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KDE - Blog from KOrganizer HOWTO

Blog from KOrganizer? What kind of madness is this? Apparently some crazy (but yet incredibly good looking) fool decided to give you the ability to post journals from KOrganizer to your blog. Let’s learn how to do it!

Firstly open KOrganizer.

Blog from KOrganizer HOWTO 1

When it has opened right-click anywhere in the “Calendars” area in the bottom-left (marked with the red ellipse) and select “Add…” from the drop-down menu that appears.

Blog from KOrganizer HOWTO 2

Select “Journal in a blog” (marked with a red ellipse) from the “Resource Configuration” dialog.

Blog from KOrganizer HOWTO 3

Fill in the “Resource Configuration” dialog.

  • Name: Choose a descriptive name for your resource, this is how KOrganizer will describe it to you in future. KOrganizer won’t reference this resource as being a blog again so you may want to choose something suffixed with “blog“.
  • XML-RPC URL: This depends on your blog but for Wordpress and Drupal this is the main URL followed by “/xmlrpc.php“, for Livejournal it is “http://www.livejournal.com/interface/blogger” and for Blogger it is “http://www.blogger.com/feeds/$YOUR_USER_ID/blogs“. For other blogs, consult their documentation or ask me for help and I’ll do my best to work it out.
  • Username: This is the username you use to login and make blog posts.
    Password: This is the password you use to login with the above username and make blog posts.
  • API: Use “(Wordpress, Drupal <5.6 workarounds)" if you use either of those blogs. Otherwise it is MovableType for Drupal, Google Blogger Data for Blogger and Blogger for LiveJournal. The LiveJournal API is unlikely to work with LiveJournal as it isn't yet complete. If you wish to implement the LiveJournal full API rather than using legacy Blogger one then please contact me.
  • Blog: When you have chosen an API this list will be automatically populated using items from the server. If there is only one entry, it will be greyed out but the entry’s text shown and selected. If there are more than one (e.g. Drupal has one for pages and one for posts) they will be selectable. If there is nothing new displayed then one or more of your XML-RPC/username/password/API are probably incorrect.
  • Posts to download: This chooses how many posts the API will download and sync. If you, like me, have made hundreds of posts then you probably want to keep this number reasonably low.
  • Automatic Reload: This defines how often KOrganizer will download new blog posts from the server without notification.
  • Automatic Save: This defines when KOrganizer will upload new blog posts to the server without notification. You probably don’t want to have this set to “On every change” unless you want it to be uploaded as soon as you hit “Save” in the next view.

Blog from KOrganizer HOWTO 4

You should now see your new blog resource displayed in the bottom-left corner (marked with the red ellipse). Let’s try making a new blog post. Activate the journal view by clicking the journal button (marked with the green ellipse).

Blog from KOrganizer HOWTO 5

We are now in the journal view and you can see on the left-hand pane that KOrganizer has successfully downloaded some of my blog posts. If we want to create a new one then click on the add journal button (marked with the red ellipse).

Blog from KOrganizer HOWTO 6

Fill in the “Edit Journal Entry” dialog.

  • Title: You probably want to change the title of the blog post from the default.
  • Date/Time: On most blogs selecting the date/time to somewhere in the future means the blog won’t publicly appear until then.
  • Content: Write something about how I am awesome, like the pictured example.The rich-text should be displayed on your blog correctly (albeit with slightly nasty HTML).

Blog from KOrganizer HOWTO 7

  • Select Categories: This list should have been populated with the ones from your blog and from the KOrganizer defaults. Sadly, I can’t seem to remove the latter and selecting them will do nothing unless they have been created on your blog.

Blog from KOrganizer HOWTO 8

When you click “OK” you may be prompted which resource you wish to save to. Select the resource we just created (marked with the red ellipse).

Blog from KOrganizer HOWTO 9

If you chose “on every change” for “Automatic Save” in the “Resource Configuration” dialog then your post has probably whizzed its way off to your blog already. If not, you can manually save it by right-clicking on your resource (marked with the red ellipse) and selecting “Save” from the drop-down menu that appears.

Blog from KOrganizer HOWTO 10

I hope this was and is useful to some people. If you find any bugs, have any problems or want any other features then please let me know either by email, my posting on this blog or by filing a bug in the KDE bugtracker.

