May 15, 2006

Podcasting

Podcasting (from iPOD and broadCASTING) is a popular way to distribute audio and other media files on the web. Podcasters publish RSS feeds listing their media files, then listeners or viewers subscribe to those feeds, making it easy to find and download new content.

To make podcasting easier for people here, I've installed the MT-Enclosures plugin on blogs.usask.ca.

You can read all about podcasting with Movable Type in the MT-Enclosures documentation. Briefly, though, here's what you need to do to become a podcaster:

1) Edit the RSS 2.0 Index Template for your blog and include the <$MTEntryEnclosures$> tag inside the <item>...</item> section. This template is used to create the index.xml file in your blog.

2) Upload an audio, video or other media file.

3) Post a blog entry with a link to the new media file.

4) Tell people about it. The address of your podcast feed file will be something like http://blogs.usask.ca/some_blog/index.xml.

Posted by elf123 at 12:51 PM

March 29, 2006

Linking to to external images in blog entries

One of the technical issues people have experienced with the U of S blog system is that once you upload images to the system, you cannot remove them from the system. One of the workarounds for this issue is link to images you have stored elsewhere on the Web from within your blog entries. The following are some instructions for how to do this....

These instructions assume that you have the following:

1. An account on the campus student webserver, http://homepage.usask.ca.
2. Access to your account on Homepage via the My Files channel in PAWS (usually you will find this channel in your Home tab in PAWS)


Step 1 - Upload the image you want to display in your blog to your account on HomePage.

To do this, click on the Homepage link in the My Files channel (see the red rectangle in the graphic above). The Homepage File Manager window will appear. Scroll down to the bottom of the window, and you will see some buttons that look like the ones highlighted in the graphic below:

Click the Browse button to locate the file you want to upload from your computer to Homepage. Once you have navigated to that file and selected it, click Upload. The File Manager will return the following response:




Step 2 - Link from within your blog entry to the file you just uploaded to homepage

To do this, you need to know two things: the web address of where your file now lives, and the HTML tag used to insert an image into a web page.

The web address of the file you just uploaded will be something like this:

http://homepage.usask.ca/abc123/yourimage.jpg

where http://homepage.usask.ca is the web address of the Homepage server, abc123 is your NSID, and yourimage.jpg is the name of the image you uploaded.

You can test out whether uploading worked properly by opening a new web browser window and trying to go to that location. If you see the image displayed in the browser window, your upload worked (YAY!)...


The HTML tag you need to use is the

<img src="">

which tells your web browser to insert an image at this spot. The location of the image to insert is given between the quotation marks.

So....

the full HTML tag would look like this:

<img src="http://homepage.usask.ca/abc123/yourimage.jpg">

Place this tag wherever you want the image to appear in your blog entry....

Posted by tbb153 at 03:31 PM

January 21, 2006

RSS Tools - feed2rss

Feed2rss provides a way to display blog headlines on external web pages and portals. Recently this was modified to be more compatibnle with the PAWS portal. Read this article to find out more about this service.

Feed2rss is a caching, rewriting RSS proxy.

It takes an RSS feed in any format that Magpie (http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/)
supports (RSS 0.9 to 1.0, RSS 2.0 and Atom), massages it a bit, and
then uses RSS Writer (http://usefulinc.com/rss/rsswriter/) to write it out in RSS 1.0 format.

Why is this useful? Well, PAWS (our campus portal) only supports feeds in RSS 0.9x and 1.0 formats. If you have an RSS 2.0 or Atom feed, you would be out of luck, except, that is, for feed2rss.

Also, by default our blog system (Movable Type) includes html code
in it's feeds, and instead of interpreting the code, PAWS displays
it. So, if we make one of our blog feeds into a channel in PAWS, you'll see things like <P>...</P> in the channel. Feed2rss strips out these codes, so the feed appears properly in PAWS.

Finally, feed2js lets you choose how much of each feed to display.
You can specify the number of items to show, whether to include
descriptions, and how much of each description.

Hmm, I said finally, but there is one more point. Each
feed is cached for 20 minutes to reduce the load on remote servers.
If a remote feed is off-line for some reason, then feed2rss serves an
old version from the cache, so people will not see channel errors
in PAWS.

Currently, only PAWS administrators can add new channels, but before long we hope to have a generic RSS channel in place, so that anyone can turn an RSS feed into a channel on their PAWS layout.

Our feed2rss proxy can be found at:

http://rssfeeds.usask.ca/

Earl Fogel
Information Technology Services

Posted by elf123 at 03:27 PM

RSS Tools - feed2js

Feed2js lets you include RSS feeds on a web page.

It does this by producing javascript code that you include on your page. When people visit your site, the javascript is run, and the result is that the contents of the feed appear on your web site.

To use feed2js, please see this item in our FAQ.

Posted by elf123 at 03:15 PM | Comments (1)

January 20, 2006

RSS to Email Tools

Free Web Based RSS to Email Tools

Rather than using an RSS reader, some blog readers would like to get the content of your weblog via a email each time that you post or as a daily digest.

Here's a few tools that will email you blog posts.

Rmail http://www.r-mail.org/

Bloglet - http://www.bloglet.com/

Bot a Blog - http://www.botablog.com/

Squeet - http://squeet.com/

   Squeet has some nice features:

Blog Reminder Service

This service is a bit different than the others. It tells you WHICH blogs changed, but does NOT include the actual content/posting. It's a reminder service.

Blogarithm - http://www.blogarithm.com/

Posted by dmf527 at 07:39 PM | Comments (1)

September 22, 2005

Showing names instead of NSIDs

By default, Movable Type shows the author's username at the end of each blog entry, eg:

Posted by elf123 at 09:25 AM

You can change this by editing the templates for your blog.

First, "Edit your profile" and set a nickname.

Then edit all the templates for your blog and change all occurrences of MTEntryAuthor to MTEntryAuthorNickname. Then rebuild your site.

Note that this problem is fixed in Movable Type 3.2, where they have deprecated the MTEntryAuthorNickname tag and replaced it with
MTEntryAuthorDisplayName. This displays the nickname if one exists,
otherwise it shows the username.

Movable Type 3.2 has a number of improvements over 3.1, but also has some interface changes that may be confusing to some people. I don't know yet when we will upgrade to 3.2.

Posted by elf123 at 11:40 AM