I decided today that I wanted to track my calories burned per day on a nice line graph. I did it, and I think I will continue. The total is automatically calculated by the PHP data source. This was made using my Mephisto Plugin for Open Flash Charts.
Today I found a nice ping list for Wordpress. I decided to put it into my copy of the Mephisto Post Pinger plugin. I’m not sure if it works yet, but this post will give it a good test.
So I made this awesome filter for Mephisto that allows you to easily embed flash videos in your post. May require tweaking if using a non-standard URL root.
It’s as simple as this:
<macro:flash>/assets/2007/8/13/party.flv</macro:flash>
Or, you can make it complicated:
<macro:flash width="640" height="480">/assets/2007/8/13/party.flv</macro:flash>
Which ends up like this:
Install it from your mephisto directory:
./script/plugin install -x https://modzer0.cs.uaf.edu/repos/hank/code/rails/mephisto/filtered_column_flash_video
Voila! Firebreathing!
OK – a little history. I wanted to write this extension some time ago, but couldn’t figure out how to make it work. Apparently, someone has spent the time to find out, and now I have to tear apart the code to find out how they did this. Anyway, this allows you to sign and encrypt any text in Firefox using GPG. It rocks. You can use the options dialog to select the private key to use. It also has support for GMail integration using little buttons instead of the right-click menu which is always available. Here’s a preview:
I wanted to be able to click a link in my email to see the comment it talked about. So, I modified Luke Redpath’s Comment Notification Plugin to give that to me. First, I had to do some script/console action:
>> s = Site.find_first
=> #<Site:0xb747e014 @attributes={"current_theme_path"=>"wibbish-mephisto",#...
#...
>> s.host='www.ralree.info'
=> "www.ralree.info"
>> s.save
=> true
>> quit
Next, I did a small model modification:
# app/models/article.rb, in the public section
def full_external_link
["http://", site.host, full_permalink].join("")
end
And a slight test:
Loading production environment.
>> Article.find_first.full_external_link
=> "http://www.ralree.info/2006/5/21/first-post-what-to-say"
Perfect!
Then, I just modified the view for the email a bit:
# vendor/plugins/mephisto_comment_notification/lib/views/
# comment_notifier/comment_notification.rhtml
A new comment has been posted on your blog for the article '<%= @comment.article.title %>' by <%= @comment.author %> (<%= @comment.author_email %>):
<%= @comment.article.full_external_link %>
The commenter IP address is <%= @comment.author_ip %>.
Here is the comment that was posted:
"<%= @comment.body %>"
This notification was sent using the Mephisto Comment notification plugin by Luke Redpath.
http://opensource.agileevolved.com/svn/root/rails_plugins/mephisto_comment_notification/trunk
Modified awesomely by Erik Gregg (http://www.ralree.info)
And it’s magic! It totally works!
I wanted some places to get pinged when I posted. I used the mephisto_post_ping plugin, I simply changed the directory structure and class definition around:
./lib/article_ping_observer.rb
./lib/mephisto_plugins/post_ping.rb
./lib/config.rb
./README
./init.rb
# $Id$
require 'mephisto_plugins/post_ping'
ActiveRecord::Base.observers << :article_ping_observer
module Mephisto
module Plugins
class PostPinger < Mephisto::Plugin
author 'Mark Guzman'
version '$Rev: 82 $'.gsub( "Rev: ", "" )
notes "Send Weblogs Pings when articles are published"
homepage "http://hasno.info/2006/11/11/mephisto-plugins"
class Schema < ActiveRecord::Migration
def self.install
end
def self.uninstall
end
end
end
end
end
That’s all I changed. This is my first post since the change, so I’ll see if it works. If not, at least Mephisto doesn’t blow up on startup.
Well,
unable to send xmlrpc weblog ping -> http://www.ralree.info
unable to send xmlrpc weblog ping -> http://www.ralree.info
unable to send xmlrpc weblog ping -> http://www.ralree.info
unable to send xmlrpc weblog ping -> http://www.ralree.info
Seems like a couple might have worked. I’ll keep working on it. But, at least it gets called.
