Friday, 14th January, 2005

National Drive-Like-a-Muppet Day

(1) The guy infront of me as we were joining the M6 at Lancaster who was doing 30mph, then wondering why all the cars behind him pulled onto the motorway and ended up blocking him.

(2) The guy in the 4x4 sat in lane three doing 60mph when lanes 1 and 2 were clear.

(3) The guy who swereved dramatically and went straight across the chevrons to come off the M6 and onto the M61, when actually, the lane he was in would have done.

(4) The guy who pulled out of the University Drive, plonked himself in the outside lane of the short dual-carriageway bit and did 30mph.

If I was a visitor from, let's say, the States, I'd come to the conclusion that there was no driving test in the UK, and that anyone could climb into a car without any training at all.

Either that, or perhaps the whole world seems to think that the roads were built especially for them ... when, as we all know, they were built especially for me stamps feet

Metacommenting

I read a lot of blogs last night. Actually, what I mean is I skimmed through a lot, and read one or two. It's amazing to think, just how many of the things there are out there. Each one a little slice of someone's life (or a right-wing political rant, but I ignore those)

I book-marked a couple, and left a couple of comments on some, and at some point I'll bung them in my del.icio.us links — but over all of them, I found something rather strange.

Maybe it's because the original blog software did it this way, but I'm not sure the advantages of having comments as a seperate entity from a blog.

I mean, every single post, seems to have comments listed seperately, accessible from a link, not integrated into the main post. And replies from the blog author appear just as other comments.

Which strikes me as strange.

When I coded comments into this thing, the most obvious way I could see of dong it was to embed them directly into the diary entry. I toyed with an earlier version where I had a separate database where each comment was linked to an individual page — but I found it a lot easier to just let the comment script fling things into the main body.

Apart from the ease of it, it also means that each day turns into a little dialogue — it slightly democratises the blog. Maybe

It's not perfect, by any stretch of the imagination, but I do prefer it to the standard way of doing things. There's a couple of things I must change on it though — I've been meaning to implement gravatars (a really cool way of leaving a little picture of yourself on gravatar-enabled blogs ) and I must stick a field into the comment form to handle URLs (c'mon, I leave my address as a link on other people's blogs — the least I could do is return the favour).

The other thing I wanted to do today, was share the code I use to do the "Past 7 Days" thing on the left. (If you're reading on siobhansplace.co.uk, you have no idea what I'm talking about do you?)

I figured that since I'd spent a fair bit of time coding an automatic XML list of the 15 most recent entries, then I could repurpose them on the blog itself. All I had to do was do a bit of text-mangling, and a little bit of maths to work out which were done in the last week:

<?php // To parse the XML file, we need to use MagpieRSS — a // simple extension to PHP require_once('magpierss/rss_fetch.inc'); $url = "http://www.tranniefesto.co.uk/tranniefesto.xml" ; $rss = fetch_rss( $url ); foreach ($rss->items as $item) { $href = $item['link']; $title = substr($item['title'], 13); // Now I need to swap the day and the month around, // because I've not got around to localising my // installation of PHP for British date formats yet $day = (substr($item['title'], 0, 2)); $month = (substr($item['title'], 3, 2)); $year = (substr($item['title'], 6, 4)); $us_date = $month."/".$day."/".$year ; $timestamp = strtotime($us_date) ; $last_week = time() — 604800 ; $description = substr($item['description'], 0, 50); // This bit checks to see if the last character of the // truncated description is a space — and if it isn't, it // keeps stripping characters off until it reaches a // space. That way, we end up with full words, which // looks much nicer while (substr($description , -1) != " ") { $newentry = substr($description , 0 , -1) ; $description = $newentry ; } $newentry = substr($description , 0 , -1) ; $description = $newentry ; // Now check to see if the Unix timestamp of the item is // more than the what Unix time was last week, and if it // is, then show the title as a link, and the truncated // description, all wrapped in pretty CSS styles if ($timestamp >= $last_week) { echo "<p><a href=$href>$title</a> :: <i>$description</i>...</p>"; } } ?>

I know — it could be more elegant but at least I didn't go down the first route I thought of which was making a special XML file just for the past week's posts.

NRT writes:

Hmm. I had noted that integrating comments into your blog entries looks good, but I wouldn't want to implement it myself. The Ministry certainly isn't a democracy

That said, if you are looking for suggestions, one thing I like to see in a blog is one topic per entry, so comments follow a specific subject rather than appearing after the author has already moved on to something else.

I've tweaked my installation of Movable Type so that comments by me are distinct from those of other visitors. I'm pretty sure MT can do the 'in the last [n] days', too, though I'm not so sure it would include a text excerpt as standard.

I know what you mean, about the 1-topic-per-entry thing, but this thing evolved from a very "diary"-based concept, so the emphasis was on the days rather than the topics. It's only recently, in fact, that I've started putting extra headers in — I used to just launch into a monolithic monologue, and you were lucky if there was any topic at all Having said that, I know what you mean about where comments show up. Like I said, it's not perfect

Josephine writes:

Could it be that those drivers you described were from the States and disoriented because they were driving on the "wrong" side of the road? As for the 4X4s, I truly believe that there is a certain warped personality test you have to pass when you buy those things, which may explain the way they drive.

I don't suppose you saw that thing on Channel Four the other night did you Josephine? "What Would Jesus Drive?" Oh boy, was it good...

They're really cute aren't they I first saw them on Jon Hick's journal — I was wondering how all these people managed to get little pictures of themselves in their comments. I was going to write something that did little pictures ages ago, but I could never figure out an elegant way of doing it. The idea that Tom Wener has had — about having a centralised store of avatars, is utter genius. You can use them all over the place, and all it takes is your email address