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>

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.

In an effort to provide MonkeyChow with a little more color, I’ve decided to add favicons from the various feeds you browse into the view. As you can see, the individual feeds in the left get the icon as well as the individual items. This replaces the bland RSS icon that was after each feed for showing the feed source. For those sites that have decided not to use favicon.ico on their site, the same plan RSS icon will be displayed. This is a user preference and you can go back to the plain old RSS icon for all feeds if you like. The individual icons all add a slight bit more time to page loads, but browser and proxy caching all make this much speedier.

This is not yet in the SVN repo, but will be this weekend. A number of people have asked me when they can see some of these changes in a tarball since they don’t know how to or can’t use SVN. I will also be implementing some weekly automated SVN repo dumps to tarballs so that you don’t have to wait for me to make a release. These will be something like version 0.5.X until I get the multiple user code finalized for 0.6.

 This release has 
* user login - all users see same view at this time; default admin passwd is set at install time 
* a unified display code for frames and non-frames view,  
* user preferences, including the display of feedicons and their display size, the choice of frames or non-frames on individual login 
* digg icon for Digg articles (will be moved to plugin later) 
* Firefox 2 integration 
* lots of code cleanup

Reminder: to get the code from SVN, execute the following

svn co https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/monkeychow monkeychow

Update: What the heck. I updated SVN to version 173 and you can download the 0.5.5 version here.

 Update: Tarball lists can be found here.

This neat screen saver can stream your favorite RSS feed to your screen. However, I strictly recommend that you only point it at a feed that are devoid of NSFW articles or you may be in for a shock when you come back from lunch.

Know someone who could use an introduction to RSS? This whiteboard and paper presentation by Common Craft is actually well produced and touches all the basic points in an easy to understand fashion.

http://www.commoncraft.com/rss_plain_english

Click To Play

You can find a little screencast that I threw together this morning for MonkeyChow, going over some of the more frequently used features. A lot of the recent work is showcased, so what you are seeing is new stuff. Most of this is only available in the SVN version, but will become available to all once I’ve finalized the last fixes and improvements for the next release. Take a look and let me know what you think.

Screencasting tools provided by Wink.

This was a long time coming, but is finally here and will make things simpler when altering code in the future. I’ll only have to change it in one place to affect all views of the code. In addition, there is now a preference for determining which view you get on login. I’ve also fixed the installer code so that the user table is set up properly and so that you are asked for the admin password instead of having to go into mysql to set it. This is currently in SVN version 167.

A quick rundown of what’s left before version 0.6 is out:

• Installer SQL sanity checking
• Keyboard shortcuts like Google Reader and Bloglines
• Plugins - alter feed item content (see Digg badge), user prefs (social badges), feed item social buttons (mailto, del.icio.us, recycle)
• Feeds per user - Still only one feed list to view
• More localization

Regarding support, you’re welcome to use the comments for feedback as I monitor it daily, but because of comment spam I’ve been force to set up autoclose articles after 30 days. Your best bet would be to sign up at the Vanilla support boards.

A recent small addition to the MonkeyChow code can be seen below.

Now, if the feed happens to come from Digg.com, the iframe Digg badge will be displayed for that story so that you can digg the story from within MonkeyChow. YOu still have to be logged into Digg for this to work, so I recommend a middle-click on the badge.

In other MonkeyChow news, I’ve combined the CSS for frames and non-frames view, and merged the index.php non-frames feed list with the frames sidebar feed list. Now, the same code checks whether you are in a frames view or not, and displays appropriately.

My next step will be to do the same for the framed and non-framed items panes, and then split the frames menu pane appropriately between the non-frames feeds and items views. This way, you can launch something from the frames view into another browser tab and still retain the functionality.

This is currently only available in the SVN code. Once I have completed this and finished multiuser functionality, I will be releasing MonkeyChow version 0.6.

