Monthly Archives: January 2004

Recent Listenings

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UPDATE: NO LONGER SHOWING RECENT LISTENINGS ON THIS BLOG no FTP support … and no desire to figure out another way for now.

Today is December 7, 2004, and it’s been a few months or more since haven’t had “recent listenings” going. Thanks!
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I’ve been working on getting a recent listening from my computer list on this page. If you are using IE as a browser you’ll see my most 10 recent under “Recent Listenings” on the right-hand side, mid-ish-way down [of my main page]. I’m still working on how to produce it to look nicer. In Netscape, it doesn’t show up. That’s why there is a link “10 most recent tracks” opens a pop-up window. That info is coded from someone else, and it links tracks to Barnes and Noble looking up the Artist and Title for the album to buy. Most of my CD’s are older, and some don’t link correctly, some not at all. Also, I listen to mp3 sermons often, and they don’t link to anything on B&N, of course.

When I’m better at writing PHP stuff, I’ll see if I can’t get things to link better, how I want, depending on what the thing is that is listed.

My goal for now though, is to get a normal non-linked list to show up in either IE or Netscape.

What I’ve done:

I am using Windows Media Player 9 for Win XP. There is a blogging plugin which puts lots of info for what you are playing output to WMP9′s interface. Songwriter is another plugin for WMP9 which allows you to output and upload XML &/or TXT files of Meta data for each track listened to. There are many options on how to make that work then, on your site.

All I’m doing right now is using a dataisland kind of coding to place the data on this page. [That is XML info which is pulled from/into datafields, XML to a TABLE midst other HTML/PHP code.]

The pop up window data uses a PHP script. I’ll study that later to see how I can use that to write the info I want on this page.

I was using SonicStage, which comes with my Sony Vaio, and it uses OpenMG as a way to load music as smaller files. I have some stuff like that already on my ‘puter, and since WMP uses a different file-type I have to burn those OpenMG files to CD’s and then copy the CD’s to WMP’s Media Library.

Once loaded via Media Library I can add more info to tracks. WMP9 is rather nice. Not perfect, of course. SonicStage uses a different service to recognize music … and it works better at that than WMP9′s version. For instance, I listen to Cecilia Bartoli, and via WMP the info doesn’t include her name at all, and so on linking with that popup window, you can’t find the CD that the song is on, and there is no reference to her at all written to my site. On the other hand, if I play those CD’s in SonicStage, they are recognized correctly.

I could load all my Bartoli CD’s onto WMP Media Library, but I sure don’t want to load all the music onto my hard drive. I’ll have to figure out what to do, fooling around with loading it, fixing the data, then burning new CD’s, will that fix it, or not. Ah, the trouble of non-standard compliance. Older CD’s recognized fine in Sony application, but not in Windows XP application. It has to do with the services they are attached to, but really, it’s plainly annoying. If I could have plugin capabilities for SonicStage usefullness online, I’d use it, but so far I haven’t found it. :(

Using WMP9 w/the Songwriter XML output, if I insert a new CD it sends info out for “not known” immediately, which messes up how the pop-up window reads the XML file. Also, the entries that IE shows, shows a messed up entry for that “play” but the next track shows up fine, as once the CD is in for a few moments it is recognized, but WMP9 insists on sending out “not known” data … which I’ll surely stop if I can figure out how to do that.

Well, that’s that for now!

The XML (songout.xml) file
The HTML file that I use to pull the data to the main page, how it looks before main stylesheet is applied

Plumb tuckerd and tickled

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Well, it’s been hard work today. I was in the garden and that’s just something wearisome in late-January (I started to type “mid-January, and realize we are at the end already! Where’d it go?!!!). Un-accustomed to that bent position, since I hadn’t “really” done it since June 2003, I dare say, I grew tired fast. But I enjoyed every second of it.

The earth has not frozen at all this year, so the cold nights of icey temps just have the ground nice and soothingly cool. Ant that had invaded my herb section last Summer left the earth fine and airy around the chives, basil, thyme, and parsley I was dealing with. I fairly easily pulled out dead weeds, and some live ones too. Some live ones were dastardly tough, but I won. The basil, dead as a doornail, was ensconced in the earth’s depths, and several battles ensued before I finally conquered, but conquer I did! :)

I can see that corner of my garden from the bedroom window I sit next to right now, warm, rich brown soil blazenly showing itself to me, beckoning, oh so seductively.

