calendar

Seems I totally forgot to add a link to my calendar cgi script, I use it every 6 months to print out a small calendar I use to plan everything.

Add RSS Feed

You've probably noticed the really crappy looking collection of little buttons on the side of my blogs. I guess I really shouldn't care, and I guess I should just be pimping the method I prefer to read my blogs with (Google Reader of course!). But since I was doing it I thought I should do it properly. All those buttons are on all my blogs and they all the same PHP file included, on my template (more on PHP and blogger templates in another post...). The PHP works out where the feed is (or you can tell it) and then makes all the buttons.

Here's the php as a text file in case you'll find it useful on your site. I forgot whose original site I used to get the format for most of these links.

addfeed.php

expandRss

Since I discovered the joy that is blogs, rss and of course Google Reader I've found one or two feeds that don't quite provide the data I want. Usually they just provide a small summary and a link to the full story, or some crucial part of the post is missing. It started off with woot.com's feed which shows you the woot but not the price (what's the point in that?) so I wrote a small python script that fetched the feed and the price and updated the feed. Then it was b3ta.com's newsletter that had one article per newsletter without the contents of the newsletter, so I changed my script to get that too, and even make a whole bunch of articles with the link be the url that each little snippet points to. Then came snopes.com which was kinda generic, it used to point to a page with the content, so I made it scrape that content and replace the description with the scraped content.

So now I share my script here, hopefull that it'll be useful to someone. I'm not publishing my feeds since my goal isn't to upset the feed publishers/sites. If you make changes or find it useful please let me know.

expandRss

Google Firefix toolbar and Firefox toolbar customization

I was never a fan of the first version of the Google Firefox toolbar. It just took too much screen real estate for the functionality that I used. However the latest version just provides a palette of options that you can pick and choose from, so now I'm happy! I also hide the usual toolbar and drag the location bar up into the menu bar, this leaves much more screen real estate for web page content. Above is what my Firefox looks like at work under Linux, at home I use a Apple Powerbook and you can't move the location bar on that (which is kinda annoying).

Also notice that my window manager doesn't have any title bars (to save space too) I'm thinking about switching to a new window manager (away from mwm) but haven't yet done so. I'm looking for something like Apple OSX's window manager that steals focus ONLY when the transient window is spawned by the current active application.