Windows Web Hosting, Web Technologies, etc
Archive for October, 2007
What kind of monster are you? Using MonsterID comments in your wordpress blog
Oct 4th
I’ve enabled MonsterID comment image tags on my blog and discuss MonsterID, it’s use and my blog theme in this article.
What is MonsterID
MonsterID is a method of generating a unique monster image based upon a certain identifier, usually based on IP address, email address or something similar. It’s used to automatically create a personal avatar image in blog comments and community sites.
You can learn more about it at these places:
What led me to MonsterID was the ASP.NET blog engine: BlogEngine.NET. Recently I was writing a blog post about BlogEngine.NET hosting at appliedi.net and thought one of the coolest features BlogEngine has was MonsterID so I wanted to get it implemented for my own blog.
Implementing MonsterID on my WordPress blog
Implementing MonsterID in my wordpress based blog couldn’t be easier. Scott has a great blog post about MonsterID and has created a MonsterID wordpress plugin for using it.
I happy to say installing Scott’s plug-in was very easy. Simply download it, unzip it and upload the entire contents to your wp-content/plugins folder. Make sure the folder monsterid is world writeable and it should work out of the box. Oh and it does work on Windows too!
Once you’ve enabled the plug-in you’ll want to go into the Options -> MonsterID and verify the test monster is showing up.You can also tweak the background colors, size, clear the monster cache and a few other options from within there. I think it’s great that these images are in fact cached upon creation and happy Scott saw to doing that.
After all of that the next step is adding it to your wordpress theme. Scott’s instructions are as follows:
Find the
comments.phpof your current theme (it should be in the folderwp-content/themes/[currentThemeName]/). Open it up and look for something similar toforeach ($comments as $comment). Inside this loop there should be code that displays the comment author’s name or metadata like<p class="comment-author">or<p class="comment-metadata">. Just before all this enter
<?php if (function_exists("monsterid_build_monster")) {echo monsterid_build_monster($comment->comment_author_email,$comment->comment_author); } ?>If you would prefer to base the monsters on the commentor’s IP address instead of the commentor’s email just replace
$comment->comment_author_emailin the above with$comment->comment_author_IP.You can add CSS for
img.monsteridin your theme’sstyle.cssto adjust the appearance of the images or adjust the size in the MonsterID control panel. You can also clear the MonsterID image cache in the Control Panel.
For my blog I simply replaced the call to generate a gravatar image with a call to create the MonsterID image in the comments.php file of my theme. If you’re wondering about my theme and why some of the blog articles reference other themes, it’s because I tend to change themes pretty regularly however what I’m finding is none of the pre-built themes really do what I want so I’m always hacking them up. My current theme is ILLACRIMO from designdisease. I love their themes and 2 of the last 3 themes I’ve used have been made by them.
What’s my MonsterID?
For my own blog I am using the e-mail address as the seed for the MonsterID,so your monster is will built around your email address. Here’s a few of the comment monsters I have:
What’s your MonsterID?
Well, don’t just sit around wondering what you’d look like. Create a new comment post here and see your own monster!
WordPress 2.3 and Windows Live Writer Beta 3 bring new stuff to bloggers
Oct 3rd
WordPress 2.3 was released on September 25th. This release of WordPress brought some great new features:
- Native tagging support (previously available through plug-ins)
- Plug-in update notifications.
- and some URL handling improvements
Earlier in September Windows Live Writer, Beta 3, was also released. This latest build of WLW brings with it:
- Insert Video dialog (previously available through plug-ins)
- Support for 28 additional languages
- Ability to print posts
- Improved image handling
Together WordPress and Windows Live Writer make an outstanding blogging platform, WordPress provides one of the most powerful open-source blogging engines available today and Windows Live Writer is hand’s down one of the easiest to use blog publishing tools.
Tagging in WordPress 2.3
Tagging isn’t new to WordPress bloggers as most have been using Jerome’s Keyword Tags or Ultimate Tag Warrior but now this functionality is built in. Looking for more information on tagging in WordPress 2.3 and how to implement some of my favorite features that used tagging brought me to the following great articles:
- How to add wordpress 2.3 tags to your current theme
- How to add wordpress 2.3 tags to your current theme part 2
These two articles do a good job of explaining tags and how to use them in your own themes. Since this is such a new feature, few themes support them today but it’s easy enough to implement them in your own blog, as I’ve done. In my blog I’ve added tags at the end of the blog article:
I still need to clean up how it’s displayed but you get the idea. You’re probably wondering why tags are so important. For me tags provide a way identify the key topics of an article and later when searching your blog for articles on particular topics you can search through the tags.
