thedeadone.net » LiveJournal

Learning to not drown in the sea of social networking

Mark Cunningham — Sat, 23 May 2009 09:40:46 +0000

I’ve finally converted. I’ve seen the light. I’ve jumped into those “whats the point?” and “timewasting” websites that have heralded in a multitude of buzzwords, Internet jokes and memes…

How the winds of fashion seemed to affect my friends

Yep. I’ve given in and followed my friends into Facebook and Twitter. A bit late in the game as people seem to be already not bothering with facebook and moving solely towards twitter. But as someone I know says, “people vote with their feet” (and yes, that’s meant to be footprints in the diagram).

None of the new platforms are perfect though and I have gripes with each, but they are all useful in their own ways. I’ve actually had a Facebook account for a while, connected with several old friends, sent “pokes” and started to get really annoyed by them and then quietly stopped using it.

How I currently use Social Networking sites

But then my wife joined Facebook. For her it’s a way to keep connected with her friends in France and the US, so I went back to Facebook and started to enjoy it, seeing some friends still actively using it. It’s great to be able to connect to them and being modern-day parents, it’s often hard to keep track of or in contact with friends.When you do make the effort it can sometimes feel forced. With Facebook there is a flow there that’s natural.

But even now, some of the more tech-forward people I know have moved to twitter, ditching facebook in the process. I’ve been playing with twitter for a week now and I can see it’s fun, though Facebook’s status updates and News Feed have a very similar feel to Twitters feed.

So I’m playing an experiment, Facebook to connect to friends and Twitter to connect to everyone (follow @thedeadone). If you want to know how it’s going, then you know what to do.

And no, I’m not deserting blogging.

Some fun with Planet Irish Gaming

Mark Cunningham — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 14:27:43 +0000

So I’ve been doing some hacking for and analysis of Planet Irish Gaming and I’ve added one new feed and welcomed back another.

Using the power of python, I wrote a site scraping script that generates a feed of LiveJournal blogs that are members of the irishgaming LiveJournal blog i.e. an RSS feed of the friends page. It’s updated three times a day (which seems to be good enough for the rate of posts) but any post that doesn’t have comments enabled can’t be included (because the site scraping script can’t generate a permalink for that post). The link to it is here on Planet Irish Gaming and it’s included in the big feed. It’s pretty nifty.

I continued with my script-hacking and created a script that “fixes” the feed from irishgaming.com. There are some technical problems with their feed so that I couldn’t include it in Planet Irish Gaming. As far as I know, they were not going to get fixed any time soon. My script fixes them and generates a valid feed so now I can include the feed. Yea!

Ah scratch that. I just checked both feeds and they have totally the wrong date. *hack* *test* *debug* *fix* … an hour later… fixed. It seems individual items in both of these new feeds were picking up the latest date rather than the last date the item was added. Should be working fine now.

Because I added the “fixed” feed from irishgaming.com to Planet, I saw this morning that they have added “ads” to irishgaming.com. So I guess I shouldn’t really have been worried about adding ads to the irishgamingwiki.com - not that it’s earned me much (if anything).

If you’ve been using the big feed from Planet Irish Gaming, you’ll know that it gets very busy. Quite a large number of posts per day. Mostly polite drivel from forums around the place, so much so I barely scan the feed. I thought that normal users might find it overwhelming. Well, thanks to the power of WordPress, you can just grab a feed without forums (I’ve even added this feed link to the frontpage of Planet Irish Gaming) and that includes the new friends feed from livejournal so it’s pretty digestible.

Still though, even doing that, there isn’t really that much genuine roleplaying or gaming news in there. There isn’t really that much genuine Irish roleplaying and gaming content to be honest. The thought had occurred to me that I add a new category to the site (and hence a new feed) that contains only items that actually pertain to roleplaying and gaming. What I could do is add a “vote” like link to the other feeds and if an item gets a few votes it gets automatically added to this category, much like digg.com or reddit.com. However this would require users to interact with the site on some level and I’m not sure the effort I’d have to put in to implement this feature would pay off in terms of people using it. Anyone got any opinions on this?

Is this a good idea: a livejournal “friends” page on my wordpress site?

Mark Cunningham — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 17:16:53 +0000

I keep meaning to reinstate my blogroll on thedeadone.net, but I just haven’t gotten around to it yet. But then I hit on an idea, have a “friends” page on thedeadone.net, like on LiveJournal, that shows the latest posts from blogs I read (including LiveJournal ones). It’s easy to do: FeedWordpress will grab the posts from my friends’ blogs’ RSS feeds and then use Advanced Category Excluder to prevent the posts appearing on the frontpage and RSS feeds. Along with a blogroll, this would be a much better way of promoting blogs I read.

What does anyone think? Would you like your blog prompted on my site this way?

LiveJournal and WordPress

Mark Cunningham — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 14:45:57 +0000

So the online Irish gaming community has moved, without a word, to livejournal. They even have a “community” setup.

But to be honest, I’ve already got my own homepage setup so I don’t particularly want to setup another blog just to join in. Well, luckly I found Live+Press, a little plugin for WordPress that allows you to synch blog entires from WordPress to LiveJournal.

I’ve setup a LiveJournal account with the uninspired name “tdo_ie” (thedeadone and many variants have already been taken). This post will actually be the first inaugural post on the account and also be synced on both sites! Lets see if it works…

Update: That was a flop. I spent some time trying to debug the plugin but I couldn’t get to the source of why the sync failed. Ah, it was worth a try.

Update #2: So Live+Press sucks but I found LiveJournal Crossposter. Lets see what happens…

Update #3: Still having difficulty but at least with Crossposter the code is much easier to debug. The problem lies with WordPress file class-IXR.php. It has no support for proxies. Seeing if I can hack it a bit…

Update #4: The error is “Something went wrong – -32300 : transport error – could not open socket: 110 Connection timed out”. This comes from the file class-IXR.php from WordPress. AFAIK, my host, Redbrick, does allow outgoing connections. Is this a LiveJournal thing or a Redbrick thing? There are no settings for proxies in either the plugin or the WordPress file.

Update #5: It appears the “110 Connection timed out” is a proxy problem. I hacked class-IXR.php a bit to use the redbrick proxy.

if ($this->timeout) {
//$fp = @fsockopen($this->server, $this->port, $errno, $errstr, $this->timeout);
$fp = @fsockopen(‘proxy.dcu.ie’, 3128, $errno, $errstr, $this->timeout);
} else {
//$fp = @fsockopen($this->server, $this->port, $errno, $errstr);
$fp = @fsockopen(‘proxy.dcu.ie’, 3128, $errno, $errstr);
}

Unfortunantly this isn’t enough. The fsockopen is successful but the fputs isn’t. The error is now: “HTTP/1.0 400 Bad Request”. I’m getting closer at least.

Update #6: Final update. I got it to work!

It requires a further update to class-IXR.php however. The request string that is passed to fputs is missing info that I guess the proxy needs. I needed to add the full url, not just the path and a “http://” to the beginning of the Host field.

$request = “POST http://{$this->server}{$this->path} HTTP/1.0$r”;
$request .= “Host: http://{$this->server}$r”;
$request .= “Content-Type: text/xml$r”;
$request .= “User-Agent: {$this->useragent}$r”;
$request .= “Content-length: {$length}$r$r”;
$request .= $xml;

I guess I better pass this info around!

thedeadone.net » LiveJournal

Learning to not drown in the sea of social networking

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Some fun with Planet Irish Gaming

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Is this a good idea: a livejournal “friends” page on my wordpress site?

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LiveJournal and WordPress

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