So having this new power of A.C.E. sort of generates interesting options as to channels of expression. I wonder what happens to the ACE if I mix categories for a post. Exclusion or Inclusion. We will see.
Category: Technology
New Liveblogging Pages
Posted by - October 4, 09
Seinime asked about how to integrate the Melative microblog with Wordpress. There was a proper hook for this sort of thing, so I started a plugin which outputs Melative updates based on a given HTML comment (<!– URL –>). I’ve made some pages on this blog for Recently Watch and Recently Read titles. First, the plugin.
The plugin currently supports two URL types using the format <!– http://melative.com/username/category/title –> or <!– http://melative.com/username/item# –> Note: The examples below are fully dynamic (the content is not in the database, rendered on display).
Single Update
<!– http://melative.com/RyanA/13233 –>
So. @Seinime, check this output http://is.gd/3WS4P ... basic plugin output, just req adding into an entry ^^ Works for a single item, media category, or media-title ^^
Multiple Updates
<!– http://melative.com/RyanA/anime/Hayate+no+Gotoku!! –>
completed Hayate no Gotoku!!
Great lovecom in a number of episodes, damn. Over until more seasons are revealed. Good news is that I still have 20+ episodes of S1, but S2 is more focused than S1. D:
watched Hayate no Gotoku!! (episode 25)
The epic adventures, a day in the life of Hayate. PACKYVENTURES. The comedy of misfortune. Last episode of S2 D:
watching Hayate no Gotoku!! (episode 25)
Hina in Wonderland. lolstyle~ and Candy Charas... USAGEE word.
watched Hayate no Gotoku!! (episode 24)
Sakuya and Hina totally stole this one; both #amazing. Past two episodes have been really nice high points, feeling the quality lovecom, and it's so distinct from S1-type episodes.
watched Hayate no Gotoku!! (episode 23)
Splendid combination of LOL and DOKI. Blend was just #awesome, Sakuya mo!
watching Hayate no Gotoku!! (episode 23)
That OP is so fab. KOTOKO FTW.
watched Hayate no Gotoku!! (episode 22)
Seriously #hilarious, servicey, and even manages to accentuate 1<3Triangle, but Maria, oh Maria. Nice covering of bases to amp the laughs and enjoyment. More of this or haremette focus please.
watched Hayate no Gotoku!! (episode 21)
Tama! Pretty funny, though episodic. The main problem when this series goes episodic is that the underlying threads usually go untouched. Maybe that's a benefit, who knows?
watching Hayate no Gotoku!! (episode 21)
Nagi's definition of ninja is super-ultra-gorgeous GOKAI! FFFF. The reaction is floorworthy. XD
watched Hayate no Gotoku!! (episode 20)
Maids. Poor Maria. The ultimate joke was alright; expected. Perhaps it's just me, but the content is getting a little less juice, and coming off more like S1.
watching Hayate no Gotoku!! (episode 20)
Maria. Maria. Oh Maria. :| Oh. Fresh.
watching Hayate no Gotoku!! (episode 20)
Maids. SRSLY. Gotta hand it to Maria for representing so well.
watched Hayate no Gotoku!! (episode 19)
Much in the fashion of S1 (kinda random, broken ep). Maria was fab with her humming, and Sakuya is so troublesome XD rawr
watching Hayate no Gotoku!! (episode 19)
rofl, why is this so random... Sunday Box. Open ze Box. hahaha
watched Hayate no Gotoku!! (episode 18)
Well played Hinagiku; the art of hiding joy. Hayate's curse continues haha.
watching Hayate no Gotoku!! (episode 18)
Seems they put some effort into the new OP. KOTOKO, Fun.
watched Hayate no Gotoku!! (episode 17)
Pretty fab episode, but a tad choppy, and mystical. Early onsen bit was filled with plenty of kyaaness.
rated Hayate no Gotoku!! 11
OMG... yea. Melative Ratings. You can make your own standards.
rated Hayate no Gotoku!! 8
Goes but where's the library change.
watched Hayate no Gotoku!! (episode 16)
Gah, more to come. Very enjoyable episode, mixed with nice level of sentiment; Mothers :) Focus sort of shifted off the harem, but the players are there.
