I sure hope not :-) Well, I felt defeated the other day when I lost all my Blinklist bookmarks because I wanted to make some mass changes and figured that the Blinklist XML backup format would be the best to work with to do it. Go figure. They have a wonderful site and it is so useful and easy to use with its nifty Ajax widgets. You would think that their own backup format could be imported back into the system. No, leave it to me to find an undocumented feature and lose all of my 2400+ bookmarks!
Well, I did not lose them totally. I still had the Blinklist XML format file. For restores/imports, Blinklist also accepts several other formats, including JavaScript Object Notation or JSON. So, what could it take? Flip a few tags, change a few names? I started by reading an article on O'Reilly's XML web site about converting between XML and JSON. The article gives a very straightforward set of examples of how the structures vary and rules binding the conversion.
I did find a few modules out on CPAN that did conversions, but most were small code fragments that would have required more work than I had time to tie together. I took a look at the Blinklist XML file. The XML was well-formed and appeared to be a straight one-to-one conversion to JSON with a few minor tag/ID name changes.
So, I put together 70 lines of perl code and converted the Blinklist XML file into a new JSON file. I tried it first on the dozen links I already added to my new (temporary I hope) Blinklist, exporting in both XML and JSON formats, creating my own JSON version, comparing the two, and then importing both to check for differences. None found!
So why I am asking if I may have caused some heartburn for Blinklist is that... well... no response from the helm, Mr. Scott :-( Just in case my Blinklist is locked during import and the reason I am not seeing it, I went to the root page of the web site and... well... nothing there either :-( Mike, if you are scurrying aroun, trying to get the servers back on the air, my apologies if it was my little ol' fault. I find that doubtful, but best to cover all the bases.
Soon, I hope to report that my full Blinklist is back in business!
Update! SUCCESS! My old Blinklist is back online!
Recently in Geek Stuff Category
As I have done on many previous occasions, I have asked for an invite today to get on Pownce, yet another social networking tool. I find it curious how the invitation systems work or don't. Sometimes, the invite comes, geez, almost before I click the submit button. Sometimes, they never come (like Orkut, which I finally signed up for today).
Now mind, I am not a sign up for every new thing that requires an invite type person, although I do like to be an early trier (and adopter if I like it). I am though the kind of person who, if they really (really) likes something, I will use it, hype it, and share it with everyone I know. Conversely, if it sucks, I will let the world know that as well.
So, I hope the good folks at Pownce see this and, if their product is up to it, will send me an invite. Oh, for those who are not dramatically inclined, the title reference is to Samuel Beckett's play in which the characters wait for someone who never arrives.
I was over at the Yahoo Developers web site today to grab an application key for a new web site. I noticed that the featured video on the front page was about a new plug-in for Wordpress. It is used while you are writing a new post (or editing an old one) and what it does is scans the content for possible items of interest from Yahoo. Things like maps, graphics, photos and such. So, what the hell, being a tech toy whore, I decided to load it up and see what it yields from the wealth of Yahoo Maps, Search, Flickr, and whatever other goodies they have stored. So I will pause in writing and see the three shortcuts it found already!
(pause)
So far, it basically found the links you see in the post above, as well as putting a Flickr badge at the bottom of the post, using those three terms as the keyword search. Now, let us add West Chester, Pennsylvania and the West Whiteland Fire Company to the mix and see what else show up.
(pause)
So, I removed the links to the three obvious web sites and added in automatically a map of the borough. It did not find the fire company's web site 
Curious as to how precise the search is, possibly only related to map locations or Flickr-finds.
Now going to enable everything and see how it looks in reality!
Update: Well, after publishing the web page and bringing it up in both Firefox and IE, I was singularly unimpressed with what happened when you moused over a link. It came up with some skeletal-looking windows and was not until you actually clicked the link that a Yahoo box came up with several search results. While it is a cute way to find related maps and pictures on Flickr for your post, I find that its usability for the general (read: non-geek) reader is lacking greatly.
Curious as to how precise the search is, possibly only related to map locations or Flickr-finds.
Now going to enable everything and see how it looks in reality!
Update: Well, after publishing the web page and bringing it up in both Firefox and IE, I was singularly unimpressed with what happened when you moused over a link. It came up with some skeletal-looking windows and was not until you actually clicked the link that a Yahoo box came up with several search results. While it is a cute way to find related maps and pictures on Flickr for your post, I find that its usability for the general (read: non-geek) reader is lacking greatly.
You know, it must be a sign of maturity... no, old people (like me) are always grumpy (not!). As a part of resurrecting the blog, I decided also to resurrect my old links area on BlinkList. If you click that link now, you will say Geez, doesn't Jim save anything? Well, last night I had several thousand links out there until I decided to backup, cleanup, and reload them. Seemed simple enough, using the BlinkList tools, that I could do just that: export them as BlinkList XML, edit them (a little grep/sed/awk-ing to clean out the crap), and then import them again. Right? Wrong. The import process generated a ream of SQL errors and my BlinkList was destroyed. Annihilated. Poof. Gone.
