Importing 5 years worth of posts from Blogger and then categorizing them was not a pretty task. Though I did notice a gradual descent into immaturity as I worked backwards. In celebration of this achievement, and bringing this blog inline with my other projects, the site has changed hosts and lives on its own domain as a separate outlet for unprofessional blurbs, rants and whatnot; www.mrfofr.com. The Mr. bit is new, I’d be pretty lucky to bag a four letter domain name.

After 5 years, my AMD Athlon 2700 XP with 1.5gb of RAM and LG 17″ screen was growing weary. Time for an upgrade, and the new 24″ iMac model took my fancy — I grabbed one from John Lewis in July and its now sitting pretty as the focus of my front room, coinciding with a big rearrangement of furniture.

Good timing really, considering that I had multiple and simultaneous hard drive failures on my PC shortly thereafter as I tried to transfer 40gb or so to the mac.

Having been through the old posts, I noted that, in hindsight, screenshots of my projects are very helpful for when the original source material has since vaporized into the mists of some internet purgatory. And on that note:

• Gears of War Movie
• Metal Gear Solid Movie
• Warcraft Movie

Anyway — back to the case in point; the generated images have three modes: a) Show the details for a given IMDB number b) Show details for the top item in a keyword search c) Show my most recently rated film. Upon generation these files get cached, the cache updates once a week for film details and one a day for the rated film. So, here are some fun fun dynamic images:

http://movies.trivialbeing.org/my/rated/rated.png

http://movies.trivialbeing.org/pic/lost in translation.png

However, I have written my 1800 words today and I am ready to take some time off. So, in-between work and more work I squeezed a little bit of MySQL PHP coding into a new site specifically for my movie collections. The site lists my owned movies and my rated movies (grabs my personal ratings from IMDB — all 400 of them), using the IMDB catalogue number it fetches data such as title, year, director, runtime, rating, plot and poster image automatically. I guess I am bringing the site out of beta by including the link here, check it out:

http://movies.trivialbeing.org/

With that said, the interim period for the site, i.e. its opening month, has come to an end with quite a razzle dazzle; v0.6 of my configuration made it to the front page of Digg and fooblog consequently succumbed to the effects of lots of visitors. Fooblog uses Dreamhost as its provider which offers 2Tb of bandwidth a month; I had plenty of preparation for such an attack, or at least I thought I did. What I was not prepared for was a catastrophic failure of Wordpress 2.1.2. To save the MySQL databases from too much stress I turned on the advanced WP caching system, however when 2000 people arrived in an hour or so something went wrong and all WP pages failed to load. Due to the stresses of such high traffic volumes I assumed the problem was caused by traffic alone and that it would rectify itself when things calmed down, I put up a temporary page and let it be. However several hours later it was still playing up, it took me a while to track down the problem but in the end deleting the cache fixed everything. It’s a shame this happened because the down period of the site occurred during the period the site was on the front page of Digg. Oh well, I will know the fix for next time.

Also large images are now available if you append an artist image url with &imgs=large

Still not happy, I looked into creating a web service, based on hydrogenaudio forums member Chronial’s efforts and ultimately we developed an online resource for downloading artist images. I do not plan to make the code public, mainly at Chronial’s request. I have created this service here: http://artists.trivialbeing.org/?a=ARTIST where ARTIST is the performer’s image you are looking for, for instance:

http://artists.trivialbeing.org/?a=the microphones
http://artists.trivialbeing.org/?a=blondie
http://artists.trivialbeing.org/?a=radiohead

Images are first sourced from Last.fm before being cached so as not to cause any undue strain on last.fm’s servers.

To make things more useful you can append the URL with &outputmode=img,
e.g. http://artists.trivialbeing.org/?a=blondie&outputmode=img
and a wrapper of sorts is available via http://artists.trivialbeing.org/pic/ARTIST.jpg
e.g. http://artists.trivialbeing.org/pic/blondie.jpg
which can be used on forums:


or in an artist download script. I use the URL2File command line application with this command:

URL2File http://artists.trivialbeing.org/pic/%1.jpg  C:\artistimages\thumbnails\%1.jpg –o 60
0Where %1 is the first parameter passed to the batch file and 60 is a one minute timeout.

Using a custom run component I can call this batch file using foobar and a keyboard shortcut or button; when passing the artist (%artist%) to the batch file you should take care to replace characters that cannot be used in creating windows filenames. Foreign characters work too, as do special characters such as the artist “Why?” or “Wham!”.

When using image output, if no artist is found the script returns this image:

With regards to copyright issues, Last.fm’s uploading policy states:
Because copyrighted images tend to be very restrictive about where they can be used we ask that you only upload images which are public domain, or that are explicitly licensed for promotional use. There are a number of places you can find images open to public use. First, try to find out if the artist has any promotional pictures on their official homepage (they usually do).

