Type in a tag, click “play”, and you will be served up 20 random flickr photos, displayed each for 20 seconds. The idea is to have people practice the art of improv to a set of never before seen images, and try to make sense of it.

I owe the idea to Giulia Forsyth, who days before 2011 Northern Voice tweeted me asking if there was some way to make Five Card Flickr do something like this. My first, lame response was going to be:

Yeah, do 5 Card flickr 4 times ;-)

But I thought this might be fun to do. My first round was a build off of the same code that I wrote for 5 Card Flickr, because all of the image data for the tags read in are stored locally in my database (the site pulls in the flickr id for a photo needed to generate a size of an image via the API).

That was not hard, after tapping into a jquery library for slide shows, jquery cycle, which is amazing for what it provides to create a variety of web-based slideshows. But it seemed limiting to use only the tags defined for my other site.

So I pressed rewind, and just wrote something from scratch, using the same phpflickr library to work with the flickr API. In this version, I use the API to pull up the 200 most recent photos with the tag into an array, and then use array_rand() to grab 20 random from among those, which are then served up by the jquery cycle gig.

I found that the first image in the set loaded a bit slowly, so I made the first slide an intro/explanation/teaser image I pre-created (I have five of them, so you get a random one each time).

The images are then displayed 20 seconds at a time, with a counter on the left- here is an example using tyhe tag “dog” (is there another tag worth doing?)

I did a demo of this at a Moosecamp session for Northern Voice, and people seemed to like it.

After I can do some tweaking of the layout and fish for feedback, I will post the code for it. Some things that people asked for included:

• An ability on the front to select the duration for slides to appear (it is fixed at 20 seconds, but this could be a menu option).
• An ability to change the number of slides (maybe a mini pecha, say 10 slides?)
• A clock on the screen (I am against the idea, it does not meet with the concept, but that is just me)
• Perhaps a way fo presetting some “easy”, ‘medium”, “hard” settings to set the challenge level

No promises I will do any of this, but I will at least share the code soon.

But this was fun to make!

Give it a play at http://lab.cogdogblog.com/pechaflickr/

A week or so ago I came across (from RSS feeds? nah, I think it was in twitter? maybe a squirrel stepped o my keyboard?) Steph Gray’s Reading: keeping on top of stuff I save, some code he rolled. The way he describes the need rang a resonant bell with me:

Like a lot of people, I use services like Google Reader, Twitter, Delicious and Instapaper to help me find and store interesting links to articles, tools, apps or whatever. Personally, when I don’t have time to read it right now, I tend to star an item in Google Reader, ‘favourite’ it in Twitter, or mark it to ‘Read later’ in Instapaper – often five or ten things a day. I also save interesting stuff to Delicious, particularly where I think it may have longer term usefulness.

But I hardly ever actually go back and read those things.

Mainly it’s because it’s a bit of a faff finding the links, and because the time I’d get to do it (on the train, hanging around waiting for a toddler to wake up, etc) I’ve generally only got an iPhone to hand.

Hence Reading. This is a little sliver of PHP and jQuery…

Steph’s nifty script consists of a single PHP script plus the SimplePie RSS parser and a JQuery library to make the interface accordion work. My setup is at http://cogdogblog.com/reading:

If you open any of the “accordion” items, you get a full version of the site:

It’s something you cold implement without much code or PHP chops needed. In fact, all you need to edit is the line that lists the RSS feeds you want to use.

What it does is let you build your own list from all the RSS feeds for these sorts of things- your tags in delicious have a feed, your Google Reader shared (and starred) items have a feed, Instapaper has a feed- all you have to do is find them, and add them to the part of the code where you enter them in an array.

Delicious provides its RSS feed at the foot of most pages- you can do your entire stream, or create a special tag you want to use to designate items for this list. Instaper provides the feed somewhere in the account settings. You can get your Google Reader starred items via the Reader Settings – Folders and Tags (set the starred items to public, and you get a link for the RSS). Your shared reader items are set up in the Sharing Setup area.

Twitter does have a feed for your favorites, though it does not provide the link directly for you- I found the answer via twitterati, it is as simple as:

http://twitter.com/favorites/[insert_your_ID_here].rss

so my feed is http://twitter.com/favorites/cogdog.rss

What is also neat, or maybe neater, is that Step’s code has a mobile friendly version at the same URL- in this one, you get the same list, but the accordion opens to just a link to the site:

I have been doing a bit more of sharing in Google reader, especially when I am on the mobile version, and this is sure a better way of organizing then emailing links to myself (the same for twitter). I’ve not used Instapaper in eons, I keep forgetting about it.