It feels so good to have rich soil in ones bare hands. It’s just too early to really think about it so much. We just had an ice storm the other day, and now here I am doing some gardening, one example of how odd this winter is.

I’m holding back the urge to fire up the Mantis. I suppose I should look into growing some garden plants from seed, if we can manage the $ for flats and the right growing medium. I’ve not ever done that before, it’s hard for me to plant seeds and thin the young plants, so it’s generally easier on me to go the route of buying started plants for the garden.

This past summer I planted some things in a natural way … I throw remants of veggy cuttings over the deck on the side to decompose naturally, well it was a nice moist summer and I had some lovely tomatoes growing come Fall, they flowered and started fruit, but didn’t mature before the first Frost on Nov 13th. A melon of unknown variety was growing as well. Seems an interesting method for growing … I may just figure a good way to do that on purpose this year :) Growing tomatoes there is interesting, I could tie them up to the deck posts well, or perhaps grow string beans, tying leads easily for them to snake their way up, just go onto the deck to harvest for dinner … that’s something I’m truly considering doing.

Well then, it was nice being with my plants over in the garden. I have two German Thyme plants. One is rather nearly all woody with very little growth, kind of weird. The other one is lush and gorgeous right now. Part of it died off, but it took off in the other direction. Smells so good! The dead basil wood smelled wonderful as well. The chives are low to the ground. I pulled the dead stuff out of them, I have three spots with chives. They were one plant, I divided it from the pot last Spring into three sections. They are establishing nicely. New little green shoots under all that dead stuff. They should do nicely this Spring.

We still have some winter to go through, but mostly the forecast is calling for these cold nights and moderate nights, and warm days for the most part. mid-March, last frost time, is less than two months away. It’s not too long before some trees will really start to rev up to blooming. Maples and Apple trees in our yard are getting buds growing to nearly looking Spring-ready-to-swell-and-burst! Just hold off until it’s safe dear trees!

I have some maples I grew from seed, from the October Glory, and a few of them are naturally sprouted that I harvested underneath the tree. I have them in a small planter on the front porch. They are about a foot or more tall and looking nice. I need to get a pot for each of them soon, and re-plant them. We want to keep them potted so that we can easily take them with us if/when we move, with heritage from the big tree we bought and installed and can’t move with us :( but really :)

So I got my hands all dirty today. I had to dig the dirt out from under my nails and soap them up really good. I hate garden gloves ;) Earth on bare hands is supremely satisfying. Particularly in January.

Ice Storm

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On Sunday late afternoon, the rain on trees started to turn to ice. So, we finally had an ice storm. It was mild here, the roads were mostly safe, as far as we know from what we experienced.

Everything was frozen through this morning, only melting as the morning warmed up finally. One and a half days of ice was nice … the tree’s are exceptionally pretty like that, but weak trees tend to break or fall over in a dangerous bend. Well planted, healthy trees are generally alright, but older and natural planted pines tend to have problems here in GA.

We were at the Mall of GA last night, B&N, and the sight was so silvery, so many trees all decked out in natures beautiful ice.

I would have pictures of our trees right now, but the Digital camera is not working again. I have film pictures, well, will have eventually.

I’m frustrated with this [digital] camera, it has worked alright, then didn’t at all, then did fine for awhile then now doesn’t work again. We’ll have to find the book and look to see if temps are going to make certain thing not work. The thing about the two “not working” times is that the are not the same. First time the lens did not come out at all. This time it does come out, then goes right back in.

So, it’s now soggy time, as the temps go up, and all that rain gets to absorb into the ground finally.

We are in for a few nights of below freezing though, and only Partly Cloudy days, which are not quite sunny or warm enough to make things warm in the house. Well, we had a couple of nice days before the ice days. Winter continues, cold, warm, mild conditions, a little wintry weather.

It is a late first ice we’ve had. It really wasn’t in the usual ahead forecasts. We do have the next forecast wintry weather on Feb 6. Rain, mixed with snow, then later snow possible. It’ll be interesting to see if we get that, and how soon or late, and if anything else crops up.

