Even though i’m supposed to be on holiday for the next week, I cannae resist tinkering on the intarwebs. So today i’ve given my tumblr blog a bit of a make-over:

before:

after:

• Widened the layout. there was s-o-o-o much wasted space in the old one. i think it was about 700px wide altogether. my new one is 1000px wide.
  
  
• Changed styling of post title, footer bars and sidebar headings to make them look a bit more ‘labelly’, which is kinda the look i’m going for.
  
  
• Changed link colours to match header bars and added text-decoration:underline on rollover.
  
  
• Stripped all ‘px’ text sizes out of template and replaced with the more uniformly compatible 100% + ems method.
  
  
• Changed formatting for quoted text.
  
  
• Centred images and videos within posts. The “align center” [sic] option when posting has never worked for me and, inspecting the generated code, it seems that it does absolutely fuck all. So i used some sneaky jQuery to add an “imageholder” class to any paragraph containing an img or iframe [as used by youtube] tag. Then set all such paragraphs to “text-align:center” [sic].
  
  
• Finally got round to doodling a logo
  
  
• Gave sidebar a negative top margin to lift it up a bit, now i’ve got quite a fat logo at the top of the page.
  
  

i think that’s it. Looks much better now —even if i say so myself!

twitterfeed is a nice webservice that allows you to automatically send updates from various types of website [eg. blogs, forums etc] to a twitter, statusnet, hellotxt [whatever them two are?] or facebook account. so you can choose to have your twitter account automatically update, whenever you add a new post to your tumblr.  i know tumblr has a built-in option to do something like this, but twitterfeed offers you a lot more control and is just as easy to set up.  here’s how:

what you will need

• a twitter account [duh!]
• a tumblr account [double duh!]
• a twitterfeed account [set one up here]

1: login to your twitterfeed account and click on ‘create new feed’

2: give it a name [whatever you want. it’s just for your own identification] and fill in the RSS URL.  for a tumblr blog this will be http://yourname.tumblr.com/rss [unless –as below– you’re a fancy dan like me and have your own domain name pointing to your tumblr blog]

3: now click on ‘advanced settings’ and customise as appropriate.the main things to change are ‘update frequency’ which you can set as appropriate for how often you want twitterfeed to check for new posts on your blog. i tend to post about once or twice a week, so i’ve set it to only check once a day.  if you’re a bit more prolific, you can have it check as often as every 30 mins.

you might also want to set ‘post content’ to ‘include: title only’, as i’ve done.  given that tweets tend to be short, that seems to be about enough text for me, although you can set other options, such as ‘include: title & description’.

another option to set is ‘post link’ and choose your favourite URL shortener. i’ve opted for tinyURL as that’s the one i use.  if you dinnae know what a URL shortener is, or dinnae care, then just leave it at the default settings. it’s just there to allow twitterfeed to create a link back to your tumblr blog post on twitter itself.

4: click ‘continue to step 2’

5: now you can choose which sites you want twitterfeed to notify, when you update your tumblr blog. as well as the obvious twitter, twitterfeed can also update your facepuke wall or your statusnet and hellotxt accounts [whatever the hell they are!]

6: here i’ve selected twitter and i’m taken to the twitter site itself, where i sign in and click ‘allow’ to allow twitterfeed to post notifications to my twitter account. the same process is presumably carried out, if required, to allow twitterfeed access to your your facepuke wall or your statusnet and hellotxt accounts [whatever the hell they are!]

7: after authorising twitterfeed to post to whatever sites you’ve chosen, you’ll be taken back to twitterfeed itself, where you click on the ‘all done’ button.

8: this takes you back to the your dashboard, where you should see your new feed listed. you can then click on the ‘check now’ button to have twitterfeed check out your tumblr blog right this minute.

9: and there you go.  twitterfeed has picked up the latest rivetting post that i made on my tumblr blog:

10: and if i go to my twitter page to check it out, there it is –a tweet about my new tumblr post, complete with a link back to the actual post on tumblr. now no-one need ever miss out on my words of wisdom!

what is it with all the tumblr blogs entitled “fuckyeah<insert subject of blog>”, which seem to be abounding these days? am i missing out on some really witty new internet ‘meme’ [or ‘internet zzzzz’, as i call them], or is it just the latest manifestation of the lack of imagination of the cyber-population at large?