Well, I’m back to updating MonkeyChow over the Christmas break. I recently saw how FeedOnFeeds just released some new code for the pre-0.6 version. I have to say that I like what has been done. However, I think that it’s still missing a number of things and its not very pretty. Likewise, there are things that I’m not happy with in Google Reader that have prevented me from going over to that platform. I’m used to the things that I have added to MonkeyChow, so I am in the process of seeing how some of that stuff will port over.

First, because of all the changes taking place, I need to make it easier to do upgrades. The installer is going to be changed so that it will in effect do a sanity check on the database so that each time there is an update the database state will be examined and changed to add any necessary columns. This will make the whole system more user friendly, where in the past I’ve asked people to do the changes manually. Some of this code was donated by Andrew Arensburger back in May, but I never did anything with it.

Logins and prefs. The logins get rid of the need to play with .htaccess, which is another manual step we want to get rid of. I have logins working, but I need to port in some of the code for preferences. I’m thinking of turning keyboard shortcuts on permanently since a number of people have asked for them. Somewhere in the prefs will be a choice of whether the frames or panel view is kicked off at login.

Now that we have identities through these logins, I also want to create some sort of community experience with MonkeyChow, so I’m looking to see if I can do something with a bulletin board like Vanilla. Likewise, a plugin for Vanilla that shows what lists you are subscribed to would be neat. The existing privacy features of MonkeyChow will still be respected in all this, of course.

The MonkeyChow UI needs to get prettier. I’ve been doing some work with this, but I know it’s not what everyone else wants. I want to extend the prefs so that I can stick all the current CSS into a themes folder and let people create and pick other themes. I don’t know how crazy we want to get with themes, but let’s see where this goes.

Plugins. I like the idea of this. I’d like to move a lot of things like the social bookmark buttons into a plugin(s) so that people can choose whether or not to get rid of that. Things like reminders and article filters will fit nicely here. But again there is room for some other social aspects like being able to see each others accounts and things like IM login status and Last.FM lists, to name a few examples. I really like how Vanilla BB does this.

Translations. If you’ve talked to me about providing a translation, please get that to me when you can. I still want to get MonkeyChow translated into a couple more languages as a requirement before we go to 1.0 (way down the road). This would give it much greater visibility.

Bugs. MonkeyChow has them. One annoying one I really want to quash is that it picks up old articles after they have been deleted from the database. Some feeds are keeping articles for many many months, and when MonkeyChow deletes the article after 60 days the article can come back in. In some cases this can be fixed by setting a date field according to what dc:date says for that article in the feed, but there are also some feeds that are not setting a date for their articles and that is a big pain to get around. If you know of any others that are keeping you from making MonkeyChow your full-time reader, please don’t hesitate to open an account on the support forums and voice your concern.

Does anyone want to see blog reading stats, like the new stuff in Google Reader?

Update 2007-02-18: Note that Google Toolbar is known to interfere with the functionality of the firefox feed handlers settings.

Update 2007-02-25: Firefox is at version 2.0.0.2 to fix a major security hole and to apply stability fixes.

What you are seeing in the following screenshot is integration of MonkeyChow into Firefox 2.0’s RSS subscription handoff.

Rather than provide us with a built-in RSS client, the folks at Mozilla wisely chose to make Firefox 2.0’s RSS Feed handling as flexible as possible. At a later date, should Mozilla choose to include an RSS reader in Firefox, they will still have that option. And so do the rest of us.

In the latest SVN release, Version 112, when you click on the Add Feeds link in the menu pane, MonkeyChow will check to see if you have Firefox 2.0 running. If you do, it adds a link that you can click on to make the above happen. You will be asked to confirm the addition of the link to the feed reading list.

Note that there is a bug in Firefox 2.0 that does not highlight user added feed readers in that list. Although MonkeyChow is not highlighted by Mozilla, rest assured it is selected and functioning.

The first time you click the orange icon () in the address bar, you will be asked if you always want MonkeyChow to be used for RSS feed subscriptions. OK this and from now on it will automatically be added to your subscription list.

This is just another reason to move to the greatest web browser and the fastest evolving web based RSS reader as your RSS platform!