Yesterday I picked up OSX Leopard and spend some time doing something productive with it. So here are some quick things I decided to do with my blog.
Twitter + JQuery. I made it so it pulls 5 twitter updates and it only shows the most recent. Then using JQuery it shows the rest. How I did this? I had to over-ride the Twitter.js JSON callback so it tags the items with a name and all the items past the first will be invisible. Then I used JQuery to show the hidden items on user demand.
$("#lnkShowMoreTwitter").click(function(){
$("li[@name=twititem]“).fadeIn(’slow’);
return false;
});
I Friggin’ love JQuery by the way, I think its the best thing to happen to the Internet in a long time. I really hate screwing around in Javascript and I always wrote what I thought was really wasteful code. JQuery does everything I want and it’s really compact and quick. Love it.
Yahoo Pipes + FeedBurner = Feed consolidation /w options. Using Yahoo Pipes I decided to merge together all of my RSS into a single feed that gets sent through my Feedburner’s main feed. I was conflicted if this was a good idea - I’m split between the idea giving a person a single access point to all the information I’m putting out on the web and the Idea of bringing it all together at my blog so they can experience it in one spot (and look at my ads.. oooh I’m crafty). Regardless I figured it would be a good experiment to try.
Oh and now I show the Flickr feed at the footer of my blog, Figured seeing as I posted images related to what I write about I may as well tie it all together.
It was fun working in OSX - it’s so easy on the eyes and it’s the little things that count - it really feels like someone thought about everything I’d want to do on a daily basis and tried to make it as smooth as possible.
Matt Brett
October 28th, 2007
I just cursed you up and down! 52 new items? WTF? You probably shouldn’t have consolidated everything to your main feed URL. No doubt pissed a few people off.
I personally hate seeing people’s Flickr images and other crap in feeds. In fact, I immediately unsubscribe if there’s anything more than blog posts in a feed. But glad to see you’re offering other feeds as well. That’s where most people go wrong and don’t bother.
BTW, the URL for your blog posts only feed is wrong - it’s only showing the most recent. bitporters.net/feed shows them all, though.
And finally, cool that you enjoyed working in Leopard. I discover new things in OS X daily that further demonstrate why it’s a superior operating system. Spoil yourself and stay away from Boot Camp for a while.
BPAndrew
October 28th, 2007
@Matt Brett
Good point, I figured I should have added a date/time filter to the pipe so that it wouldn’t dump 52 new items at once. Another thing I could have done was make it so it only imports flickr photos if I have a description length > say 50 characters. Not sure if I’m going to keep it this way because I see your point.
Also, your right I think I may try to see how much work I can get done in Parallels. If I can do XNA development in it (not sure because its tricky what happens behind the scenes there) then I’ll stick to it as my primary OS.
BPAndrew
October 28th, 2007
OK I cut out the flickr and the comments in the global feed - that was a bad idea - its just twitter mixed in with my blog postings.