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I was trying to figure out why Alan’s Feed2JS tool wasn’t displaying dates for my weblog feed. Alan pointed out that it was an RSS 0.91 feed, so it didn’t have dates. Duh.

After an email to the Blosxom group, and some googling, I’ve got an RSS 1.0 feed available. Turns out I needed an additional plugin to give the minimal Blosxom script some extra brains, and then some flavour files to tell it how to render the feed.

I’ve made it the default link on the sidebar, but existing subscriptions to the RSS 0.91 feed will still work.

Also, if you want to subscribe to just one section of the blog, just tack on an "index.rss10" after the path on the weblog. This works for category paths and dates (and for individual posts, but that’s not very useful…) Here’s an example for just the "Development" section.

I’ve just installed Alan Levine’s handy Feed2JS tool, which takes any RSS feed and spits out a couple of lines of HTML/Javascript for embedding it on any web page. Very handy stuff.

It’s available here if anyone on campus needs it. I’m using it to aggregate the active Learning Commons weblogs onto a single page here.

Thanks, Alan!

UPDATE: (2004/08/04) I have noticed that the Feed2js deployed on commons is being pretty heavily abused. It’s being used by German dating sites, and many many other questionable (and certainly non-academic) uses. The number of requests on our server for the single feed2js.php file is an order of magnitude greater than the next-most-requested file. I’m temporarily disabling Feed2js for a while.

If you have a valid academic need, please let me know and I’ll hook you up. The rest of you freeloaders can download a copy of feed2js for yourselves and soak up your own CPU and bandwidth…

Just came across this comparison of open source licenses from OpenFoundry.org.

Almost plain english, and provides a nice at-a-glance table of key features and restrictions of the various licenses. They compare the 10 most popular licenses, as used by projects on SourceForge.net

This should be a useful companion to the listing of actual OSI-Approved licenses from the Open Source Intiative.

I was thinking a bit over the weekend about modifying Jay Allen’s awesome MT-Blacklist plugin to work with Blosxom. I just did some googling, and searching of the Yahoo Group for Blosxom, and came up with Doug Alcorn’s BlogSpam.

It’s based on the MT-Blacklist plugin, and uses the same blacklist.txt file. It even merges in email notification of new writebacks, making my own wbnotify_nosendmail hack unnecessary and redundant.

If you’re thinking of using Blosxom as a weblog in a public space, do yourself a favour and grab BlogSpam. It replaces the default writeback plugin, and only requires some minor customization. (I added some additional stuff to quote the name in the sender’s email address, and to use a specified mailserver rather than localhost – I’ll probably do some other minor modification to tweak the output message as well).

One thing I couldn’t get working as per Doug’s instructions was the automatic update of the blacklist.txt file using his perl scripts. It’s easily cronnable without using Perl, though… I’ll likely just have it curl the latest blacklist.txt file into place once a week or so…

The Library of Congress just released this report, which discusses rights expression languages (the stuff that drives usable DRM).

Here’s a link to the PDF. Haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but it might come in handy.

I’m poking around in the Pachyderm Flash template source files, and just came across this gem:

shell.isloaded = "nononono";

I’m not sure what “nononono” means, or where it came from. It may have been just too obvious or boring to use this instead:

shell.isloaded = false;

Especially when the code to test the shell.isloaded variable seems to expect a boolean anyway. At least the original authors had a sense of humour…

Rachel Smith, with the New Media Consortium, has just released an excellent set of guidelines for authors of learning objects.

It’s the first document I’ve seen that focusses more on the educational side of things, rather than the technical. This approach is much needed, since the real implications of this stuff are not technical at all…

And, her flexible learning-object-is-whatever-it-needs-to-be-as-long-as-it’s-educational operational definition of “learning object” works for me, too.

Nicely done, Rachel! And you probably win the “How many times can you use the phrase Learning Objects in a single document?” award for 2004.

I was frustrated because the Blosxom wbnotify plugin wouldn’t work if you don’t have sendmail enabled on your host. I don’t have it turned on on the commons webserver, so writeback notifications failed.

As my first Perl coding ever, I modified the wbnotify plugin by Pasi Savolainen so that it uses the Perl module Net::SMTP rather than sendmail.

After some tweaking (mostly because I can’t seem to hit the right keys to save my life today. Come onMotrin, do your stuff), it’s working, and happily sending notifications of new writebacks.

If you are in a similar situation, feel free to grab a copy of wbnotify_nosendmail for yourself. It needs some minor configuration before it will work (you need to provide a destination email address, a sender email address, and the location of a machine with SMTP that you want to use).

The current limitation of this setup is that all Blosxom weblogs on a single server (well, sharing a plugins directory, anyway) will send notification to the same account. Not a big deal, since this is the only Blosxom weblog on the server, but it may become a problem…

UPDATE: This plugin is actually quite redundant. If you’re looking for this, be sure to check out Doug Alcorn’s BlogSpam – my thoughts on it are here.

I’ve had SSHPassKey installed for a while now – Bill Bumgarner wrote it back in his CodeFab days (pre-Apple), in order to make ProjectBuilder ask nicely for a CVS password.

I’d forgotten about it for a while (haven’t been using CVS), but I fired it up yesterday and set it to respond to SSH password requests – so I get a nice GUI to ask for it – and better yet, it’s Keychain aware, so I can ignore it after it’s set once.

Now, Blapp can use its “Publish” button, calling rsync to send new posts up to the commons webserver automagically, and it gets the password properly (instead of failing on authentication). Cool!

Thanks, Bill!

Doh. I’ve been trying to get this working all day, to no avail. My installation of Macromedia Studio MX 2004 (with Flash MX 2004 Pro), has suddenly decided it doesn’t want to launch.

I needed both Dreamweaver and Flash today, and neither one wanted to show up to the party. Fell back on BBEdit to edit the HTML (actually, that was probably more efficient anyway, so no biggie), but I have to go through some Flash files to evaluate some requirements for a project. And that’s hard to do when Flash doesn’t want to run.

I click on the app, and get the bouncy dock icon. It bounces for up to 3 minutes (thought I was stuck in VM thrash hell, but apparently not), and then I get a dialog box saying the application has crashed, and asks if I’d like to tell Apple about it. No, Actually, I’d like to tell Macromedia, but I’m not given that option

I’ve tried deleting the whole shebang (the apps, the /Library/Application/ SupportMacromedia folder, the /Library/Application Support/Macrovision folder (that’s supposed to be managing the registration, so I was hoping that would trick it into working), and then reinstalling from scratch. No joy.

I’ve sent word to Macromedia, but haven’t heard back from a non-automated respoder. Doh.

UPDATE: I deleted all of the Macromedia and Macrovision stuff again. Rebooted my machine. And reinstalled. Again. It worked this time. Why on earth would I have to reboot to get Dreamweaver working is beyond me, but it’s running now. More importantly, Flash is running too, so I can get to the Pachyderm template analysis…

UPDATE 2: Wow. A tech support guy from Macromedia just called me. An actual person, on an actual phone. I’d already resolved the issue, but that’s a nice touch – especially when most tech support is just a search form on a database somewhere. Great! Thanks, Macromedia!

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