Creating tag clouds in WordPress 2.3
The new tagging feature also supports a user customizable tag cloud as seen on my blog:
For me, the tag cloud helps you identify what the common themes of a blog are and just what topics the author tends to write about. The code to implement my tagcloud would seem to be complex, right? Fortunately, is very simple:
<?php wp_tag_cloud(‘smallest=8&largest=16&’); ?>
Identifying Related Articles thanks to Tags
You’ll notice all these tags allow you to really identify what articles are related. To take this a step further, I’m using a plugin called: WP 2.3 Related Posts, to identify related articles on each blog post’s page:
By using this plug-in when a visitor comes to your site, say through a search engine, they’ll have an easily available list of related articles on the same topic that they can review. Thus making your blog more ‘sticky’ and visitor friendly.
Windows Live Writer and WordPress 2.3
So far I’ve only talked about WordPress tags and only mentioned Windows Live Writer. Well, the latest couple betas of Windows Live Writer really supported tags but we were crippled on how we could implement them. This has all changed. Ruhani Rabin, provides a great tutorial on how to enable tags support in WLW for WordPress:
In a nutshell you’ll download the wlwmanifest file and some images, upload it to your blog and then have WLW update your blog features. This will enable the new tagging features.
To add tags to your new blog post from within WLW, you’ll find the dialog box hidden at the bottom:
Stream DVDs to your Xbox 360 from your Media PC (part 2)
Oct 3rd
This blog article was initially just one large article and in an attempt to make it more enjoyable I’ve broken it down into 3 parts. This is part 2, using My Movies Catalog. My Movies Catalog is an add-on tool for Windows Media Center which allows you to connect to a webservice and pull down information such as box covers, a movie synopsis, cast and crew biographies and such. My Movies also allows you to categorize your movies. My Movies is available from http://www.mymovies.name
Adding the Movie to My Movies catalog
This is the cool stuff. The application My Movies adds a new item on your Media Center screen labeled “My Movies” (imagine that) and you build a catalog of all your movies using it.
After installing My Movies we’ll fire up the My Movies Collection Management and it will look something like the below image (minus all the information the first time you run it)
How cool is that, it’s got details on the movie, a description, a front box cover shot and back box cover shot and all the names of the people involved in the film. Best of all, all this information is going to show up on your Xbox!
I just finished ripping Lucky You so we’ll add that to my collection. Select the Add Titles icon and select By Title and enter your movie title and click search (it recommends scanning the barcode through your webcam but this works for me) and you’ll see something like the below:
Select the correct version for your DVD and click on Add Online. It will prompt you for where your DVDs are stored (mine are all in a folder called DVD and then each is in it’s own folder from there and since this app adds some images and information to the folder I recommend keeping things organized like this as well):
Click OK and then click Add Titles and let it do it’s magic!
It will probably prompt you about adding some new actors and what not (I just click Yes) and then start adding them:
When it’s done the Collection Manager will look something like this:
The new movie is in there and you can update it if you like. There now all movies are indexed in My Movies and all this movie-phile information is loaded in too.
Accessing your My Movies collection
Now it’s time to impress your friends and family. Let’s fire up the Media Center (or the Xbox 360).
Here’s the My Movies option in Media Center:
Selecting it we see the Movie Collection
You have the ability to sort your movies, store them in sub catalogs and do all kinds of cool stuff. The best part is you get to see the DVD box cover right there! Let’s click on one of my movies, “The Condemned”
We get to see the box cover, the rating, if we’ve watched it already and read the synopsis of the film. Maybe you want to see who’s in the movie, clicking on Cast & More we get:
Hey I wonder what other movies Vinny Jones has been involved in? Click on Vinnie (Yo! Vinnie!) we get his biography:
and clicking on Movies we get to see what other movies we have that’s he’s in:
This app is definitely one of the coolest programs I’ve come along in a long time. It’s also pretty slow (both on the Xbox 360 and running in my media center window on the desktop where I took these snap shots) but it’s so cool that we can live with it being a little slow.
Oh and if you’re wondering what’s stored on your hard drive to make all this possible it’s a couple images and an XML File:
Now to watch the movie
So there you have it. We’ve ripped the movie, cataloged the movie and even impressed our friends and family with cool box snapshots and info about the film. The last thing to do is watch the movie and you can do that right there in My Movies.
I was hoping to post some pics here and let you see the movies running on my screen but that’s just going to have to wait until another time. I can definitely say running over the wireless mesh network the Xbox streams fine from the PC though. streaming while ripping is a bit choppy at times but it seems to still stream fine. I was worried streaming from the USB drive wouldn’t cut it but so far so good. I’ll do a few test streams though and post about it.
