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Alex Jones

I lead teams at the intersection of strategy and design. Autodidact. Polymath. Barbecue acolyte. I start fires (the good kind).

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Ma.gnolia Plugin 1.4 Released

Thanks to Rick and Emre for the excellent suggestions which prompted these improvements to the Ma.gnolia WordPress plugin:

  • Added the ability to pull bookmarks from group collections as well as those of individual people. Tags can be used with either, so you can pull bookmarks from the Web Design group that have been tagged with ‘css’.
  • Added ability to pull the Full feed from Ma.gnolia, which includes:
    • Thumbnails of each bookmark
    • The tags applied to each bookmark

    Please note, this is all or nothing, so you cannot just pull the image, or the image and description without the tags. Sorry, but that’s how it’s coming through and I spent too much time trying to find a way around it with a couple of different RSS parsers.

  • Changed the variable $username to $collection to fit the new model of pulling from groups or individuals. This shouldn’t impact your site as it is more of a clean-up task.
  • Added configuration option to enable/disable the link to view more Ma.gnolia bookmarks
  • Added the plugin to wp-plugins.net/ to ease updates for folks using Update Manager to track plugin updates (like me).

Please check out the official page to download the latest version and the new examples page to learn more about the plugin.

Note: for Users of 1.3: You should be able to drop this upgrade in place without changing any of your code. Please let me know if you notice any issues with your existing setup.

The New Ma.gnolia WordPress Plugin

Barry Price, the creator of the Ma.gnolia plugin for WordPress has set its development aside and has encouraged me to adopt the project. As I use the plugin heavily on this site, and I enjoy development, I decided to take him up on it.

This plugin makes it easy to output a list of your Ma.gnolia bookmarks anywhere on your site. You can set it to only pull bookmarks with a specific tag, which is great for listing sites related to a specific category or post.

Please download the plugin and provide me your feedback in the comments of this page. I’ll do my damnedest to fix any bugs you report and look forward to expanding it to be even more useful!

Update

I’ve updated the plugin. Please go to the official page for the latest version: Ma.gnolia Plugin.
Download
Magnolia WordPress Plugin

Make sure to join the Plugin group on Ma.gnolia to add your site to the list if you are using this plugin!

Install

  • Drop the entire plugin folder into wp-content/plugins/ – the final paths will be:
    • wp-content/plugins/magnolia/last_rss.php
    • wp-content/plugins/magnolia/magnolia.php
  • Activate the plugin in the admin area of your wordpress install

To Use

This plugin is very basic at the moment, so all it takes once you’ve installed the plugin is a single line of PHP, inserted wherever you want the list of links to appear. You can pass the following variables to the plugin:

  • $username is the Ma.gnolia account to use, this is typically your account.
  • $numLinks sets the amount of links you want the tag to output, this defaults to 10.
  • $showDescriptions tells the tag whether or not it should include descriptions in the output. This defaults to “Do Not Show”.
  • $showPubDates tells the tag whether or not it should output the date the URL was bookmarked in Ma.gnolia. This defaults to “Do Not Show”.
  • $useMagnoliaLinks determines whether the links should point directly to the bookmarked URL, or the bookmark’s page on Ma.gnolia. This defaults to the Bookmark’s actual URL.
  • $tag allows you to pass in a tag to narrow down the list of results. Only bookmarks matching that tag will be output. This is empty by default, so it pulls all bookmarks regardless of their tags. Use a plus sign (+) to separate multi-word tags. For example “web+design”.

The output consists of an unordered list, each link contained in a separate list item tag.

Example of Usage

Here’s a snippet to output three bookmarks, with their associated descriptions from my bookmark list, regardless of the tag.


