So what happened to me and the Sleepover / Christmas program et al? Well the sleepover went alright, and it actually was a lot of fun. We played a lot of crazy games, like one where we put some M&M’s on a paper towel stretched over a bowl full of water. Then you poke holes in the paper towel with a pencil. The person to send the M&M’s into the water has to eat them out of the water without using their hands! That gets disgusting We stayed up really late watching Hook and generally had a good time.

Next day was the Christmas Program, which went well. I played my one song with the band and then watched the rest from the audience. Everything went off perfectly without problem and we quickly came to the best part : Refreshments!

The Symons left a few days ago, they’re in N’Djamena now and soon on their way out.

On Friday the whole TEAM Chad field goes to Annual Conference, including me. We’ll be gone just over a week with probably no Internet or Email of any kind the entire time.

I posted before about how some people are posting their comments to del.icio.us. At that time I said that I thought the idea good, but would far prefer it if there were a service dedicated to this use, for reasons I listed. After some discussion on the subject, and seeing more and more how useful content is sometimes lost because it is in a comment somewhere, I decided to try my hand at implementing the idea myself.

So, using Ning as the hosting and codebase, I have developed Commentosphere. Yes, it’s a tacky name, if you have another suggestion I’m more than open to it 😉 Developing on Ning was an interesting first-time experiance, on which I plan to write a post later. Currently posting to the service is handled primarily by a bookmarklet available on the about page or the posting page, but I hope eventually to have some greasmonkey script’s based off of Johan of Ecmanaut‘s script for del.icio.us. You must have a Ning account to add comments to the service.

For those people who have been tagged their comments on del.icio.us I have included an importer. Having, however, no comment data on del.icio.us myself I have not been able to properly test it, so feedback on this feature would be greatly appreciated!

Comments may be filtered by tag, user, what post they are on, what blog they are on, what parents they have (more on that below), or any combination of these. They are also fully searchable. Tag intersections do not work yet, but I am trying to fix that. Syndication is possible via RSS 2.0 or JavaScript (for inclusion in a blog sidebar, see mine) and there is a JavaScript Feed Generation tool. Other formats (including JSON) should be coming soon.

Comments are semi-threaded on Commentosphere. It works like this: when adding a comment you can specify the permalink URLs of one or more comments that this comment is a reply to. When viewing that comment in the app these ‘parent’ comments are listed and linked to. A link to ‘child’ comments is presented and, if clicked, will bring up a page of all comments who have that comment set as their parent. Multiple parents is currently a tag buggy, but that should be fixed soon.

Last but not least is the aggregator. The aggregator lets you add posts, blogs, tags, and users to monitor for comments. When a new comment is added to Commentosphere for any item you monitor, it will be added to your aggregator. For off-Commentosphere comments you have the option of adding an RSS comments feed that will also have its content mixed into the page. The page may itself be syndicated via RSS to allow you to monitor comments from blogs across the web without cluttering your reader with all the innumerable feeds. The aggregator currently has a known bug in that it does not sort the items in any way, and thus they end up chrological, but grouped by source. This is obviously not the desired behaviour and I am working to correct this.

And that, in a (large) nutshell, is it. More information can be found on the about page or the tips page. Testing and feedback on all features (especially the del.icio.us importer) would be greatly appreciated.

Tags: Comments del.icio.us delicious Syndication Ning Commentosphere

So I haven’t said anything in a long while. I’ve meant to a couple times, but I keep forgetting. Lately I’ve been kinda bored… to show you just how bored I’ll tell you what Daniel and I did the other night – signed things to each other in sign language. Doesn’t sound that bad until you realise what we were signing… he knows almost no signs yet and I learned all I know from him, so we were sitting in the living room signing things like ‘You are an orange’ and ‘I am not you’ and then cracking ourselves up about it. Ya, really bored and really tired.

