benlog

The first two or three times I set out to start what became this nlog, I started working on my own design from scratch. I picked WordPress mainly based on one positive mention on a website for my favorite RSS reader. Then I set about doing all the templates and all that, until I just stopped working on it. This last time when I came back to it, I just did a clean install, picked the default theme, and that was it.

The default WordPress theme is nice and neutral, and although it wasn’t my own creation, it seemed to fit nicely. In the nlogosphere, though, you have to worry about sticking out as someone who pretends to be all web-savvy but just has an off-the-shelf look to his or her site, just like everyone else who installed WordPress that day. So, of course, the drive to search for themes grows until something must be done.

The thing is, when it’s your personal site, themes are sort of like someone else’s vacation pictures. Some of them look real snappy, but rarely do they express any real meaning or relevance to your own life and self. This one suits me okay, having this great old tyme feel to it, but the urge to find something better or try to make a whole new theme that’s just the right thing is still there.

After someone with an eye for design made some nice clean improvements to Feedr, I was inspired to add a few things and put together a 1.1 version. Matt Ebb sent me a version with a nice white background frame for the displayed images, and also changed the back to look like the back of all the Apple widgets. To that I changed the help to have a fun roll-down animation like sheets in OS X, and added a way to paste in any image RSS feed from Flickr. For example, since with the tags and NSIDs you can’t easily specify your contacts, now you can copy and past the RSS 2.0 URL from your Flickr contacts page and be all set. Ben had that idea.

See my original post for the download link.

This is my first Dashboard Widget. It reads RSS feeds from Flickr and cycles through the pictures. You can configure the refresh time, set which tags to match, and set which user IDs to match.

Updated 5/16/05 - version 1.1 - more info

Download Feedr 1.1

Feedr 1.0 is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Apple says I should give you these instructions:
Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger 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.

Answers.com says that doodad is a synonym for widget. It also lists gimmick and contrivance, but I don’t want to complain as much as my last post.

Last Friday I took the time to update my computer to OS X 10.4, which brings with it Dashboard. I don’t have much to say about how new or not new putting JavaScriptlets on your desktop is or is not, but the installation and moving over of my files went smoothly enough that I decided to make my own Widget. I started trying to make a widget that displays a Flickr badge by generating the request that you get from their nice badge creation page, but the problem with that is it comes in as javascript code that you embed in a page, which is not easy to dynamically update. After only having something partly working I decided to rethink the whole thing. Now I use our friend the XMLHttpRequest to pull the RSS 2.0 feed and pull the title, image, and link out of that. Easy. Well, mostly easy.

Whatever part of OS X that does the HTML/CSS/JavaScript, I think it’s WebKit, is a little quirky to my understanding of xhtml. It seems that <div/> is not the same as <div></div> which is also treated differently than a div followed by a new line followed by the closing div.

Hmm, how about some of this drag and drop magic in a Dashboard Widget?