RichardBenson.co.uk : Work

YUI Editor in Movabletype v1.3

Thu, 28 May 2009 11:18:09 +0000

A new version of the YUI Rich Text Editor in MovableType is available, this version adds a new button to your toolbar that will search your entry's text and extract terms that can then easily be added as tags.

Personally, I can never think of proper tags for all my entries, so I created this. Based on an article from Zomie.com, I took the concepts there and added them to the YUI RTE plugin.

To enable auto-tagging you will need to get yourself an appid from the Yahoo! Developer Network, but it's very straightforward.

Once you have an appid, enter it into the blog plugin config page and a button will be added to your RTE toolbar which, when pressed, will scan your text for terms and present you with a list of suggested tags, which you can then click on to add them to your tags field.

Currently only searches the active page (body/extended), so try it on both to get the best results if you are using an extended entry.

Download YUI Rich Text Editor for MovableType 4 v1.3

Adding YUI RTE in MoveableType Community Solution

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 15:58:03 +0000

On certain sites, you may want to allow your users a little more freedom with their comments, or if you're using the community templates in MovableType, then you may want to improve the "Create Entry" screens to allow rich text.

I managed to squeeze the YUI RTE into a stock forum template set, then just haven't got round to writing it up yet. You can see it in action here, and below the jump is the write-up, it's surprisingly easy!

I've also put it on here, for registered commenters, something else that needs a write-up really!

YouTube lightbox

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 17:58:08 +0000

For a while now I have been toying with making my own JavaScript libraries built around the YUI libraries, as there were things out there I wanted but didn't seem to exist in a YUI flavour.

I since found that exactly what I wanted didn't seem to exist in any flavour (please correct me in the comments if I am wrong).

The two things I wanted straight away were image and video lighboxes. Yeah, an image lightbox in YUI exists, but I want to just add a class name to a link and magically have the lightbox do all the work, and I wanted the same for youtube links. I believe that making things as simple as possible for people, means they are more likely to use it.

So I went and made them.

My JavaScript Libraries

YUI Editor in Movabletype v1.2

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 11:18:33 +0000

Another simple update to use the latest YUI library (2.7.0)

There's changes in config.js and js/load.js as the Element utility came out of Beta

Download YUI Rich Text Editor for Movabletype 4 v1.2

Embedding YouTube videos from Action Streams

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 13:56:15 +0000

The next logical step from displaying a thumbnail of your posted or favourite videos is to actually enable playing of the video in your own webpage. Thankfully, this is simple with youtube's embed code and your Action Stream. I've now added this to my video calendar page and i think it looks good and works rather well. It may be a little to much to add it to the home page, plus we don't want that to slow down any, it's already having to grab resources from all over the place anyway, so adding 9 embedded videos may be a little too much!

Code after the jump..

Action Stream 2.0 field list

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 13:45:29 +0000

Please Note: This is for version 2.0 of the Action Streams plugin, for the 1.0 list see this post.

Differences and additions between v1 and v2 are highlighted in yellow.

Additionally, v2 has not yet been officially launched, as such this list may change between now and launch and I will only be highlighting differences from v1 to v2, not from now to v2.

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"

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).

Removing a Drive from a Spanned Volume

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 12:45:22 +0000

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.

YUI Editor in Movabletype v1.1

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 11:49:39 +0000

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

Sporepedia Action Stream v0.3

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 13:55:11 +0000

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

Working on achievements and Sporecasts for the next versions

Download Sporepedia Action Stream Plugin for MovableType v0.3

MT.org Action Stream 0.1

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 22:53:04 +0000

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

Action Stream field list

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 11:34:01 +0000

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).

Collating Action Streams

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 12:31:10 +0000

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?

Varying display of Action Streams based on content

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 14:40:07 +0000

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.

Combining entries with Action Stream data

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 13:16:14 +0000

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.

YUI Editor in Movabletype v1.0

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 14:19:45 +0000

At last I can make this 1.0!

IE6 is not yet perfect, but as good as it can get until Yahoo! update the CSS for the editor.

Download YUI Rich Text Editor for Movabletype 4 v1.0

Version Notes:
1.0

Width tweaked to make IE6 look better