The Palmview Christmas program is coming soon… either tomorrow or next Saturday. Way early I know, but it’s how things fit into the school year. I am playing one song on my baritone with the ‘band’ (which is really a trio).

Tomorrow (I think it’s tomorrow) I am being hauled off to a sleepover with a guy half my age (ok, ok, a little more) that I hardly know. My brother is going so if I don’t I look rude *sigh*… hopefully I won’t die of utter and complete boredom.

Yes, school is alright… it’d be better with Chels back… so I wait…

Not much else… well, there might be, but I’ve forgotten it, so byeallfornow! If you read this, comment so I know how many readers I get, lol

This hack has been superceeded by a newer version.

A recent post at Freshblog got me to thinking about integrating the viewing of tags directly into my blogger blog. The solution presented there loads the results from tag queries into your sidebar, and checks the referrer if no tags are specified. The idea here is that if you are on my blog and query a tag, and then click a link to his blog, his sidebar will show his posts for the tag you selected here. It’s a great system, but my only problem with it was that it reloaded the current page with no apparent change at first, until you checked the sidebar. So I have modified the code for my own hack.

This hack will present a drop-down list of tags in your sidebar, pulled from the del.icio.us account you use to tag your blog and filtered for the anchor tag you use (if you use one). Selecting a tag from the drop-down list will take you to a post page on your blogger blog, so you never leave the site, that lists the results of a tag query for the selected tag. The sidebar will also update the same was as on Freshblog to facilitate the inter-blog browsing. Selecting another tag from the drop-down in the sidebar will add that tag to your query, not replace your query.

A ‘reset’ link is placed next to the drop-down box so that you can clear the tag query and switch to another tag without adding it. My version also fixes a minor bug in the original so that when tags in a referrer URL have ‘%20’s in them they are replaced by the del.icio.us-compatible ‘+’

If no tag is found in the <head> section, the script attempts to pull one out of your posts. This can be disabled on your main page by inserting this code along with that in step 2:
<MainPage><script type=”text/javascript”>var no_autocapture = true;</script></MainPage>

Now, without further boring explanation, here’s how to implement the hack :

1. Create a new post on the blog you would like to implement this hack on with the title ‘Tags’ and click the ‘Edit Html’ tab for the post body, pasting the exact code ‘<div id=”tagspostpage”></div>’ into the post body. Turn comments off for the post and set the post date to January 1, 2000. The time doesn’t matter. Post this post.
2. Edit the template for your blog and insert the following code into the <head> section :

   <script type=”text/javascript”>
   //<![CDATA[
   var del_user = “username“;
   var anchor = “anchortag“;
   document.write(‘<script src=”http://del.icio.us/feeds/json/tags type=”text/javascript”><\/script>’);
   //]]>
   </script>
   <script src=”http://www.awriterz.org/etcetc/tagspostpage.js type=”text/javascript”></script>

   Replacing ‘username’ with the del.icio.us username where you tag your blog posts and ‘anchortag’ with the anchor tag you use (if you use one). If, like me, you don’t use an anchor tag, then replace ‘anchortag’ with nothing.

3. At the bottom of your template, right before the ‘</body>’ tag insert this code :

   <script type=”text/javascript”>
   var thediv = document.getElementById(“tagspostpage”);
   if(thediv)
   thediv.innerHTML = return_tagged_posts(true);
   </script>

4. Insert this code into your template where you want the tags drop-down box and matched posts to appear (as they do in my sidebar) :

   <script type=”text/javascript”>
   list_side_tags();
   write_tagged_posts();
   </script>

5. Save your template and republish your whole blog.

Google Base launched today. It seems to be a service that will host just about any content, from recepies to schedules to opensource projects. All items can be tagged and an arbitrary number of arbitrary fields with arbitrary datatype are available. This seems to be a service that aims at providing tools, not purpose, and you can do just about anything with it! An interesting idea, it’ll be interesting to see where it leads.

Official Announcement
Google Blogscoped Article

Tags: Google Google Base Websites