Thanks Steph for sharing the code- again, you can get your own code from Steph’s site, and I see the plans for the next version are to make it so you can download all the items to a Google Spreadsheet.

What are you waiting for? Give it a try.

Well, let’s back up. If you are running online events where people might come from anywhere, there can always be challenges for getting the right time to people. For our NMC events, while our office is in Austin, we have staff in 3 other time zones, and people in our community from maybe another 14 or more zones on top of that.

If I say something starts at 2:00pm Central Time, then it puts it on everyone else to figure out when that is (and I’ve seen event sites where they do not even provide the reference time zone). If were all proper and versatile, we’d use Greenwich Mean Time, since everyone knows their offset, right? (I am -7 what are you?)

Most of the time , our event times are referenced to Pacific Time, since that is where our server is hosted, but even if we provide Pacific, Central, and Eastern Time, what about folks in Spain? New Zealand? Hong Kong?

This came to me a lot when our events picked up in Second Life back in 2006-2007. They used Pacific Time too as a reference time (actually for a long time they called it SLT for Second Life Time, and people still say that).

I started early using the World Time Clock fixed time. It allows you to enter a date time, and reference time zone, and generates a link that produces a big chart that converts that to other times around the world.

it’s silly to not think of the world as your audience, and most of the world is on a different time zone, like those weird half hour ones in South Australia.

For example, if there was an event, like tonight my dinner, at 6:00 PM, I’d enter the date and time in the form, and scroll all the way down to the bottom to select my time zone (U.S.A. – Arizona – Phoenix), and the form generates for me this URL

http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?month=10&day=23&year=2010&hour=18&min=0&sec=0&p1=197

which I can use to generate a URL that lets anyone else in the world know when I am having dinner, in their local time zone:

And in our event web pages I might say:

hey, tonight’s event is Alan’s Dinner! It is taking place October 22 at 6:00 PM PST (check for local time)

I was pretty adamant about getting our folks to add this “check for local time” link. If you inspect the URL, you can actually make new ones just by adjusting the values in the URL string (The site does provide a URL shortener if you dont want to display a monster long URL).

But here is the thing that struck me today- for our MIDEA site, I am using the WP custom post types for our events, so I already have built into the date, a value for the start date/time (it is the unix time version of the date/time, number of seconds since 1970). Since I already have the data, I thought it would be easy to write a function that auto generates the World Time Clock Link.

It was easy.

function get_worldtimeclock ($ts, $tz=197) {
	// generates a URL for a world time clock link for a given timestamp $ts
	// default timezine (for this site) is 197 or Phoenix, hey thats my time zone

	$when = getdate($ts);

	return 'http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?month=' . $when['mon']  . '&day=' . $when['mday']  . '&year=' . $when['year']  . '&hour=' . $when['hours']  . '&min=' . $when['minutes']  . '&sec=0&p1=' . $tz;
}

and you can see it in action in the top gray bars on pages like http://midea.nmc.org/event/horizonreportmuseumwebinar/.

It’s really bone simple PHP, just like to write it up. I set up a code demo page so you can see it in action:

Actually, it was just fun to dip my paws into the code. Even if it is bone head simple code.

Elwood: It’s 106 miles to get this sidebar coded, we’ve got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark and we’re wearing sunglasses.
Jake: Hit it.

I have no idea why I opened this way except for Jim Groom Inspiration.

But to jive my code chops, there’s nothing more energizing than doing a little hack and chop coding in WordPress.

Today I was again doing some sidebar fine tuning on the NMC MIDEA web site (previously covered in my almost done series on doing custom post types in WordPress 3.0).

It was one of those “oh this might take 20 minute” deals that ended up going a bit longer. but like Jake and Elwood, when you gotta go to Chicago, you drop the sunglasses and hit it.

And this is pretty simple, and most likely there is a plugin that already does what I needed, but sometimes, it is just worth the effort to roll your own code. It’s the same joy of actually doing something in your car engine that actually does not result in flames or calling a tow truck.