<?php magnolia('BaldTechnologist',3,1,0); ?>

Example Output


<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/17328648@N00/sets/1737284/" title="Cool &amp; Wacky Records - a photoset on Flickr:: No Description" class="ToolTip">Cool &amp; Wacky Records - a photoset on Flickr</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.fortymedia.com/blog/post/59" title="Attention Mapping: The 10-Point Exercise:: Attention is the most fundamental unit of design. Once you get past the color schemes, typography, layouts, graphical treatments, etc., it all comes down to guiding and shaping the viewer’s attention." class="ToolTip">Attention Mapping: The 10-Point Exercise</a></li>
<li><a href="http://haha.nu/misc/html-tags-illustrated/" title="HTML Tags illustrated:: A collection of photos that demonstrate HTML tags." class="ToolTip">HTML Tags illustrated</a></li>
<li class="MagnoliaLink"><a href="http://ma.gnolia.com/people/BaldTechnologist/bookmarks" title="Alex Jones on Ma.gnolia::Browse through the sites and pages that I have added to my bookmark list on Ma.gnolia. If you're a member, add me as a contact!" class="ToolTip">View my bookmarks on Ma.gnolia</a></li>
</ul>

Other Examples

Five Bookmarks Tagged with “Design”, No Descriptions, Pointing to the Original URL


<?php magnolia('BaldTechnologist',5,0,0,0,'design'); ?>

Ten Most Recent Bookmarks with their Descriptions and the Time they Were Saved to Ma.gnolia, Pointing to the Link’s Ma.gnolia URL

<?php magnolia('BaldTechnologist',10,1,0,0,'History'); ?>

Behind the Scenes

Barry Price built the first version of this plugin, and what you see here is a a modified version of his work the Last RSS Parser, which does much of the heavy lifting. At this point, Alex (BaldTechnologist on Ma.gnolia) has picked up the project and will be adding features as suggestions come in and time allows. If you have an idea, please contact me and I’ll see what I can do!

Contribute, for Free!

It’s easy to support this free plugin, and it won’t cost you a thing! Here are a few simple ways:

  • When you plan to buy something from Amazon, follow this link (Amazon.com). It won’t cost you anything, but it will add a small amount of your purchase to my account.
  • Write about the Ma.gnolia for WordPress plugin on your site
  • Add a link back to my site (www.silverspider.com) from yours
  • Drop me a line to say hi and let me know where you are running the plugin.

Changes Made

I’ve made some changes, both major and minor to the plugin, including:

  • Changed quote usage from single quotes to double quotes to improve parsing efficiency.
  • Improved comments within the script
  • Moved the feed parser class (Last RSS) to a separate file for ease of maintenance.
  • Various code, formatting and commenting changes

Upcoming Changes

These are not currently prioritized, but I want to add these features/implement these revisions:

  • Add CRON abilities to pre-cache feeds instead of waiting for a request
  • Add ability to search multiple tags (AND & OR)
  • Add the ability to pull from groups in addition to by tags
  • Documentation with some examples
  • Improve configuration options
  • …(this is where your suggestions come in)

Mmmm Code Snippets

Code Snippets is an online resource, providing a central user-writable repository for chunks of reusable code. A stroll through the language-agnostic site provides a plethora of tasty bits and bytes from many programming languages and frameworks. Each snippet can be tagged and each tag can be followed via RSS. Users can comment on snippets as well, which is invaluable for anyone deciding whether or not they want to try out a piece of code.

PHP Progress Bar

An interesting idea was posted to eVolt’s TheList in the form of a tip: using PHP’s flushing buffer to create a progress bar for large PHP applications. Juha Suni, the author of the tip, provided the following code, noting, that “you can use the flush()-function to push more data to the browser while the script is running. This data being elements for small pieces of the progress bar, you can rather easily have a universal solution for all heavy scripts”. The code below is as posted, the only changes are a couple of formatting tweaks for display on this site. I haven’t implemented it as of yet, so I can’t vouch for it’s functionality.


ob_end_flush(); // This should be called at start

// Load all data and process it ready for looping

// Do some preliminary calculations, such as:
$totalloops = 38;
$percent_per_loop = 100 / $totalloops;
$prev_percent = 0;

// print html/css for the part above the progress bar
// as well as possible background of the actual progress bar
// in such a way that the images for the progress bar (coming next)
// align themselves nicely
// (This example fits 100 images next to each other, each
// representing 1 percent of progress.

