The Blog of Gordon Diggs

On Thursday, I moved into my new dorm at Lehigh University for my first year. Things have been pretty good so far.  Here is a picture of my dorm:

Click on the photo to go to its Flickr page

I am currently on my annual vacation from New York in the Berkshires, which is cut short this year by a little thing called my first year of college. I unfortunately am only out here for two weeks, instead of a whole month. At any rate, this brief respite from the distractions of the city lead to some very nice productive time and exploration. I’ve been working on a video presentation that is almost complete, which is exciting. Here’s what else I’ve been getting into:

• WideImage is a really cool PHP library if you need to manipulate images
• This CSS Template is awesome. Download it here
• Gallery remains my favorite way to make photo galleries, and it is well worth a look at if you haven’t checked it out before.
• This blog’s search has been enhanced
• I’m building one of these
• The newest John Mayer, Subways, and The Faint albums are good.

A List Apart is having their 2008 Survey for People Who Make Websites.  The results will be used to form a global image of web professionals.   Click below to take it if you are eligible.

This weekend, I am off to the Fitch’s Corner Horse Trials in Millbrook.  I run their website and am also doing a video presentation for them.  Below you can see the array of gadgets and equipment I am taking.  Click the image to go to its Flickr page that has notes about each piece of equipment.

Today was Day 1 of my push-ups routine.  My goal was 41 and I completed 45 push-ups.  Also, I went biking on Saturday.  I planned on going around the Central Park Drive, but I could only make it half-way and walked home from there.  I think it was a combination of the heat and my being generally out of shape.  I hope to be able to bike the whole thing before I go off to college in August.

So, today I embark on my quest to get back into shape (I used to be in shape, but the last year or so has changed that).  First, I am following the program at one hundred pushups. I took the initial test today and was able to do 15.  Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday I will do the pushups.  On top of that, I am going to either run or bike every Saturday.  Why am I posting this here?  I’m posting this in hopes that blogging about my experience will both keep me on track and devoted, and also perhaps it will inspire a fellow geek or two to take up a fitness routine of their own.

So, the other day my sister sent me this video and it brought back some serious childhood memories.  You see, I grew up watching the After Dark screen savers: Flying Toasters, Bad Dog, etc.  I went looking for a port of After Dark that would work on OS X Leopard, but could only find this Flying Toasters screensaver. It’s quite a cool thing to have, and if anyone knows a port of After Dark that works in Leopard, please leave it in the comments!

I just updated the blog to Wordpress 2.6. It seems quite nice. Here’s a video of the new features:

Last week I released an OS X Dashboard Widget for SMS reminder site Oh, Don’t Forget…. Today marks the release of version 1.3 of the widget.

Changes since v1.0

• Redesigned interface that comes as a result of work with Jason Stirman, founder of Oh, Don’t Forget… and Mobaganda
• Ability to clear individual fields with single click
• Time Zone is automatically determined

To Download

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger or later is required. If you’re using Safari, click the download link. When the widget download is complete, show Dashboard, click the Plus sign to display the Widget Bar and click the widget’s icon in the Widget Bar to open it. If you’re using a browser other than Safari, click the download link. When the widget download is complete, unarchive it and place it in /Library/Widgets/ in your home folder. show Dashboard, click the Plus sign to display the Widget Bar and click the widget’s icon in the Widget Bar to open it.

Click Here to Download

Support

If you have questions or problems using this widget, leave them in the comments and I will answer your questions.

If you look at the front page of the site, you will see that I have replaced the blog announcement with the latest blog entry.  (You can see it below).

Doing this was really quite simple.  Rather than updating by hand every time I post to my blog, I simply grab the title and link of the latest blog post from Wordpress’ RSS feed and put it there.  To do this, I use Magpie RSS, which is a way to parse RSS feeds using PHP.  By default, Magpie gets the first 15 entries in the an RSS feed and displays them in an unordered list (this is the library on which feed2js is based).  So, the functionality does exactly what I wanted it to, I just needed to tweak it a little.

The script works like this - the index.php file makes a call to getblogpost.php, which looks like this:

define('MAGPIE_OUTPUT_ENCODING', 'UTF-8');

foreach($items as $item){
$href=$item['link'];
$title = $item['title'];
echo “< a href= $href >$title“;
}
?>

Basically, this gets all the feed items, trims the array of items down to one, and then displays that one as a link.  So, unzip Magpie to your web server, save the code above into getblogpost.php and then in index.php, you just call <?php include('getblogpost.php'); ?>, and there you go!