ar's weblog

dogfood:encoded

2006-06-15T15:08:58Z

There's really nothing like eating your own dog food. Since I reluctantly started this blog, I've already fixed a couple of bugs in the PHP back-end code for iJot and isolated another 2 that we're savagely hacking at. Yesterday, Andy - who is blogging using Squib btw - noted that the entity:encoded elements of iJot's rss 1.0 weblog feeds were encoded not once but twice. Oops. Boy do I hate encoding! What's wrong with simple, unaccented, tag devoid, plain English text anyway ? Well, this double trouble is now a thing of the past. Peace to all RSS aggregators...

Encoding Redux

2006-06-15T15:08:58Z

Just when I thought we were finished with encoding woes, I take a look at the activeRoll Gilles has inserted in the right column of his weblog, and lo and behold, it's full of unprintable (?) characters. Gilles, like most of his fellow Quebecois, insists on writing in French, which is plagued with even more accented letters than regular English. The OPML version of Gilles' blogroll is encoded in UTF-8. Gilles' weblog, published with Wordpress, is also encoded in UTF-8. Our own activeRenderer tries to be accomodating with encoding fashions and trends: if the source OPML is encoded in UTF-8, well, let's output the rendered DHTML in the same UTF-8 encoding. Or so we thought. The rendering code on the production server runs under PHP 4, whereas are development server runs PHP 5. Now, of course, the xml parser in PHP 4 handles encoding differently from PHP 5. PHP 4 tries to guess the XML source encoding, and usually fails miserably, defaulting to ISO-8859-1, which renders Gilles' activeRoll unreadable. It looks like I will have to manually detect the source encoding (yikes! regexen to the rescue! :-) and force it down the throat of the XML parser. And to make things worse, with PHP 4, this will only work for UTF-8, US-ASCII and ISO-8859-1. What a way to run a railroad! PHP 5 is marginally better, so we'll migrate the server eventually. Update: I've made a modification to the activeRoll code, so people who are using any of the 3 PHP 4 compatible encodings - including Gilles - should now have properly looking blogrolls.

activeRenderer

2006-06-15T13:45:07Z

A few years ago, I provided Radio Userland bloggers a way to publish OPML outlines as regular DHTML Web pages: activeRenderer. One of activeRenderer's most popular features was the ability to display OPML blogrolls as activeRolls in any Radio weblog's sidebar.

activeRolls

2006-06-15T13:45:07Z

activeRolls are just like regular blogrolls, with a twist: active outline wedges to uncover underlying levels of information. They provide a dynamic user experience, while preserving screen real-estate and fitting smoothly into the surrounding layout. While working on the iJot project, I ported most of the Usertalk OPML rendering code to a new Apache/PHP server. So check-out the activeRoll wizard at http://services.activerenderer.com/demo/roll/. It will drive you through the process of creating an activeRoll from any Web accessible OPML file, customizing the roll's style, and inserting the proper code into your weblog's template. Any kind of weblog. No longer limited to Radio. It has been tested with WordPress, Drupal and OPML Editor.

OPML Editor

2006-06-15T13:45:07Z

With OPML Editor, you will need to update your version to benefit from the new easy stylesheet feature. After restarting, you should: 1. paste the CSS rules defined in the wizard's second step into the new OPML Editor stylesheet (Community / Your OPML Weblog / Open stylesheet menu), 2. paste the links of step 3 in the OPML Editor template (Community / Your OPML Weblog / Open template menu) into the section, *before* the <%stylesheet%> macro, 3. paste the code of step 4 in the template where you want the activeRoll to be displayed.

Grazr

2006-06-15T13:45:07Z

If you have a little room left in your sidebars, Mike Kowalchik's Grazr provides an extremely clever ipod-like interface to your OPML outlines. A Grazr widget has less styling options than an activeRoll, but delivers a clearer browsing experience for OPML documents that go beyond collection of links.

Dog Food

2006-06-15T13:45:07Z

I have been asked for an OPML weblog to document the resurrection of activeRenderer as a suite of Web services. Well, there's nothing like eating your own... So I've just created a new iJot weblog for this very purpose.

Thanks Guys

2006-06-15T13:45:07Z

Thanks to Gwenael for his pioneering work as well as suggesting improvements to the wizard's design, to Dave for enabling style declarations in the OPML Editor, to Donovan for experimenting with the wizard and motivating Dave :-)