURL$></link>
<description><$MTBlogDescription remove_html="1" encode_xml="1"$></description>
<language><$MTBlogLanguage$></language>
<lastBuildDate><MTEntries lastn="1"><$MTEntryDate format="%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S%z" language="en_US"$></MTEntries></lastBuildDate>
<generator>http://www.typepad.com/</generator>
<MTEntries>
<item>
<title><$MTEntryTitle encode_xml="1"$></title>
<link><$MTEntryPermalink encode_xml="1"$></link>
<guid isPermaLink="true"><$MTEntryPermalink encode_xml="1"$></guid>
<description><$MTEntryExcerpt encode_xml="1"$></description>
<MTWeblogIfFullRSSContent>
<MTWeblogOwnerHas field="feeds_full_content">
<content:encoded><$MTEntryBody encode_xml="1"$><$MTEntryMore encode_xml="1"$></content:encoded>
</MTWeblogOwnerHas>
</MTWeblogIfFullRSSContent>
<MTEntryCategories>
<category><$MTCategoryLabel encode_xml="1"$></category>
</MTEntryCategories>
<dc:creator><$MTEntryAuthor encode_xml="1"$></dc:creator>
<MTIfNonEmpty tag="MTEntryDate" format="%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %z" language="en_US"><pubDate><$MTEntryDate format="%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %z" language="en_US"$></pubDate></MTIfNonEmpty>
<MTEntryEnclosures>
<enclosure url="<$MTEntryEnclosureURL$>" type="<$MTEntryEnclosureMIMEType$>" length="<$MTEntryEnclosureLength$>" />
</MTEntryEnclosures>
</item>
</MTEntries>
</channel>
</rss>

TypePad new feature

Yay, the last Thursday we had a pretty big release for TypePad. Most of the features are done in the Hackathon and I took a part of Podcasting support. Everybody loves new features obviously.

Yes, this is yet another true blog style, links without extra comment.

Atom Stream

Brad released a prototype for Atom Stream server for LiveJournal today, Ben was working on TypePad to support the upstream push from TypePad weblogs. Hence I spent a couple of minutes to write a consumer library: XML::Atom::Stream. It uses SAX based XML parser (XML::SAX::ParserFactory) and splices the stream into individual <atom:feed/>s, with which you can do whatever you want.

We chatted about the idea of Atom stream in the last weekend. That's pretty quick and I love it. And yeah, this is part of our first-step answer for weblog Updates ping and RSS Ping stuff. See also Ben's Post with nice background information about pings.

Interview with Damian Conway

Link: perlcast.com ? Interview with Damian Conway.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to sit down with Damian Conway and record an interview about his involvement with Perl and about his new book Perl Best Practices.

There's an interview Podcast with Damian Conway on PerlCast. It has to be must-listen.