RichardBenson.co.uk

When I needed more space in my main PC, I went for the (then) cheaper option of 4x 250GB drives over one large one, and as I wanted to avoid problems with moving the disks I didn't use the motherboard's RAID features and instead went with Windows dynamic discs and a spanned volume.

Time moved on and I wanted some of the contents of that drive on my main PC and the rest on the media PC, but I had nowhere to store roughly 1TB of data whilst I re-arranged the disks.  After much research on the net everyone told me that it wasn't possible to remove a single drive from a Windows spanned volume.  That's never stopped me trying before and I am glad to say that I managed it!  Instructions after the jump.

This update merely makes the plugin use the latest (2.6.0) library.

A small change was made in config.js, so back that up if you've made your own customisations, and change ConfigYUIBase to be "http://yui.yahooapis.com/2.6.0/build/".

The other change is in load.js, so if you are hosting the YUI scripts locally you'll still need the update.

Download YUI Rich Text Editor for Movabletype 4 v1.1

Updated to show creations now that the official site has an RSS feed.

Anyone out there trying to find the perfect Christmas present for me (surely you all are?) need look no further, as always, eBay has the answer.

A very simple action stream to add your activities on MT.org to your stream.

The plugin pulls in plugins you have posted and your "activity" as defined by the list on your profile page.

As the actual XML for your recent activity is not very useful, this pulls out the relevant information and formats it for stream display.

This first version is rough round the edges for the "activity" stream, I would prefer it to display exactly as it does on mt.org, but the plugin section is as good as it will get!

Feed and category available as usual.

Download movabletype.org Action Stream v0.1

The Action Stream plugin provides a lot of information about your profiles which isn't accessed by default.  With a little playing (as described in my previous posts) you can really start making your action streams work for you and provide a "lifestream" to your own blog.

The following is a description of all the fields found in the default plugin (without any additional profile plugins) in the following format:

• service_type
  • stream_type
    • MTStreamActionVar name="xx"

I will try to keep this up to date as new streams are added to the plugin.  One important difference to note is that between "stream_type" and "service_type". The difference is a stream type gathers together similar feeds, i.e. the photos stream_type will be all services where you post photos to, whereas a service_type of “flickr” will just be all actions based on flickr (including favourites etc).

Yves Luther has come up with another great idea for action streams, however his solution didn't quite fit with what I expected it to do, plus it doesn't "strap on" to the default action stream templates very well.

The problem is when you use feeds that are updated frequently, Last.FM listened to tracks and uploading whole sets of photos, it floods your action stream with so many entries that other things can get lost in the noise.  Now if you're like me and listen to music all day every day, then you would normally just turn off something like the last.fm feeds.

However, wouldn't it be nice to capture and show that information in a way that doesn't compromise the importance of other items in your action stream?

Following on from my last post about combining Action Stream data with entries (which has been superceded by an offical MT post and plugin from one of their devs), the next thing to do with Action Streams is to change their appearence based on their content/source.

The mechanisms to do this are all included in the plugin, but require a little tender love and care to get the desired effect.  Here is how I did it.

First off, credit where credit is due; this method is entirely the property of Yves Luther, I am merely providing it in English in an instructional capacity.

So, you can see on my home page that my blog posts are nicely mixed in with my action stream entries, which for blogs with infrequent updates or personal sites, means you have a collection that summarises (most of) your activity on the web as a whole.  The beuty of Yves solution is it's simplicity and flexibility.  Once set up, the choice of exactly how to display your home page is completely up to you.

Also on my home page are variations on styling and content based on the service providing the action, this is something I will detail in a later post.

The BBC News website had a report about a new search engine, Cuil (pronounced "cool"), created by ex-Googlers that claims to be better and more relvant than the big G.

So I did some searches on it.  First I tried some of the keywords that I list highly on for Google and "no results found".  After trying a few and also variations on them I was getting nowhere and so just stuck my domain in.

Have a look for yourself at the results.  That little logo next to my website has made me quite angry, I don't think I've ever even mentioned Scientology, let alone use a logo that alludes to any kind of "success" within it that I may have achieved.

The natural thing in this case is to pop over to the FAQs and see if there is anything I can do about it.  Brilliant, a link to some webmaster tools.... that doesn't work and no other notice about contact.

First impressions count for damn near everything, and I'm certainly not going to be using Cuil or recommending it to anyone.  In fact, so that Google can give it a good description, I'm going to link to it by saying, Cuil is misleading and useless.

UPDATE: Looks like a lot of their links only work some of the times you go to them!  Maybe if I keep trying the webmaster one will work.