What we have on this site is a number of accounts, me as admin, some staff as editors, and a few guest bloggers, with roles as authors. The category our gues authors blog under is called “Ideas“, and my idea was to add to the template sidebar, above the part where widgetized stuff happens, a blurb and a listing of our guest bloggers. I also liked the feature of not listing authors who have yet to post.

At first it seemed like the function wp_list_authors would do, but it has no way to list just authors of a certain role- it is meant for all authors (you can hide the administrator; I thought by making all our staff admins it would work, but that did not).

I scoured a few plugins, but most are widget oriented (its a long explanation, but because this only appears on category archives, doing a special set of widgets was overload) or or geared for listing author avatars.

Next I googled and found a custom function from WP Engineer that at first looked good, but it was written for previous versions of WordPress- things have really changed from the early days of basing author capabilities on an integer user role number, though the info is still there in the database. I started editing their script to get it to work, going back and forth to phpMyAdmin to run test queries.

it ended up sort of working, but still was not what I sought. I wanted it (a) to not only list the authors, but link to their profiles; (b) list the number of posts the author has written like the wp_list_authors() function does; (c) skip authors that have not posted (again like wp_list_authors() function does); and (d) list the authors in alphabetical order of their last name… which I did not find anywhere.

With some more elbow grease I more or less got it going, but really though the code was not quite as lean as it should be (this is the place where it may not pay to keep coding, but now Jake and Elwood were only 50 miles from the Windy City, and they could see the glow of light on the horizon).

There is actually quite a bit of fine grained tuning you can do for blog user accounts, down to the specific capabilities, and you can add/remove what accounts can do beyond the basic titles of “author” editor (see Roles and Capabilities). Most of this seems put to use for creators of plugins.

But with another round of Googling, I found the function I was looking for from Steve Taylor- it would return a list of ids of users that had a given role, and it made my code a lot shorter.

Only 25 miles til Chi-Town, boys….

I still ended up rolling some bits to do the parts I wanted… so here are the two functions I added to my functions.php template to generate a list of users with a given role as a >ul<…>/ul&lt list, in alphabetical order by last name (I made all the accounts, so I know they have these parts completed), skipping users with no posts…

It is pretty heavily commented, and ought to be semi-explanatory…

function getUsersByRole( $role ) {
	// find all users with given role
	// via http://sltaylor.co.uk/blog/get-wordpress-users-by-role/

	if ( class_exists( 'WP_User_Search' ) ) {
		$wp_user_search = new WP_User_Search( '', '', $role );
		$userIDs = $wp_user_search->get_results();
	} else {
		global $wpdb;
		$userIDs = $wpdb->get_col('
			SELECT ID
			FROM '.$wpdb->users.' INNER JOIN '.$wpdb->usermeta.'
			ON '.$wpdb->users.'.ID = '.$wpdb->usermeta.'.user_id
			WHERE '.$wpdb->usermeta.'.meta_key = \''.$wpdb->prefix.'capabilities\'
			AND '.$wpdb->usermeta.'.meta_value LIKE \'%"'.$role.'"%\'
		');
	}
	return $userIDs;
}

function midea_list_authors($user_role='author', $show_fullname = true) {
	// Generate a list of authors for a given role
	// default is to list authors and show full name

	global $wpdb;

	$blog_url = get_bloginfo('url'); // store base URL of blog
	$holding_pen = array(); // this is cheap, a holder for author data

 	echo '<ul>';

	// get array of all author ids for a role
	$authors = getUsersByRole( $user_role );

	foreach ( $authors as $item ) {

		// get number of posts by this author; custom query
		$post_count = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT COUNT( * ) as cnt
		FROM  $wpdb->posts
		WHERE  post_author =" . $item . "
		AND  post_type =  'post'
		AND  post_status =  'publish'");

		// only output authors with posts; ugly way to get to the result, but it works....

		if ($post_count[0]->cnt) {

			// load info on this user
			$author = get_userdata( $item);

			// store output in temp array; we use last names as an index in this array
			$holding_pen[$author->last_name] =  '<li><a href="' . $blog_url . '/author/'  . $author->user_login  . '"> ' . $author->display_name . ' (' . $post_count[0]->cnt . ')</a> </li>';
		}

	}

	// now sort the array on the index to get alpha order
	ksort($holding_pen);

	// now we can spit the output out.
	foreach ($holding_pen as $key=>$value) {
		echo $value;
	}
	echo '</ul>';
}

And this is simply called in my main sidebar.php template… I use a conditional to insert it where I want, so it only appears on the archives for the “ideas” category (I made the defaults of my function match my use case… sue me!)

