Playing With Sharp Objects

A recent query from a MonkeyChow user about reblogging got me to rethinking about how it is currently implemented in MonkeyChow. This is not the first time someone has asked me about automatically feeding a blog system like Wordpress with the reblog/recycle feed from MonkeyChow (rss.php). I had previously looked into this back when WP was at v2.0 and rejected a WP plugin called WP-o-Matic because it really hosed my test blog, but this sounded like the ideal tool.

Fast forward to WP 2.2.2 and it seems like the plugin now works as advertised with WP! A blog without frequent posts usually drives people away. I originally wanted to use this type of a tool to boost my post frequency, since I do a lot of reading and make good use of the Recycle box for this site. But this is a quantity vs quality issue and I finally decided that high volume posting was not what I wanted. I find it annoying that some bloggers post minutia as new articles, rather than adding on to an existing article or post in their own comments. However, there are uses for such a tool.

So one of the things that was missing in the MonkeyChow reblog RSS feed was article bodies. That was added this morning to the rss.php. By combining WP with WP-o-Matic, and aiming at your MonkeyChow reblog feed, you can now have a reblog publishing platform. For any article in MonkeyChow where the Recycle box is checked, WP-o-Matic will automatically pick up the article and post it to WP. This can be seen in action at my test blog: http://www.swordcery.com. One of the problems I’m seeing is that there is no link back to the original article, so attribution is an issue.

For this site, I do a similar reblog action with the SimplePie WP plugin which automatically posts in the sidebar to the right.

Update: I found these instructions, which make use of the Get Custom Field Values plugin to make the titles work with proper link attribution. Note that this works for the entire blog, since the change replaces the original function, otherwise we would need to come up with some sort of conditional statement for making the title work with WP’s original the_permalink function, or this one.

To get the source link to work in the post, grab this plugin, install it and activate it.
Plugin Name: Get Custom Field Values
Version: 2.1
Plugin URI: http://www.coffee2code.com/wp-plugins/#getcustom

Then paste this code:
<?php echo c2c_get_custom(’wprss_link’); ?>
in the loop on your template index.

This code puts the source URL as the link for the post title. Example:

<h3 class=”storytitle” id=”post-<?php the_ID(); ?>”><a href=”<?php echo c2c_get_custom(’wprss_link’); ?>” rel=”bookmark”><?php the_title(); ?></a></h3>

My current car now is a 1998 Plymouth Voyager which up until April had only 48000 miles on it. After my 1994 Ford Escort died from a bad case of “transmission repairs will cost much more than the value of the car”, I had to resort to driving the van to work at 20 mpg. That was when I was driving 60 miles per day, which took about 45 minutes. With the new job, I’m now putting in 100 miles per day for an hour commute. So I need a car that will give me better mileage. My dad has a Prius, and while it is interesting and gets close to the theoretical 60 mpg, it is butt ugly - we’ve termed it the Space Car - and more money than I want to spend.

After a lot of looking around, I settled on the Mini Cooper with manual transmission, which will give me about 40 mpg. So today I stopped at the Princeton NJ Mini dealer to factory order a 2007 Mini Cooper. The car you see above is the model from the configurator at the MiniUSA site. My only beef with that site is that many things, like the financinig calculator, would not work in Firefox, and I had to resort to firing up IE7.

And I now need to learn to drive stick. The dealer was nice enough to take me for a spin in a nearby lot and let me try my hand at the manual transmission. The car rides nicely, but I will definitely need practice getting into first gear smoothly from a standstill without chirping the tires or stalling. Beyond that, I was able to shift up and down through the gears once the car was in motion. I added lots of neat little extras to the car that should make that hour commute a lot more fun. The car is definitely small, but should have enough room for my 4 year old’s carseat and my 12 year old daughter - our older son will probably be too big to ride in the back so he can stay home while the wife and I take the other two for a cruise. =) Since the dealer was closed, the info could not be completely entered into the system, so now I’m waiting for the dealer to call me on Monday with my vehicle number that I can use to track the car as it is built and transported to me over the next 6-8 weeks. Stay tuned.

I recently tried to add some new content to MonkeyChow at SourceForge’s SVN repo. Looks like they moved and renamed the repo so that even this

#svn sw https://monkeychow.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/monkeychow

does not work:

svn: ‘https://monkeychow.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/monkeychow’
is not the same repository as
‘https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/monkeychow’

So, to get further SVN updates, you will need check out a new copy and then copy the config file into the new copy.

#svn co https://monkeychow.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/monkeychow monkeychow.thanksSourceForge
#mv monkeychow monkeychow.preSFchanges
#mv monkeychow.thanksSourceForge monkeychow
#cp monkeychow.preSFchanges/config.php monkeychow

Monkeychow should continue to work properly after that. Seems that this change happened recently, but it had been announced as far back as November, possibly earlier, and I completely missed it. Sorry if this caused anyone problems. If there are any changes you made that you would like to see implemented, please send me a diff against this latest version so I can look into incorporating it.

The latest tarball can be found here.