For those without foobar2000, I give an example of an alternative use. I took the recently played tracks RSS feed, played with it a little using magpierss and create a page that shows recent tracks along side artist images, an example can be found here:
http://fofr.trivialbeing.net/page.php?p=nowplaying

• Upon migration the URL for archives was reset so all updated archives linked to a 404. I quickly fixed this once my server, that has been up and down a bit lately, allowed me back into the FTP.
• Previous Post links have stopped working, the conventional tag instead of providing a list of the 10 posts prior to the post being viewed now shows only the ten most recent posts. This makes navigation of the older pages less fluid and to find old posts you need to visit label pages or archive pages with the aim of finding a specific post.
• The uploading dialogue for blogger has also been tweaked, it now shows the successfully uploaded files in a list and when errors occurs it tells you them. A nice addition to this would be a suggestion on whether or not to perform a republish based upon the severity of FTP errors. When I see the errors I ask myself whether or not all the files uploaded ok — the last thing I need is a corrupted page that I don’t know about. One caveat of this new system is the removal of the percentage uploaded indicator, I like to know how far through the process is and whether or not connectivity is good or bad, taking away the only indication seems wrong to me. Hopefully it is just part of the inevitable blogger beta ftp teething stages.

Moving onwards, once I had confirmed files could be uploaded and my template would not be utterly destroyed I chose to add labels to my posts before publishing the blog again. It is now that I discovered the new template system blogger has developed and is implementing, one in which blog style editing is made easy for those that do not know code, html or css etc. Simple colour picking schemes etc. However in doing this they seem to have completely abandoned the template tag technique which I like to use to fully customize my template design. Backwards compatibility remains yet under my existing html templates I cannot add the new shiny features. Blogger also provides no template tags for these features, instead opting for defined widgets and sections. After publishing I also noticed that labels were automatically appended to the post body in a separate div with the name “blogger-labels”. The text “Labels:” cannot be altered in anyway and I have had to use absolutely positioned CSS to shift the labels into the comments bar where I want them and alter the hyperlink format. Here are a few other problems I noted:

• Labels with a gap in there name e.g. “My Life” would link to a labels page: “labels/My Life.php” without substituting the space for a ‘-’ character or removing capitalization (e.g. labels/my– life.php)
• The labels directory is not customizable and is fixed to the “/labels/” default.
• No pagination occurs on the label pages, despite the number of posts — one of my labels has 33 posts and they all load to create a mammoth scrolling fiasco.
• When labels have a gap in their name they do not show up in the labels section on the individual post page — I noticed this and tested it to check it had uploaded correctly. All pages that I had applied the label “My Life” to did not show any labels, though others did. I have since changed the label title but it is an issue that needs fixing.

Finally I decided to post something new. The inclusion of a quick switch between html and rich formatting is an excellent addition that is very handy. Posting via a 1280x resolution the blogger post box seems very small. I like a large area to play with and it would be nice if the box could expand to fill the whole screen, much like in Gmail.

The interface is all very fluid and fast, quickly pulling up 160 posts and labeling them was not a daunting task as I had expected. The dashboard makeover also improves usability, I now only need one click to reach certain regularly visited sections.

I now have one plea: Please do not abandon the template tags scheme. I love it and use it successfully to create my blog exactly how I want it. Please maintain these tags and add respective ones so that us power users can continue using blogger and its new features in the same way we always have done. We do not need to utilize simplified template editing techniques and whilst two separate schemes never seem wise I don’t know why they cant run side by side — leaving the templates tag as an advanced yet maintained option for those with a little more knowhow.

This is still in beta so I can remain hopeful for changes, it is nice to finally see some changes and I do feel that Blogger is moving in the right direction.

However the “Radio Blog” flash script used there seems too cumbersome for my liking, so I searched around for an alternative flash streaming audio player. I found two options — both by Jeroen Wijering, the first was very similar to Radio Blog, it has a list of songs and you can choose to play them; whilst very nice and highly customizable it did not suit a post by post situation. So I opted for the second, a concise progress bar which allows colour and size manipulation (but has no text display), perfect for my needs.

To check out this neat little script I suggest reading the latest posts in the Audio / MP3 blog section, I have put up three posts so far including Lulu Jackson’s pre-war blues rarity “You’re going to leave the old home Jim” and a video of Mohammed Rafi’s “Jaan Pechechaan Ho” performed for the Bollywood film Gumnaam.

My satisfaction with this script has also lead me to integrate it into the forums so that any direct link to a file with mp3 extension is parsed to generate an inline playable version and an option to download the track. This modification is amongst the many I have added lately, including the ability to post YouTube and GoogleVideo inline from the reply box. Now I only wish I could somehow apply these to blogger so that I don’t have to add the html every time I want to post something dynamic.