Notice that the title may be left out and then it would retrieve updates only in the ‘anime’ category.
Theming
I don’t recommend leaving the HTML naked, so here is the basic structure of an ‘event’ item.
<div class=”m-ev”>
containing div
<div class=”E”>
Event item
<div class=”L”><img /></div>
Left, contains a title’s img when present
<div class=”C”>
Content
<p class=”A” />
Action - usually the title ‘watching XXX (episode Y)’
<p class=”M” />
Message
</div> // end C
<div class=”meta”><a /><a /></div>
contains a tags
</div> // end E
</div> // end m-ev
It’s quite easy to style the items by using .m-ev .E CSS selectors. One special type of ‘E’ class has the class ‘thread’ which means the item above it is contains the same context (title). These items will not have an image output for the title. The content is generated via XSL transform after obtaining the API XML, so it is configurable if need be.
Issues/Future Updates
- Selecting a certain number of updates. 20 updates is default.
- Calls are cached by URL, and expire after 5 minutes; s/b configurable.
- Relative links are wrong in the A div
- Default CSS could be inserted into the header
With the current implementation, it will be easy to make other calls the the API, and one such call I want to do is that of a user’s Library. The library list holds a good deal of information including ratings and tags. Optimally, bloggers should be able to show their ‘lists’ to visitors on-site, and not require them to go to some other service. Plus there is full theme/styling control. It’s a win situation ^^
If anyone wishes to contribute, I’ll go ahead and make a Wordpress plugin page. Most likely it will be placed along side the melative-link plugin mellow_bunny has tweaked.
On Wordpress as The Ultimate CMS
Posted by - September 26, 09
usagijen has an awesome post up about WordCamp Philippines 2009. There was a point that struck me about WP as a CMS.
I was talking to mellow bunny in the #melative freenode channel the other day about this, and I have to disagree with Wordpress as the Ultimate CMS, mainly because it is not “meta-coded” enough, or rather because it is a finite solution at the core; a system for blogging (entries, pages, comments).
Is a CMS an out-of-the-box blog?
If we take a step up and look at the concept of a CMS, it doesn’t really solve the blogging problem until it is instantiated/implemented, but because a CMS is a more general solution it is capable of becoming something Wordpress cannot, take Joomla’s LMS for instance1. From another perspective, if we look at the activity at Drupal, we see that there are blogging modules, but also a whole lot of other stuff.
In short, a fully fledged CMS is more like a framework than a specific solution; WP is downstream (more specified) in development stages. The added compromise of using Wordpress as a CMS for something other than the blogging problem would be that of using a db schema not built for whatever specific problem that needs to be solved (the ability to optimize without modifying the wp tables and without creating an entirely new subsystem is limited imo).
A good example I have interaction with, Melative. There’s no way WP could handle the inter-contextual linking of the backend (talking about the “encyclopedia pages” only). Okay, so that’s not entirely true, because WP could be used to get similar output, and possibly even the linking through plugins… but, by the time all this customization was done, it would have over-specified the solution. The fact that WP is handling page-data becomes pointless, because the page data is not static dynamic and also needs semantic linking to another general system. Not to mention that it would be a thicker codebase.2
So anyhow… just thought I’d share that opinion. Wordpress is awesome nonetheless, it is a role model in “method” for another project I’m on ^^ If considering it a CMS, I’d say it is more of a Static-CMS… maybe most CMS are used that way, who knows, but in my mind CMSs allow more auto/dynamic content and are capable of being adapted into a wider array of solutions, one being a blog3.
Musical Spread
Posted by - September 15, 09
The past 40 or so hours have yielded hellish issues interesting findings on my home server. Rather than go into that, here’s a nice little circle-chart (some call it pie).
click for full
Image taken from Disk Analyzer packaged with various Linux distributions.