Archive Heirarchy Changes

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I’ve just changed my archiving method. If you have a link to anything I’ve written before, it’s changed now. My Individual archives are dirified by title and in category folders, meaning:

Say I have a post on “January 1, 2004″ and it’s titled “Happy New Year” and it’s main Category is “Holidays and Celebrations”

it would be found at: /archives/holidays_and_celebrations/happy_new_year.php

That’s where Individual posts are to be linked to.

Month and Daily archives are now here:

/archives/2004/Jan/index.php for the Monthly archive page

<$MTArchiveDate format="%Y/%b/index.php"$>

and dailies are in their respective year and month folder and are titled, for example:
“january_10_2004.php”

<$MTArchiveDate format="%Y/%b"$>/<$MTArchiveDate dirify="1" format="%B %e, %Y">.php

(I’ve never had anything linked to them, but just in case I ever do, they are there. If I have one post on any day, it’ll archive as a daily, and any other post on the same day archive on that same page. It’s the same premise as Monthly archives.)

The above are all ficticious paths and files, btw.

I’ve wanted to do this in the past, but didn’t wrap my mind around how to get the codes for the paths the way I’d want them. It’s a confusing thing and takes time to figure out, since there isn’t an easy example of different hierarchies of filing ways for MT, easily found, that is.

I was working on another installation of MT today, and it’s where I decided I HAD to use a different method because of how I wanted to use it. I got it worked out fairly fast. So it inspired me to take the plunge on this blog and get it done.

For some reason, it didn’t work so smoothly. I had to manually create all my directories via FTP. On the other installation of MT I didn’t have to do that. Weird. Same Host. Same files, from same source on my computer, that is. Well, I did have trouble in the past deleting something that MT created on this site when uploading with it. So it’s possibly a weirdness in how this one domain is set up. :(

I did an overhaul some time ago when I converted all my files to .php extentions. That means all the google and yahoo, etc links out there are dead when one does a drastic change like renaming extentions, or totally changing the directory structure. For me that’s what it is, I have no control over any .htaccess files, so I have no way to re-direct or have nice 404 pages and error pages.

I have a good host, a friend, but some things are just set to default and there’s only so much I can ask for without being a pest and a half. I do want to do my own hosting someday so I can do what I want and not bug anyone at all, but myself ;)

I’m considering doing an over haul of my photolog directories, but I’m not sure how I’ll do it. I’ll do it a bit differently than this one and the other one I did earlier today elsewhere.

I’d put the code for what I did in my archive paths, but I am too bleary eyed and brained to find the solution on how to do that. I need something, a plugin or something, and I’m not finding it. Well, maybe tomorrow after a few hours sleep I’ll be more successful. :) DONE.

New Photo Log

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I’ve been working on a new Photo Log. I’ve imported most everything into the new setup and now have it in the place of the previous one. Referrers on it are new, they didn’t transfer, so page views and referrer links are starting from scratch.

This photo log is just the same in how I use it to load things, but it displays totally differently. The place I got the templates from is linked on the pages. I’ve tweaked it heavily though, changing the colors as well as integral parts of size and how it works in certain instances. I could have done the whole thing bottom up, but since someone else had done work on a similar style as to what I wanted to do, and has the templates available, I went ahead and used those.

Most photo weblogs in MT utilize ImageMagik (a server-based image manipulator) when creating entries. My server doesn’t have that available, but even so, I find it easier to create thumbs of photos myself in Photoshop, and then upload the photos and thumbs via FTP, then just code in location into the message template, avoiding the whole “upload file” thing.

If I have a few or more to do at the same time, I can create an import file, and use that to easily add many new entries at once.

They are easy to create, just a text file facimile any “export” one can create inside MT’s weblog interface. If you use MT but haven’t ever imported or exported, look that info up and give it a try. It’s a good way to back up your blogs entries and comments. It will give you the right template to use to create new entries, as I do for multiple new entries.

Using this import/export feature, you can move entries around to different blogs, entire content or partial.

I have a little work to do with my photos. I’m changing the way Portrait photos display. I’ll have all thumbs 100×67 and that means portrait thumbs will be cropped. Portrait photos will display individually at their length in contrast to the width of 500px. All other (landscape) photos will display at 500 x 333px. So any portrait dimensioned photos that are blurry, haven’t been reloaded yet, and the thumbs if they are portrait shaped (bigger than 100x67px) that also means they haven’t been reloaded yet. I’ve done some, but not all. as of yet.

Let me know what you think of my new Photo Log layout and how it works!