<?php if (is_category('ideas')) : ?>
<h3>MIDEA Ideas</h3>
<p>Our panel of guest bloggers, all of them experts in the museum and technology field, bring you food for thought. </p>

<?php midea_list_authors(); ?> 

<?php endif?>

And with that, welcome to the big city… see it in action

And the boys are now in town!

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cszar

If my stats are right, in the 6 hours since the cache was cleaned out (daily), 45,000 some unique feeds have been run through here, which is about 60 feeds per minute.

I hardly do anything to the code and I hope it does not blow up on anyone. There may have been some issues since the time I was trying to implement a new parser (which killed the server which for years has been kindly donated for free by the kind folks at Modevia Web Services)…. in restoring it I may have put a deprecated version of MagpieRSS; I just re-adjusted and the old FeedMachine seems to be working.

For the last few years I had the source code hosted at EduForge but as there were some rumblings of changes there, and that despite my immense depression over being Wave Rejected, I am a Google Fan Person— so I have moved the Feed2JS code to Google code at http://code.google.com/p/feed2js/.

I am still learning how to set things up there, and I don’t have source code established as check in / check out basis (like it matters, no one ever jumped at the chance to tinker in the code when offered). But since my contact info is not exactly front and center on Feed2JS site, I prefer if people use the Issues submission tool at the new site to let me know of any problems (no guarantee I can do much, but I will try)

As a first example, I am cleaning up an older WordPress site I use for logging my running/training; in the past, I kept a spreadsheet on my desktop for keeping a run log and then manually transferred the totals/averages/graphs to my web site by pasting into some text files (they are embedded with a PHP include). It worked, but it did have that tedious manual smell for something that should be more automated.

It seemed to make sense to transfer the spreadsheet to a Google Doc. I’m not going to detail all the bits in there, but essentially, for every run, I enter a distance and time on the appropriate date line, and the sheet calculates total/averages per week and on a final summary page.

This is just the data; I have another sheet that is just the table for the weekly totals of miles and time spent running; from here I can simply use Google’s built-in Publish Chart which provides a URL to embed this graphic:

This is subtle but powerful– this is an image, but not an image- as the data changes, so will the graphic. So I know longer have to manually make a graphic and upload it to my web site; I can simply use the HTML

<img src="http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=tMIPDwydKpay-5Oq0_G769w&oid=4&output=image" width="100%"/>

The other piece uses Google’s ability to publish a worksheet as CSV- this is data you can then parse on your web site. So I have a sheet that simply does averages/totals for my running log:

To access this data, I click the Share button and select Publish As Web Page

The options in the top make it so the published data is made current whenever I request it; in the bottom I select the option to have it published as CSV (comma separated value), and I select just the spreadsheet I need.

Thus, this URL always gives me the data on the spreadsheet in a form I can use in my code…. this bit takes some PHP savvy to manage, but I use the same logic almost everywhere.

I use this on the sidebar of my blog to display an up to date listing of my totals. In my WordPress sidebar, I use a statement to bring in the code from an external file named totals.php that sits inside my theme directory:

<?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . "/totals.php"); ?>

I could have simply inserted the code into my sidebar template, but going modular like this makes it easier to separate code from format…

The basic logic is using the php file command to read int a remote file, which puts the contents into an array; where each array item is one line of data.

// get the CSV data as an array from the remote URL
$lines = file('http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=tMIPDwydKpay-5Oq0_G769w&single=true&gid=0&output=csv');

// get rid of header row
$headers = array_shift($lines);

// Loop through data- therer is only one line hear
foreach ($lines as $line) {
	$ldata =  explode(',', trim($line)); // split row to its own array of elements

	if ($ldata[0] == '') break; // an empty line means we are done, so exit the foreach loop

      // now we can just output the information as an HTML list, referencing the appropriate array items
       echo '<li>Total Miles Biking  <strong>' . $ldata[0] . '</strong></li><li>Total Miles Running  <strong>' . $ldata[1] . '</strong></li><li>Total Hours Running  <strong>' . $ldata[2] . '</strong></li><li>Ave Pace Running  <strong>' . $ldata[3] . '</strong></li>';
}

And what is cool is there does not seem to be much of an impact of hitting Google each time. It must be ‘a caching. Good stuff.

