Tag: melative

New Liveblogging Pages

Posted by Ryan A - 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 ^^

27d ago

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:

on Hayate no Gotoku!! 2mo ago

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:

on Hayate no Gotoku!! 2mo ago

watching Hayate no Gotoku!! (episode 25)

Hina in Wonderland. lolstyle~ and Candy Charas... USAGEE word.

on Hayate no Gotoku!! 2mo ago

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.

on Hayate no Gotoku!! 2mo ago

watched Hayate no Gotoku!! (episode 23)

Splendid combination of LOL and DOKI. Blend was just #awesome, Sakuya mo!

on Hayate no Gotoku!! 2mo ago

watching Hayate no Gotoku!! (episode 23)

That OP is so fab. KOTOKO FTW.

on Hayate no Gotoku!! 2mo ago

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.

on Hayate no Gotoku!! 3mo ago

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?

on Hayate no Gotoku!! 3mo ago

watching Hayate no Gotoku!! (episode 21)

Nagi's definition of ninja is super-ultra-gorgeous GOKAI! FFFF. The reaction is floorworthy. XD

on Hayate no Gotoku!! 3mo ago

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.

on Hayate no Gotoku!! 3mo ago

watching Hayate no Gotoku!! (episode 20)

Maria. Maria. Oh Maria. :| Oh. Fresh.

on Hayate no Gotoku!! 3mo ago

watching Hayate no Gotoku!! (episode 20)

Maids. SRSLY. Gotta hand it to Maria for representing so well.

on Hayate no Gotoku!! 3mo ago

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

on Hayate no Gotoku!! 3mo ago

watching Hayate no Gotoku!! (episode 19)

rofl, why is this so random... Sunday Box. Open ze Box. hahaha

on Hayate no Gotoku!! 3mo ago

watched Hayate no Gotoku!! (episode 18)

Well played Hinagiku; the art of hiding joy. Hayate's curse continues haha.

on Hayate no Gotoku!! 4mo ago

watching Hayate no Gotoku!! (episode 18)

Seems they put some effort into the new OP. KOTOKO, Fun.

on Hayate no Gotoku!! 4mo ago

watched Hayate no Gotoku!! (episode 17)

Pretty fab episode, but a tad choppy, and mystical. Early onsen bit was filled with plenty of kyaaness.

on Hayate no Gotoku!! 4mo ago

rated Hayate no Gotoku!! 11

OMG... yea. Melative Ratings. You can make your own standards.

on Hayate no Gotoku!! 4mo ago

rated Hayate no Gotoku!! 8

Goes but where's the library change.

on Hayate no Gotoku!! 4mo ago

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.

on Hayate no Gotoku!! 4mo ago

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.

How soon is Fall?

Posted by Ryan A - 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.

More…

ActionSpamming!

Posted by Ryan A - June 8, 09

Soooo…. I see a lot of twitter action which would look nice in this form.

action webz

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).

More…

Microblogging About Anime

Posted by Ryan A - May 20, 09

In light of getting thoughts out quickly, microblogging anime series [or any media] is quite the handy thing. More than anything it resembles what we now call scrobbling. The difference is, that scrobbling is a miniature instance of experience logging, with no thoughts attached.

When we scrobble-blog (micro-updating on media titles) we can and do include our thoughts as well as the instance of experience (whether it is logged depends on the platform). Oh what a nice combination. Here’s a view of what it looks like on twitter (I added the highlighting and labels, to make it more apparent).

Previously, reflections were my main destination of media updates, but I’ve hardly posted anything of length in recent months. No, it has been mostly this scrobble-blogging. But, is this a good solution? Let’s see….

Evaluation

  • When we scrobble-blog, does the system mark the given title as experienced in some way, or add it to a list?
  • Are updates organized by media-category and title?
  • Are titles standardized, readable, unabbreviated, and relevant in these updates?
  • Can we avoid including the title or abbreviation in the content of the message?
  • Is there a way in which we can see what we post the most updates on, whether it be for a specific title or a type of media in general?
  • Is there a way in which we can see what our friends post the most updates on?
  • Can we hide some updates while making others available for everyone, such as having all media updates be available to everyone, while personal updates are available only to friends?
  • Can we be expressive in our updates (bold/italic/strike, bigger or smaller font)?

So, where does your microblog stand?

Notes

My cat is asleep on the futon D: I like having my own micro-scrobblings organized by blog reading, anime, music, or other media. I like using bold and italics. I like having the full message available without considering the length of the title I’m posting about. I also like being able to hide events from other’s streams, but still have it visible when they look at my updates. Etc, etc, etc.

A Spotted Firefox Extension

Posted by Ryan A - April 25, 09

What a terrible weekend, crunch time on the uni front, but enough about that. Sometime last weekend, natsuneko attempted to use the melative XUL app, yay. Unfortunately, things didn’t work out, but his suggestion to make a TwitterFox like extension might be better. So I gave it a shot. It was a great suggestion.

Extension

With the awesome feedback received from natsuneko, Seinime, and FFVIIKnight, the extension is usable and in a development-update state. The current version is available here and will auto-update when newer versions are released. More information about the features can be found on the blog. Although the stream is media-context-centric, it can be used without any context just like a normal status update, some of the realized features of the stream include:

  • HTML tags (tt, i, big, b, small, em, ins, del, sub, sup, code)
  • Auto-shortening urls with is.gd
  • Group indexing with the ! operator
  • Tag indexing with the # operator
  • Activity which occurs on the site appears in the stream (ie. recommendations, reflections)

The context-awareness of the stream means users can specify what they are talking about outside the message, and even announce specific experiences such as reading a chapter or watching an episode. The stream may also be unspoiled and hide messages inside announce updates, but still allowing the event to be seen.

One of the most beneficial aspects, imo, is the ability to see activity on a specific media, title, character, creator, tag, or group amongs friends. Hopefully, the implication of that feature makes sense, if not here’s an example:

Cruisin’ Sammy wishes to view all the stream updates his friends wrote about Sengoku Basara. There is no searching. He only needs to visit the URL, http://melative.com/stream/anime/Sengoku Basara, and all his friends’ updates will be available in pages.

So…

We Can Microblog

Posted by Ryan A - April 12, 09

Explaining how to use melative’s contextual micro-streaming service.

update

Positively ensuring that posts are not lost in the unorganized clutter, use context, and by that I mean denoting posts about a title, onto the title. The above image is the part of the current user stream home on melative, and what we can see is the input asking for a topic, or context.

More…

Microblogging: Stem Theory

Posted by Ryan A - April 8, 09

This comes after responding to one of usagijen’s shared notes via twitter, and being struck with the realization of the confining communication mechanism known as microblogging micro-conversing. It’s not an issue with microblogging, obviously strict-length updates are advantageous, but it is a problem with the nature of responding/messaging within a stream that was constructed for single-forward-broadcasting.

stem

Stem theory: if an event-item is posted, a time-dependent, stemmed discussion should be readily available in it’s own persistent thread.

More…