I’ve just released a very small plugin for jQuery. It’s called Modialog and it aims to be the smallest “modal dialog boxes” plugin (there are already a lot of them out there). It weights only 2KB and works with every recent browser. You can take a look at its bare bone demo page.
Software
Ultimi miei 3 articoli su Edit di HTML.it
How to export your friendfeed stream (posts and comments)
I just wrote a script to easily download your FULL friendfeed stream. I mean: every post with comments, likes and even images and/or files. Enough for the good news: the bad news is that this a PHP command line script and you have to know how to run it. On a recent OSX or Linux environment you should be ready to go. For Windows-ers it could be a little more difficult. Sorry.
Anyway, here is the features list:
- can fetch a private stream, giving your remote key
- locally downloads images and files (detects already downloaded things)
- upon subsequent runs, it tries to get only the newly added posts
- the output file is JSON
- it scales well!
- it’s free software (MIT license)
Download the scripts from Github (the link points to the project page, where you can read the README too. In this case you’re interested to the ffexp.php script).
You then may run it like:
php ffexp.php somefilename.json
As you may infer from the output file extension, the output is plain good JSON. This format is very handy for whatever thing you may need to do with the export file. But this is up to you (or your programmer friend).
As an example of JSON postprocessor I also wrote a converter that given your export file will render a fully functional HTML file, looking just like a Friendfeed page. It also automatically embeds the necessary JavaScript, CSS and even icon images. Download the ffexp2html from Github, open it, read the fine documentation and run it like:
php ffexp2html.php somefilename.json > somefilename.html
Now you can open the somefile.html file with your browser (no internet connection needed). You may find a generated output here.
Limits? Yes there are:
- No download of your DMs (don’t know exactly why, maybe a limit of the API. But I don’t care)
- You can download even entire rooms (just use the room name as the username), but it seems that there is a limit of how back you can go. Very high, but it exists.
Convert Delicious bookmarks to CSV
Following the news that the Delicious social bookmarking service will soon be dismissed by Yahoo!, people started wondering which other service could they use in its place and how to better export their delicious bookmarks. This post is not yet another list of sites, but I’d try to help to better manage the exodus and even gain something from this deliciousastrous.
I wrote a little script in PHP that converts your bookmarks file exported from Delicious in some other formats. The script, if you’re in the mood, is even easily extensibile if you provide it another “driver” to convert in another format (you write it and then plug it into the script. Pretty straightforward).
The script is ready to be used if you need to convert the file in CSV.
Run it like this:
php deliconv.php delicious_export.html > delicious_export.csv
Another idea on how to use the script would be to check every URL for its existance. It’s a pretty easy task if you know how to use the curl extension. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader :)
So, if know how to run PHP from the command line, grab the script here (remove the .txt extension).
There is also a Delicious XML exporter, out there.
Update: my friend Nicola D’Agostino has collected some other useful informations and tricks on the matter.
Video: integrare Twitter con Drupal 6
In questo video presento l’installazione e la configurazione del modulo OAuth e Twitter all’interno di una fresca installazione di Drupal 6. Enjoy!
In search for a project releases announcement standard
Quite recently I launched a site to host a project of mine. appdate.it is meant to be sort of a “hub” for people to be costantly notified of recent releases of mainstream open source software projects (Apache httpd, MySQL, jQuery, OpenOffice, you name it…). Projects are manually added (by me), where adding a new project means writing a quite simple Python bot that scrapes the project’s site in search for the usual info: the version number(s), the release date, the Changelog, the download instructions (or directly the link).
As you may imagine this scraping process is tedious to set up and prone to errors in the medium/long period. I have to read through the HTML of the page and try to find the patterns that must be interpreted to obtain the needed information (as for the moment, the bots rely on a regular expression match system). But what if the project owner(s) redesign the site? Yeah, the bot miserably fails and calls for help (me, as usual). For example: recently Apache added an “(httpd)” string to the release page of its httpd server, and for the 2.2 version only :) The 2.0 branch still has no “httpd” string in it…
Now I’m wondering if a system could be implemented for the project site webmaster to give a more reliable system to give project like mine a way to gather this (all in all) very little piece of information they need.
What could be the best way to describe and publish the information about VERSION_ID, RELEASE_DATE, CHANGELOG, DOWNLOAD_URI for a project? What do you suggest? This is a short list of ideas, so far:
- META element(s) on the home page HTML
- HTTP header(s) to be requested via HTTP HEAD method
- a common, stated web service via a REST URI like http://someproject.info/info
- an RSS dialect
- a “standard” already exists that I’m not aware of :)
Your comment would be very appreciated :)
Updates:
In the comments void points out the DOAP project. Really interesting.