This is pretty simple example. I am running some more complex examples on the NMC Virtual Worlds site where the reason to do this was to have a larger amount of tabular data be displayed in a more readable fashion on our web site– and to make it so someone other than me can be in charge of keeping the data up to date bu simply editing a Google doc (note that a spreadsheet used for this purpose must be public viewable, so don’t mix in any company secrets in there).

So for example, our Clients listing is coming from a google spreadsheet, and the parsing tests the existence of certain items to format the output– e.g. if the organization URL column has a value, we echo the name as a hyperlink; if we have the coordinates of their land in Second Life, we add a teleport link. The code that generates this page also sorts it on output.

This one technically is not hitting the spreadsheet every time…. I set this up so a unix cron (a timed script) calls every hour a PHP script which generates the formatted content as a text file on the web server, so the web page actually just reads it in via an include statement… this is a simple form of caching.

Another page has actually two chunks of data that are generated from different spreadsheets. Out current land availability page lists plots of Second Life land available from NMC for rental.

The main body content is a list of land with the output formatted around data in a spreadsheet. And the current land prices on the right side come form another sheet- this way we can make adjustments to the web page at any time simply by editing a spreadsheet, and never touch the web page- again it works like this:

1. Every hour a cron script on the server calls a PHP script.
2. The PHP script reads in CSV data, sucks it into an array (one line as an item), marches through items, and parses each item as an array representing the cells, and outputs the formatted as HTML to a small text file.
3. The WordPress page simply uses an include statement to display the content (I use the Exec-PHP plugin to be able to run statements in a page).

I am thinking more and more how I can use this process….

Of course, this is all baby stuff compared to the masterful data wrangling by the Jedi Master Tony Hirst….

The main navigation of most WordPress sites is driven by cycling through all of the content that are WordPress pages– which is nice, but sometimes you have content that you don;t want cluttering the navbar. Or maybe you want to insert something that is not a Page into the navbar. I’ve been amazed that so few people seem to know how to subvert it, and below is a little trick I use when I want to wedge some other kind of WordPress content into the navbar by Pages process.

Mostly this is in your HEAD… I mean the header.php file of your templates that generates it as an Unordered List:

<div id="nav">
<ul>
  <li class="<?php if (is_home()) {echo 'page_item current_page_item'; } ?>">
    <a href="<?php echo get_settings('home'); ?>/">Home</a></li>
  <?php wp_list_pages('title_li' ); ?>
</ul>
</div>

The first li item creates the Home link, and in thes case applies some CSS logic if the home page is in view. The rest of it happens in the PHP code statement that uses the WordPress fucntion to return a list of all Pages and putting each one in an

<?php wp_list_pages('exclude=5,11&title_li' ); ?>

<?php wp_list_pages('include=3,5,12,23,34&title_li' ); ?>

<?php wp_list_pages('include=3,5,12,23,34
         &title_li&sort_column=menu_order' ) ?>

<div id="nav">
<ul>
  <li class="<?php if (is_home()) {echo 'page_item current_page_item'; } ?>">
    <a href="<?php echo get_settings('home'); ?>/">Home</a></li>
  <li><a href="http://cogdogblog.com/">Good Stuff</a></li>
  <?php wp_list_pages('title_li' ); ?>
  <li><a href="http://flickr.com/photos/cogdog">Photos</a></li>
</ul>
</div>

RedirectPermanent /tips http://www.mycoolstuff.org/my-cool-tips

<?php
/*
Template Name: Last XX Posts
*/
?>

<?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . '/headless.php'); ?>

<div id="content">
<h1>Last Posts!</h1>
<ol>

<?php $my_query = new WP_Query('showposts=100');?>
<?php while ($my_query->have_posts()) : 
$my_query->the_post();?>

<li><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" rel="bookmark" 
title="Permanent Link to 
<?php the_title(); ?>""><?php the_title(); ?></a>
<small><?php the_time('M j, Y') ?> 
<?php the_time('h:ia')  ?> 
<?php edit_post_link(' Edit', 
'<img src="' . get_bloginfo('template_directory')  . 
'/images/edit.gif" 
alt="" align="absmiddle" /> ', ''); ?>
</small> </li>

<?php endwhile; ?>
</ol>
</div>
</body>
</html>

<gcse>url|width|height|title</gsce>

include("extensions/googleCSE.php");