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Our left-column Ajax RSS widget, with a drop-down list of news sites and blogs that lets you check out their current RSS feeds, has been completely rewritten. The code now uses PHP’s native SimpleXML object library to parse all three flavors of RSS (0.92, 1.0, and 2.0) or ATOM feeds. ...
As I mentioned yesterday, I recently discovered that the LGF server was running PHP 5, not PHP 4 as I thought, and I’ve been like a geek in a gadget store ever since. For years, the RSS news and blog feeds in our left sidebar were driven by a PHP ...
Here’s a tech note, also known as an open thread, as I delve into the wealth of new goodies in PHP 5. At some point after installing our new server last year, our gracious, kind, and all-powerful web hosting company upgraded our version of PHP from version 4 to version ...
Our latest addition to The Blog codebase is a button to let you “retweet” an LGF article. “Retweeting” is a common way for people to spread interesting content around on Twitter. Since each article is already automatically posted to Twitter, your tweet is prefaced with the standard Twitter syntax to ...
Tech Note, LGF Blog Engine, Twitter, Javascript, jQuery, John Resig, Retweet
Stop the presses! New feature alert! OK, maybe you don’t need to actually stop any presses, but we have a new feature in the LGF Comment Engine: embedded MP3 files. It works just like the embedded video feature: you put the URL of an MP3 file on its own line ...
Tech Note, LGF Blog Engine, Comments, Audio, Javascript, Media, jQuery
I’ve been doing a lot of work on the LGF Blog code behind the scenes, so as always, if a feature doesn’t seem to be working correctly, the first thing to try is reloading the page. Bugs get fixed quickly, so reloading will often make all your problems disappear. Well, ...
Tech Note, LGF Blog Engine, Spinoff Links, Ajax, jQuery, Javascript
If you experience any weirdness when trying to submit a link to our spinoff links, it’s because Stinky Beaumont and I are working on the plumbing again, to optimize the loading of page elements. In the meantime, here’s an open thread...
We’re trying out an advertising service called Infolinks, which analyzes the page content and creates links in the text that pop up a little dialog box when your mouse hovers over them, containing an advertisement or link to a related site. The dialog box goes away automatically when you move ...
Registered users have been able to embed video clips in their LGF comments for several months; today I added a new format to the list of embeddable video types: Vimeo.com. To embed a Vimeo clip in a comment, go to the page at the Vimeo website that has the video, ...
Tech Note, LGF Blog Engine, Comments, Video, Javascript, Media, jQuery
We’re pulling the cover off a new feature for the LGF Blog — a “timeout” block, instead of a permanent block. It’s a temporary block on a registered lizard’s account that expires in 24 hours. Intense consultation, lengthy meetings, and heinously expensive focus-grouping resulted in the consensus that we need ...
Open Thread, Private, Lizard Lounge, Tech Note, LGF Blog Engine
Believe it or not, several people emailed because they noticed our new Web 2.0-style buttons for Paypal donations and subscriptions and our Amazon store, and wanted to know where the heck I got those nice glassy gray buttons. Well, I made them myself with Adobe Fireworks CS4. There are many ...
For years, the LGF front page has contained the last 3 to 5 days worth of posts, which can result in rather large pages depending on the content in the posts. I’m experimenting today with a single day’s worth of posts on the front page, to cut the size considerably ...
Here’s our Monday evening Lizard Lounge thread; if you’re registered and logged in, click the green magnifying glass in the row of icons at bottom right of this post to enter LGF Spy for this article in “Lounge Mode” — this is the private “chat room” area for the thread, ...
Tech Note, Javascript, jQuery, LGF Spy, Comments, Lizard Lounge, Chat
A Sunday afternoon before the weekday crowds seems like a good time to do one more acid test of the new Ajax-based Lizard Lounge. If you’re registered and logged in, click the green magnifying glass in the row of icons at bottom right of this post to enter LGF Spy ...
More tweaks and improvements to the private Ajax chat room feature, so here’s another private thread to give it the acid test. If you’re registered and logged in, click the green magnifying glass in the row of icons at bottom right of this post to enter LGF Spy for this ...
Yes, it’s another test thread for the private Ajax chat room feature, as we continue tightening up the code. If you’re registered and logged in, click the green magnifying glass in the row of icons at bottom right of this post to enter LGF Spy for this article in private ...
Comments, LGF Spy, jQuery, Javascript, Tech Note, Technology
We’ve been doing some more tweaking of the LGF Spy, so here’s another test thread for the private Ajax chat room feature. If you’re registered and logged in, click the green magnifying glass in the row of icons at bottom right of this post to enter LGF Spy for this ...
Comments, LGF Spy, jQuery, Javascript, Tech Note, Technology
Here’s another test of the private chat room feature. If you’re registered and logged in, click the green magnifying glass in the row of icons at bottom right of this post to enter LGF Spy for this article in private mode. There may still be some glitches; hopefully this test ...
Comments, LGF Spy, jQuery, Javascript, Tech Note, Technology
Improvements in the LGF Spy: %%LIST=The comment numbers are back, the comment numbers are back! Comments now show the date and time of posting. A navigation panel lets you move to next or previous threads in the Spy. When a new article goes up, the navigation panel is automagically updated.%% ...
Here’s an open tech thread — I’ve been testing the LGF Spy with my iPhone and it turns out to work really well for posting comments. In a regular comment thread, when the HTML page gets very large the iPhone’s Safari browser bogs down, and even crashes; makes it not ...
Tech Note, Javascript, jQuery, LGF Spy, Comments, iPhone, Mobile Phones
This is an open thread to test a new feature, making comments visible only to registered lizards. I can enable the “privacy” feature for individual threads; in most threads I’ll leave it off so everyone can read the comments, registered or not. But by using the LGF Spy for a ...
Comments, LGF Spy, jQuery, Javascript, Tech Note, Technology
Here’s how it works — you click the little green magnifying glass at the bottom right of an article (in the line of icons that includes Email, Print, and Favorites). This brings you to the LGF Spy page for that individual thread. Note! Clicking the LGF Spy link in the ...
Another new Ajax feature: the top level category for each LGF article (which appears on the second line of the title, to the left of the date and time of publication) is now an Ajax popup link, showing the most recent 5 articles in that category. As with the Ajax ...
Those little tags you see at the bottom of each LGF article are now Ajax-infused. When you hover your little mousie over a tag, up pops a list of links to the last five LGF articles with that tag. The code uses jQuery with the tooltip extension Levitip (with a ...
A new feature of the LGF Blog: a little checkbox underneath the comments area, labeled “Auto.” When checked, this option will automagically load and display any new comments in a thread, at 10 second intervals. (If you’re registered and logged in to your account, that is.) When you’re typing a ...