Posted in Software Development

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WP-reCAPTCHA failure…

So apparently the WP-reCAPTCHA plugin sucks is a little too good and seems to stop anyone from posting comments on my blog. I was going to link to their page but it seems it’s 404′ing which strikes me as somewhat ironic…

If anyone else has a good plugin for Wordpress for avoiding spam then please let me know as being on the Planet seems to result in me being spammed to oblivion.

Also, if you had anything interesting to say about Spore, Phorm or Chrome then please excuse me being a noob and post comments!

Posted in Software Development, Uncategorized

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I love my TS-109 II

QNAP TS-109
I used to run the server powering this site from my home internet connection but when I moved to getting the worst ISP of all time free with my job then this rapidly ran out of favour. The connection was slow, the router liked spontaneously rebooting and the Pentium 3 running it was using a lot of power and struggling somewhat with still being kept alive.

Eventually I got a shiny KVM virtual machine (which reboots and only takes the web server down for three seconds!) supplied by a friend which is treating me well.

The only problem now was I wanted a something that I could keep as an always-on fileserver for backups and various things I wanted an always-on system for. After a bit of hunting I found the QNAP TurboStation 109 II which has a 500Mhz ARM chip, 256MB of RAM, a speedy gigabit ethernet port, SATA and eSATA, USB ports, runs Linux and uses 14.4W on load and 6W idle.

By default it runs some crazy QNAP distribution but there is a (rock solid in my use) beta of Debian available for it, which has been done by one of the former Debian project leaders and is all-in-all a pretty nice experience. I have it now doing my regular incremental backups using rdiff-backup and running a few other miscellaneous servers, including CUPS for my printer which works amazingly.

I’ve had absolutely no problems with either the hardware or running Debian on it and I really recommend it to anyone looking for a (relatively) low-cost, low-power and low-hassle system to run as a small file-server.

Posted in Software Development

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Spore

Annihilator
My recent forays into gaming on a computational device have taken me to playing Spore, the latest game from Maxis which bewilderingly doesn’t contain the word “Sim” anywhere in the title.

Personally, I hated all the SimCity games, I found them boring and directionless. I hated the Sims series, they just seemed to be either more boring than my life (in which case I wondering why I was playing them) or more exciting than my life (which made me sad :( ). Reading most of the build-up for Spore made me think it was going to be just-another-boring-sim-game. When I read that Soren Johnson, the lead designer of Civilisation 4 (a game more addictive than any drug), was working on it my interest was piqued.

I got the Creature Creator partly as it was £5 and I thought it might entertain me for a few hours by creating some grotesque creatures and watch my girlfriend make some pretty ones but, despite my expectations, I actually ended up getting quite into it. The intuitiveness of the tool and the sheer variety of creatures that were getting created really excited me so I bought the game.

For the last two weeks I have been living like an addict, waiting to get the next fix of the game. I think yesterday evening may be the first since I bought it that I didn’t played it (instead I just read about computer games). I don’t just play for fun, I play to elevate the Globby Empire to greatness!

Globby
Globby is a friendly fellow. By which I mean he’s eaten all his fellow cells, ripped his fellow creatures to bits, massacred his fellow tribes, nuked his fellow civilisations and blown up the planets of his fellow space empires. In Spore you can be friendly, evil or somewhere in the middle. Sadly, blowing up planets and eating other creatures has proved to be far more fun than talking to them or forming trade routes.

I realise you don’t care about Globby or his mighty empire but you would if you’d created this creature from a single cell (with a mouth, but I’ll give Will Wright the right to give cells mouths) and evolved it to a mighty space-faring empire.

Really this is just a really fun game. It continuously rewards the player through the multiple stages and in-stage checkpoints and the badge/achievement system strongly appeals to the more obsessive types like me (HAVE TO GET THEM ALL) it’s just a really enjoyable experience. Add this on top of the ability to subscribe to Sporecasts and your friends feeds, meeting them in game and you just get a really fun community experience.

I highly recommend buying and playing Spore. It’s one of those incredibly innovative games that everyone should play, regardless of their preferred genre.

Posted in Computer Games

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