Fancy File Uploader

This is a reworking of an example file uploader. I've thrown in my typical user accounts, pagination, and tagging to make it really powerful. Feedback is welcome. I will also answer questions about how the code works.

Adding audio enclosures to feeds with Yahoo Pipes

I just finished my second "pipe" using Yahoo Pipes. If you haven't looked into Pipes, I strongly recommend it, because it is a testament of capabilities the web just didn't have until recently. It's main use is manipulating RSS feeds to create new feeds. Also, a pipe can make feeds from scraping web pages. Instead of editing source code as text, you insert graphical modules and fill in values to configure them. Then, whatever a module outputs can flow into the next module and the next, until finally the output is produced. Both of the pipes I created solve the same problem, adding audio enclosures to a music feed that was lacking them. I had to identify a pattern between the information in a feed entry and the URL of the MP3 file. The first one, Newgrounds weekly audio winners (original feed, my version, pipe page), was easy. All I had to do was copy the link and change "listen" to "download".



An experienced Pipes developer could make this in 2 minutes. But I have no idea what I'm doing, so it took me a couple hours of trial and error. The second one, remix.kwed.org (original feed, my version, pipe page), was a little more complicated. The link is http://remix.kwed.org/?search={id}. The MP3 is located at http://remix.kwed.org/{id}/{title}.mp3. Still not too bad, though, since all of the information was right in the feed, so no page scraping was necessary.

I still don't think I understand how to really use Pipes, as I am used to textual coding rather than visual. Maybe they will make it even easier to use in successive versions, assuming Yahoo isn't disbanded, with all of its cool apps sent to the scrap heap. But for now, if there's a quick hack you wish for involving feeds, and you don't feel like opening up a new programming project and figuring out how to host it, Pipes is your best bet.

Empire Maintenance

I finally got around to refreshing the layouts of my various web properties, namely my web site and this blogger template. Let me tell you, both were in bad shape. The banner now reads "vortices" whereas before it was "Vezquex's Vortices". The branding change doesn't really make sense. The domain is vezquex.com, after all. But it was the best logo I have at the moment. It looks pretty sweet over the fantasy space background; don't you think? I lifted it from a Russian guy, but let's keep that between you and me ;). The menu has some new items and should be easier to navigate.

The image used to make the menu bar is now monochrome and transparent so that it can be an arbitrary color using a background color, plus it looks cool over an image. I took out the Friendfeed widget from my home page and moved to the blog's side bar. I adopted their technique of many favicons linking to profiles. I still want to better integrate this blog into the site, but I haven't decided exactly how to approach that.

I've also been doing a lot over on AppJet. The concept of throway apps is great. I wrote a two libraries, lib-subdomain and lib-style, just for making my other libraries look nicer. I've bundled some pretty useful things into lib-general. But I haven't forgotten about the apps. One I recently made is an anonymous (for now) message board with support for external images and mp3s. I'm actually trying to write a user account library, but there are some bugs in it that I haven't quite solved, so it's not finished. There is of course an existing library that does the same thing, but I don't like its execution. (My main gripe is that it sends you to a separate page to log in.) On the lighter side of things, I have rewritten the PHP Novebruary script in JavaScript on AppJet, with added support for Septogust, so mark your calendars. I'll reimplement the widget too.