// Start looping:
for($i=1;$i< =$totalloops;$i++) {

    // do stuff
    // echo progress if at least an advance of 1 percent
    // occured since last loop
    $percent_now = round($i * $percent_per_loop);
    if($percent_now != $percent_last) {
        $difference = $percent_now - $percent_last;
        for($j=1;$j<=$difference;$j++) {
            echo '';
            }
       $percent_last = $percent_now;
       flush(); // Push the new data to the browser;
        }
}

// In the end print necessary code to the end of the html.

Juha notes, “on some occasions, the webserver, proxy or the client browser can buffer data no matter what you do, so this will not work 100% for everyone at every situation”. Still, this is a great idea, and one sorely needed for some major PHP apps.

Update: Juha has posted a nice demo of the script (no longer live), which “loops the sleep(1)-command for 14 times”. He also added a counter that displays the percentage that has been completed. Juha mentioned that he hopes to find the time to clean it up and implement the counter as a package for use in other scripts and projects. That would be great to see!

Update 2: Juha has posted a zipped up collection (see update 3 below) of the PHP source files and associated images.

Update 3: It appears that Juha’s site is down. I don’t have a demo to point to, but it appears someone else posted the script, which you can find here.

SSPL 1.2 Coming Soon

Just a quick note to let people know of the upcoming release of SilverSpider Play List 1.2. Changes include:

  • User-specified album covers: SSPL will check to see if the current album name/artist name combination is listed in the Various Artists file, and if it is, it will use the images that are specified. Images (small, medium, large are all defined) are specified as URLS from any Web site, so you can use Images from Amazon, or post your own.
  • Keep the play list file to a reasonable size (hat tip to Sean for helping with the solution)
  • New config setting: $PlayListLength to define how many songs should be stored in the play list file
  • Moved the list of Various Artists from config file to separate the file
  • No longer needs closing comma, nor does it require escaping of special characters
  • Updated the in-line comments
  • Changed the format of the various artists file, allowing user to specify the artist override name. While most albums in the list will use ‘Various Artists’, the user could have one album use ‘Various Artists – Country’, and another album could use ‘Jazz Masters (Series)’
  • Added basic international Amazon query support, so users can choose to query the international Amazon sites instead of just the US .com site. This is still in a testing mode, and will be a beta feature within 1.2. Future versions should bring it up to speed. At this point, only one site will be queried, so SSPL will not check international domains if it cannot find an album on Amazon.com. Sorry.
    • us (default)
    • uk
    • de
    • fr (testing)
    • jp(testing)

I hope to have this released within a week.

SilverSpider Play List 1.1 Released

Just a quick note to let everyone know that a new version of SilverSpider Play List is available.

Changes

The first big change is the ability to choose the size of the album cover, which was requested by two people on the same day! So, you can now use any of the following sizes:

  • Small (50 x 50)
  • Medium (130 x 130)
  • Large (300 x 300)

The second big change is the addition of six new formats, bringing the total to 12. These new six are variants on the same basic layout, the image is placed in it’s own div and is encased within a link. A second div contains the information (song name, album name and artist name), with the first listed item acting as a link.

I have also added examples of the output for every format within the documentation so you can see what it actually produces. A full version history is available within the documentation.

Upgrading

I had to make changes to the config file, so make sure you back yours up before you overwrite it. Also, with the introduction of the new sizes, you will need to create two new missing album cover graphics if you want to use the larger sizes.

Download SSPL 1.1 (64K zip)

As always, let me know if you have questions or suggestions. I will do my best to respond quickly, but I have friends and family in town for the next week, so please forgive me if it takes a bit more time.