So, I figured I might as well provide a quick tutorial on how to make Mephisto Plugins currently. Many of the old plugins are broken, so there needs to be a resurgence of plugin development. Here’s the basic structure of the Tag Cloud plugin:
mephisto_tag_cloud
- init.rb README
- lib
- mephisto_plugins
- tag_cloud.rb
As you can see, the structure is very simple. Here’s my code for init.rb
Liquid::Template.register_filter(MephistoPlugins::TagCloud)
That’s it! No require or anything! Next, I edited lib/mephisto_plugins/tag_cloud.rb:
module MephistoPlugins
module TagCloud
def size_tag(tag, largest = 2)
size = (Tag.find_by_name(tag).taggings(true).length + 18).to_f / 18
size = largest if size > largest
"<span style='font-size: #{size}em'><a href='/tags/#{tag}'>#{tag}</a></span>"
end
end
end
Holy crap that barely any code at all! So, the moral of the story is that it’s very easy to make the plugins once you figure out what to do.
Because the French one disappeared off the face of the earth, I took it upon myself to make a tag cloud Liquid plugin. Here’s the scoop. I downloaded Rick’s MeasureMap Plugin and went to town converting it.
Add this to your sidebar in your liquid template of choice:
{% for tag in site.tags %}
{{ tag | size_tag }}
{% endfor %}
And you should have some awesome tag_cloud action. You can specify an upper limit as well:
{{ tag | size_tag: 3 }}
That code allows for up to 4em font size. I don’t recommend this because it’s ludicrous. The default upper limit is 2em, which makes the font size range between 1em and 2em. Suggestions are welcome.
Get it here:
svn co https://modzer0.cs.uaf.edu/repos/hank/code/rails/mephisto/mephisto_tag_cloud
Or install it like this:
./script/plugin install https://modzer0.cs.uaf.edu/repos/hank/code/rails/mephisto/mephisto_tag_cloud
Works for me – let me know if you have any difficulties.
Well, he’s back. It was down a while back. You can see his version here. I like mine better. :P
SELECT StatementThanks to Todd for pointing out that the tags were applying to not only published articles, but drafts as well, which produced false tag counts. He also pointed out that they were applying to revisions, which was unacceptable. I think I fixed the problems using some straight up SQL:
def size_tag(tag, largest = 2, smallest = 0.5)
number = ActiveRecord::Base.count_by_sql(
["SELECT COUNT(*) FROM taggings,
tags, contents WHERE
tags.name = ? AND taggings.tag_id = tags.id
AND contents.id = taggings.taggable_id
AND contents.published_at IS NOT NULL;", tag])
size = sprintf("%0.2f", number.to_f / 5)
size = size.to_f > largest ? largest : size.to_f < smallest ? smallest : size
This is simple – I’m just adding some conditions that filter unpublished articles and revisions (which I don’t think actually appear in the contents table anyway). In a test, the linux tag returned 35 results the old way, 34 without the checking of published_id, and 33 as it is above. I think it’s filtering, but Todd will have to confirm this.
I made a sweet sidebar today that I’ve been wanting to make for a long time. I usually forget to head over to XKCD, so I wanted a way to have the newest images staring me in the face all the time. Now, thanks to the magic of RSS, they’re right in front of me. They are lightboxed, so I have the newest comics and their captions available to me without even leaving my own site. How homey. To get the sidebar (works in Typo svn rev. 1246, which is my crusty old checkout), do this wherever your plugins are kept:
svn co http://modzer0.cs.uaf.edu/repos/hank/code/ruby/typo/xkcd_sidebar/
Horray! A sidebar is born.
I’ve been using Graticule for geocoding in a Rails project at work, and I decided I needed to make some changes. So, I turned the Graticule gem into a plugin. It’s available here:
./script/plugin install -x https://modzer0.cs.uaf.edu/repos/hank/code/ruby/graticule_plugin
It’s as simple as that. Then just jam this into your environment and change it accordingly:
GEOCODERS = [
Graticule.service(:google).new('google_key'),
Graticule.service(:yahoo).new('yahoo_key'),
Graticule::GeocoderUsGeocoder.new,
Graticule::MetaCartaGeocoder.new
]
Then you can just perform looping on GEOCODERS to do your queries on every site.
There’s also some other changes you can do to catch Graticule::AddressError, but I won’t go into those here.