Pretty much don’t use most of that chart, and lately just stick around the Current/Burner/Burner-J directories. Now if I did the animu drive, I wonder what that would look like…
How soon is Fall?
Posted by - July 31, 09
The other night Seinime comes onto the melative microblog mentioning he’s going to be linking to melative for all the coming Autumn series. Naturally I was like “Shit!” because I hadn’t entered any of that info.1
Well, after a couple hours of searching for resources and whatnot, most of the info was present. Seimine’s early Fall forecast is out.
I once wrote an article on the essence of a Season Preview, with some focus on melative. Today I took a few hours and javascripted a dynamic info-fetcher based on the melative API; mind you, it was in raw javascript, had I been using jQuery it’d likely have been quicker.
It can be found on this page. While the javascript source is here.
Before that, Hold up
Isn’t is like this early to be doing Autumn seasonal stuffs. Here in FL, we’re still on the lookout for afternoon thunderstorms, swimming through the humidity, and wondering why god has forsaken this penisula just when this season will end. Shit, I’m still in summer; and I’ve only sampled two series -_- So anyway…
I’ll get my Autumn seasonal forecast… eventually. /smirk
About the Script
First, it’s very rough.
If anyone cares to copy-pasta and modify it, go for it. It’s probably very easy to mod into a hard-page format (where the info is dynamically loaded into the page, but the page appears solid; no hover-popups).
Second, it uses dynamic <script> injection with a callback from the melative api to MelaMeta.callback, in which the JSON response is passed. The call to the api (/api/media.meta.json) is simply given a parameter such as anime=Kobato, but also a callback parameter and and a cache parameter. Callback is self-explanatory. Cache enables the JSON to be cached by the browser (the default atm is for 30 minutes… the data is not likely to change that often).
Finally, it is activated by an <a> tag with the rel attribute set to “melative” and href linked to a valid melative page (doesn’t really matter what is used). We can link music, events, manga, etc.
ActionSpamming!
Posted by - June 8, 09
Soooo…. I see a lot of twitter action which would look nice in this form.
So I setup twitterfeed to grab my music updates, seeing what they look like on twitter (they look souless). twitterfeed is a not so efficient idea for this, and making a pure twitter integration is purely stupid, since they are ass-warping their API with OAuth and it would end up something only usable with twitter (twitter is not the only platform in the world guys).
When @ Fails
Posted by - May 14, 09
Recently, twitter changed something in their @ operator handling. Though it was news to me, there was previously an option which allowed users to view their friends’ updates which were replies to non-mutual friends. Since around July of 2008, my account had automatically hidden replies of this nature, but I have realized a flaw in the new changes. Something painful.
Before I get into that, I’ll just say that some users are irritated by this modification, but from a developer’s point-of-view, twitter’s reasoning is rather sound on the grand scale. Naturally, if I were to implement it I would do it a bit differently, allowing those who follow a reasonable number of users an option to see these replies, while limiting this feature for those who either follow 3-5000+ users or the followers of those with 3-5000+ followers. In essence, it’s more efficient if new-twitter was a place where everyone was following and being followed by 10k people (god, the whole following bla bla is so geh… SUBSCRIPTIONS). That’s off the topic.
Today, once these things were in order, I realized something in my replies, or rather what was in the list of replies and not in the home view. Previously, I would see replies for all @nuclearsurprise, which still stands, but I cannot recall any time where someone I was following included @nuclearsurprise and it did not turn up in my home view. Do we see where this is going?
This happened today, when owen_s, a user I follow, mentioned @nuclearsurpise in one of his updates, a non-mutual reply to omomomo. Now why on earth did this not show up in my view? And still these updates will not show up in my follower stream, which leads me to believe either something is off in this new implementation or this is the way it is supposed to work (I’m covering all feasible grounds here, as I don’t expect a group with millions in backing to fuck up… but then again).
So given that users cannot see these non-mutual replies is whatever, but why, oh why, does this happen on non-mutual replies which include a follower’s nick?
I don’t think it was supposed to happen that way.
