Monthly Archive for June, 2008

How I added Picasa to the RSS Stream plugin

Published
by
Julian
on Mon, June 30 2008
in apps and www
. 0 Comments

First of all, thank you Rick for this great plugin.

I started by adding some lines to the rss-stream.php

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function rss_stream_picasa($feed = '') {
	global $lifestream;
 
	$picasa = fetch_rss($feed);
 
	if ($feed != '') {
		foreach ( $picasa->items as $status ) {
			$title = $status['title'];
			$date = strtotime($status['pubdate']);
			$link = htmlspecialchars($status['link']);
			$msg = '<a class="picasa-link" href="'.$link.'">'.$title.'</a>';
 
			$lifestream[$date]['date'] = $date;
			$lifestream[$date]['type'] = 'picasa';
			$lifestream[$date]['link'] = $link;
 
		    $lifestream[$date]['msg'] = $msg; 
 
		}
 
	}
}
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	if(get_option('RSS_Stream_picasafeed')!='') { rss_stream_picasa(get_option('RSS_Stream_picasafeed')); }
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|| get_option('RSS_Stream_picasafeed')!=''
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$option_RSS_Stream_picasafeed = $_POST['RSS_Stream_picasafeed'];
       update_option('RSS_Stream_picasafeed', $option_RSS_Stream_picasafeed);
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<fieldset class="options">
        <legend>Picasa</legend>
<table border="0">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
 
<strong><label for="RSS_Stream_picasafeed">:</label></strong></td>
<td>
<input id="RSS_Stream_picasafeed" name="RSS_Stream_picasafeed" size="75" type="text" value="&lt;?php echo get_option('RSS_Stream_picasafeed'); ?&gt;" /></td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
</fieldset>

Thereafter I added this line to the rss-stream.css

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.RSSS_picasa{ background: #e4f1e6; color: #555; }

To get an icon to match picasa, I took picasa’s favicon. So I deserve no credit for that, and it’s a trademark of Google, inc..

You can grab the icon here

Just put it into the images folder of RSS Stream

Recent design changes

Published
by
Julian
on Sun, June 29 2008
in this blog
. 0 Comments

today, and yesterday I was working on some tweaks of the page’s design which just got live. The header got a changed a bit, page background now is #333.

Most obvious change though, is of course the increased width.

I added another sidebar, which right now only contains a lifestream powered by the rss stream plugin for wordpress.

I only changed it’s css, obviously, and I added Picasa support myself - for what I had to write some php code. I hate php :P

Now the only thing that bothers me is that I can’t add my twitter to it, as my twitter account turned into one huge bug today. My personal page for example isn’t accessible for instance.

I opened a ticket, and wrote on get satisfaction. I hope this is going to be resolved soon.

World wide internet adoption

Published
by
Julian
on Thu, June 26 2008
in real world, society and www
. 0 Comments

Researchers are predicting that one quarter of the world’s population will be online by 2012.

Most growth is, as you might already have guessed, to take place in the emerging regions of Asia, like China and India.

This figure is stunning if you consider that about one third of the world’s population does not have access to clean, running water nor sufficient food. One fourth does not have access to electricity.

Do we expect them to order their nutrition online?

Besides our, in my opinion, wrong order of priorities, the internet access itself won’t do much harm to the population in those regions. Actually quite the contrary. It will help to them to develop higher standards of free speech and information. Not even the Great Firewall of China can shield the citizens from all of the information.

More Users on the other hand, of course, pose problems in the technical point of view.
The transition from IPv4 to IPv6 is progressing slowly and upcoming traffic from our new online buddies need to be handled as well. Internet infrastructure needs more and faster upgrades to keep up with the rising demand and usage.

Do you remember what happened when several undersea cables failed earlier this year? A big part of South Asia and the Middle East was cut off the internet. The more people get online and will start to rely on the web, the more it will hurt them if they’re offline. Not only economically.

My favourite Firefox AddOns

Published
by
Julian
on Wed, June 25 2008
in FOSS, Ubuntu and apps
. 2 Comments

Now that Firefox 3, my browser of choice, got final about a week ago I thought I could share the addons I’m using on regular basis, the ones I need occasionally and those I could not live without any more. Continue reading ‘My favourite Firefox AddOns’

No Reservations: Asia Special

Published
by
Julian
on Sun, June 8 2008
in real world, society and video
. 0 Comments
I really love this show. The host Anthony Bourdain, NYC chef, travels the world eating everything he can get.
It’s not your usual food or travel documentary, he grasps every opportunity to get off the tourist routes trying to find the real food and the real culture of the country he’s visiting.
Participating in every weird ritual he comes across: Piercing a living pig’s head with a spear in the jungle, drinking some cannabis drink + cookies in India or a psychoactive cocktail made by a shaman in Peru.
You can find some of the episodes on Google Video,  search for “No Reservations”
Well, you’ve to see for yourself, this is the Asia Special taking place in Japan and China.