Lucky for me, I was an early adopter of BlinkList (it really is a super tool!) and happened to have the email of the chief geek on the project. Hoping he was still connected with the project, I emailed him and got a quick response. Unfortunately, not the right response. So, I am now off to concoct my own solution! Time to write a little perl code to see if I can get around this problem! We shall see...
Update @ 1530...
I just realized I still had a ton of those links on Furl as well. Mostly older unfortunately. So, I did a quick export from Furl and am now attempting a bookmark import at BlinkList. Attempting is the keyword here - it has been running for about 15 minutes so far...Update @ 2130...
Well, I have some of the old bookmarks added, but without tags or categories :( Time to do some serious coding I do believe!Update @ 2200...
Wasted enough time on BlinkList. It is a real shame, but I have more important things to do rather than debug someone else's software process. I understand it is a free system, etc., etc., etc. I also understand that they have an obvious programming problem which, oh well, isn't going to be fixed anytime soon. Cut my losses and move on.
Yep, it is snowing today - a bit more than the few flakes we had yesterday, but enough to give a minor coating on the grass. So, while tending to cleaning up the rec (read: wreck) room, I am getting things back in shape here. I do like this new format (hats off to Bob) and am having fun adding widgets and plugins. Yes, I am a geek and I do like to over decorate... but things will settle down, just bear with me in the meanwhile. Please, if you see something you like, leave a comment... also if something annoys you too.
So, back to cleaning out boxes and straightening out the mess, off- and on-line.
I was updating an old Fedora Core 5 image (old = 5 months without updates) and the rpm database went ka-boom when it tried to update 500+ modules! So, after Google-ing around, I found a couple of possible fixes. This is the one that worked. As root, use the following commands:
% rm /var/lib/rpm/__db* % rpm --rebuilddb % yum clean allNote - the filename in the rm command is [underscore][underscore]db*. The rpm rebuild took about 20 minutes and, after running the yum clean-up, the yum update worked like a champ.
On one of the web sites that I manage, I noticed a high influx of email bounce messages. That lead me to investigate one of my email scripts which, unfortunately, was vulnerable to one of those idiot email injectors. Now that I have deleted the 20,000 or so email messages from the adminstration account, I can get back to normal operations.
If anyone is interested in the relatively easy solution, please contact me.
And now for a break in the revolution! The elections are over for another cycle, classwork is pretty much up to date, and the holiday season is still a few weeks off. So, it is time to shake things up here a bit. New layout? Maybe. I do have to get MT up to the current release and I want to tidy up the web site in general. I also want to include a few new features like my latest bookmarks from Blinklist and a blogroll of stuff that I read on a regular basis.
So, stop back in a few hours (or days) and see what's what!
Ok, have I become a Blinker? Damn straight! It is now obvious with the addition of a Blink It! link at the bottom of every post. The Blinklist team has instructions for adding a Blink It! link for Blogger and WordPress, as well as generic instructions for other blogs. Well, since I use MovableType, I took a few minutes to hack into my templates and figure out how to do it.
So, here's the way to do it. You have to open up to four templates, depending upon the archiving method you use: Main Index, Category Archive, Date-based Archive, and Individual Entry Archive. i placed the Blink It! link right after the Permalink in each entry. You can opt for either using the Blink graphic or a text link. I opted for the latter since it fit in better with my layout. Here is the code you need to paste into the template to generate the link with your entry's title, permalink, and tag. Note that I am terrible about tagging the category for entries so I just used the blog title entry. So here is the code required:
Blink It! with the graphic:
Blink It! with a text link:
Remember that when you are done modifying your templates, you must rebuild your site for the changes to take affect!
So, share the love! Feel free to steal the code for your MT blog!
Blinklist gets another gold star, a big one in my book. It all has to do with backup, something that most geeky types forget about until they hit an oops. So, like a good boy, I backed up my Blinklist and what did I get but an RSS feed of all my links! No more IE/Netscape favorites, but a well thought out XML feed. Here is a sample entry:
<item> <title>Virtual Network Computing - Wikipedia</title> <description>VNC Wikipedia entry</description> <link>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vnc</link> <guid></guid> <pubDate>1162749883</pubDate> <private></private> <favourite></favourite> <category>Geekdom,Remote_Access,VNC</category> </item>The field names have obvious meaning and are easily parsed. The publication date is based on the standard UNIX epoch. The fields private and favourite are either blank or have a value of on and the field category is easy to parse with simple comma delimiting. Now I am off to pull together a few perl modules to play with this puppy! Kudos to the Blinklist team!
