bookmarks

It’s been a while since I posted anything about online bookmark managers. I’d pretty much settled on posting bookmarks to Spurl, then letting Spurl post them to del.icio.us. This was working great for a while, but the del.icio.us integration in Spurl stopped working a week or two ago. A few people have posted about it in the forums, but nobody from Spurl has said anything about fixing it.
To get around having to either post everything twice, or give up either Spurl or del.icio.us, I’ve been looking for another way to post to them both at the same time. I found a site called OnlyWire. It looked legit, but I was initially wary of giving them the passwords to my Spurl and del.icio.us accounts. I gave it a shot, and it works OK. However, it turns out that their terms of service allow them to post sponsor links under your IDs. They say that they’ll only do that once, but that’s enough to make me want to avoid doing business with them. If you look at the “Hot Spurls” and “Just In” lists on the Spurl homepage, it looks like this service (and possibly others like it) have already polluted the bookmark pool, so to speak, to the extent that useful bookmarks are being pushed down the list in favor of sponsored links.
I’m starting to think now that maybe I can do something with Greasemonkey. I haven’t really looked into creating Greasemonkey scripts, though, so I’ll need to do some research first.

Avoid the loony Zune

Andy Ihnatko’s Zune review in the Chicago Sun-Times is a classic. You gotta love it when phrases like “colossal blunder” and “complete, humiliating failure” appear in a review. Admittedly, Ihnatko is a long-time Apple fan, but he has some serious points about the Zune. I kind of hope he’s right when he says “the Zune will be dead and gone within six months.” If this thing is a success, it’ll just encourage other companies to take the same approach to DRM and functionality.

Wii Virtual Console – Zelda

Well, I went ahead and bought the virtual console version of Legend of Zelda for the Wii. It’s relatively painless to buy and download games from the Wii store, and it’s pretty easy to bring them up and play them. One thing that would be nice: a PDF version of the manual, so I could print it out and have it handy while I’m playing. I think the VC games will largely be interesting as novelties, rather than games that I’d really want to spend a lot of time playing. Some of those old games are pretty cool, though some of the best ones aren’t up at the store yet.
Meanwhile, I’ve been playing a lot of Wii Sports tennis. I’ll probably get tired of it at some point, but for now, it’s a lot of fun. I wouldn’t really call it a workout, but it’s definitely more physical work than the average video game.

Blogger label cloud

I just found a PHP script by this guy that does pretty much the same thing that my script does, except in the form of a cloud instead of a list. Nice. He also uses a cache file so he doesn’t have to read the directory on every call. Both of those were things that I had thought about adding to my PHP program. Now I can probably just borrow this guy’s code.

more fun with Blogger tags and PHP

I wanted to enhance my tag list PHP program to do a couple more things. Basically, I wanted it to be aware of when we are on a label page, so that we could make the list item for the current page plain text (instead of a link), and so that I could put a link back to the main page on any label page.
Normally, I have a link back to the main page in the header of any page other than the main one. I do this through the Blogger template, using the “ItemPage” and “ArchivePage” Blogger template tags to figure out when we’re not on the main page. Unfortunately, there’s no “LabelPage” template tag, as far as I can tell.
Making one of the list items text rather than a link broke the sorting, since I was just sorting on the text of the list item, including the “a href…” stuff. To get around this, I switched to using an associative array, where the key value is the tag.
Here’s the code:

<?php
$dirname = ".";                        # current directory
$uri = $_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"];        # the page we're on
$bOnLabelPage = false;                # are we on a label page?
$dir = opendir($dirname);
$file_list = array();
$i = 0;

while (false != ($file = readdir($dir)))
    {
    if (ereg(".html$", $file))
        {
        $tag = substr($file, 0, strlen($file)-5);
        $key = strtoupper($tag);
        if (ereg("$file$", $uri))
            {
            $file_list[$key] = "<li>$tag";
            $bOnLabelPage = true;
            }
        else
            $file_list[$key] = "<li><a href='/labels/$file'>$tag</a>";
        $i++;
        }
    }
closedir($dir);
#natcasesort($file_list);
ksort($file_list);
?>
<h1>My Tags</h1>
<?php
if ($bOnLabelPage) echo ("<a href='/'>[Back to main page]</a>");
?>
<ul>
<?php foreach ($file_list as $file) echo($file); ?>
</ul>

A little more complex than what I started with, but still not too bad.
As a side note, I am using TextWrangler to edit PHP files on my Mac, and it’s working pretty well. It’s got syntax-highlighting for PHP and HTML. I’m also now using Fugu to copy files up to my server. It integrates well with TextWrangler, so that I can just keep a file open in TextWrangler and have it copied back to the server every time I save. Nice.
On Windows, I’m mostly using Multi-Edit and WinSCP. That combo works pretty well too, though I’m using an older version of Multi-Edit that doesn’t have PHP syntax highlighting.

too much Christmas music

Okay, it’s two days after Thanksgiving, and I’m already tired of Christmas music. They started piping in music here on Main St. yesterday, and kept it going until a little after 10pm. They’re doing it again today. I’d really like to stay in for the most part this weekend, and get some stuff done, but I may have to go out just to escape having “Feliz Navidad” pounded into my head for the thirteenth time today.