… or is uploading photos broken on tumblr today?

i was hoping that santa claus might have brought the folks at tumblr some new servers for christmas. but apparently not, as i’m still getting that bloody annoying “…over capacity…” message almost every time i try to do something on the site. 

so in homage to the now legendary twitter fail whale, i present the “tumblr servers are bollox pollock”

why, o why, o why, o why… [etc. ad infinitum] are blogger -and by extension google- so utterly determined to make it impossible for contributors to a multi-author blog to separate out their own posts?

as you all know –or at least that fraction of you all who are my second year students, i have been wrestling with the problem of how to extract our individual contributions from last year’s multi-author PDP, so that we can import them into tumblr.

importing an entire blog from blogger into tumblr is doable, albeit a bit of a palaver [using this script].   however, if we did that with the old PDP, all the posts would import into tumblr, looking as if they were written by the same person [ie. me, as i’d be the one importing it].

what is needed is some way to filter out the posts by individual author.

as i’ve mentioned before, it seems like google have set out to deliberately make this impossible to do; there is no mechanism built in to blogger to alow you to display posts by a selected author.   when exporting the blog –for import into tumblr– there is no way to only export selected posts [which would at least allow you to choose only posts by a certain author].   nor is there even any way to view posts sorted by author in the blogger dashboard.  there are lots of posts on blogger’s support forums asking why the hell this facility isnae available, some dating back years -all of which go resolutely unanswered by anyone at google.

potentially, you could filter posts by certain criteria by building a custom URL to output only the posts you want as a feed and then wrestle with the problem of how to suck that feed into tumblr.   a feed is basically just a stripped down XML version of your blog, which can be read by other web apps.

the standard feed for the PDP is at:

http://PDP2010.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

but we can tweak the returned feed by adding parameters to the URL.  for example, if we want it returned in RSS format instead of the default atom, we can use:

http://PDP2010.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

if we want to return more than the default 25 posts that the standard feed returns, we can use:

http://PDP2010.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss&max-results=500

and so on.  there is a wide variety of parameters you can add to the feed URL, to filter the output in just the way you want.  google even helpfully supplies a list of the parameters that their web services use on this page. the sharp-eyed amongst you [or anyone nerdy enough to even look at that page!] will notice that one of the parameters google claims to support in feed URLs is ‘author’:

great!   we can just add that parameter to the feed URL too and get a nice RSS feed, filtered by author… can’t we?

no. we cannae.  because blogger disnae even support google’s own feckin’ code standards.  try using the following URL:

http://pdp2010.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss&max-results=500&author=%22stiobhart%22

and you’ll see the following delightful error message:

the crunching sound you can hear is my head banging against the wall!

OK - time for a bit of lateral thinking.  i’ve heard a lot of good things about yahoo pipes, a service which allows you to build your own mini web apps for filtering information from around the intarwebs.  i nipped over to their site and, after a few minutes tinkering had built the following pipe:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/madra

the gubbins of which takes the URL of the PDP feed, asks the user to input their username, as used on the PDP and then filters the results by author, where author contains that user name:

so let’s give it a whirl.  [feel free to try this at home folks!]. visit:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/madra

and click on PDP author filter. if you then enter your blogger username in the box and hit ‘run pipe’, you should get a nice list, showing only the posts from the old PDP, authored by your good self:

[note: i had to temporarily change my username on blogger from stíobhart to stiobhart to try this out, as the feed URLs tend to choke when presented with accented characters. the rest of you shouldnae have this problem]

yay!:

now we’re cooking on gas!

yahoo pipes even supplies you with a nice ‘get as RSS’ button, which will allow us to view our filtered feed as RSS.  all we’ll need to do then is save off the source of the RSS feed as an XML file and then we can import that into a new temporary blogger blog - thus populating that blog with only those posts from a single author.  once we’ve got that temporary blog set up in this way, we can re-export it from blogger and [using the script linked to above] import it into tumblr.  the job looks well on its way to quite possibly being a ‘good ‘un’!

so here is the RSS version of my filtered feed:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=8dd8ebde23c4615a4d76a3304414edb0&_render=rss&author=stiobhart

so, i save that off as an XML file and then head over to blogger, where i create a new temporary blog and then go to the dashboard and choose ‘import blog’, which would allow me to import an XML file previously exported from another blogger blog into this new blog, thus allowing me to populate the new blog with only those posts by a single author:

the success of this mission will depend on whether or not blogger will import an XML blog file that was not created using blogger itself.  ie.  will blogger recognise the universal RSS/XML format output by my yahoo pipe, or will it use some fuckwitted proprietory XML format of its own and refuse to import the file?

yep! -you guessed it:

well, there’s a day out of my life i willnae see again!

so the quest continues until either i find a way to do this, google get their bloody act together, or you all forget that the previous year’s PDP even existed!