RSS column view (Line Up)

I just whipped up a planet style RSS syndicator, with one subtle difference. It displays feeds in columns. Why? SVN logs + developer logs = accountability/review/fun. I’m a little surprised something like this didn’t already exists (which was somewhere I could find). Anyway, the SVN is available http://simbot-code.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/RSSLineUp/

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Personal flash video player

With this handy little util, flash video player, and ffmpeg to do the conversion it is easy to embed videos in your website, without having to use a video sharing site like youtube. This is of great importance to intranets, and protected sources. Why run the flash route? Easy, it’s the only working, embedded video player in Linux.

ffmpeg -i infile -t flv -ar 44100 outfile.flv

Just a note, you seem to have to have the whole thing on a webserver for it to work. It won’t work straight off your hard drive.

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PHP internal server error

I think my cpanel host recently upgraded some software on their server, and suddenly all my usual proceedures for rolling out web apps broke, with Internal server errors and this in the error log “error: directory is writable by others”. So, the obvious solution of going into the file manager and changing the permissions was tried, but the changes never stuck.

In the end I had to use FTP, and chmod 755 all the directories which were PHP entry points, ie held php files which the users accessed (index.php). Note group and other has no write access. If group has write access then you’ll get the same error message.

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Quick survey of useful Drupal 4.7 modules

All these modules are related to blogging, and information gathering, rather than social networking, or any of the other roles Drupal fulfills.

Related Links
The related links module allow you to specify external links which relate to the entry. It also, automatically extracts links from the body. These links can be displayed in a Related Links block, as well as those related by topic in the Related Topics block.

The use of a multiline textarea to store the extra links, in HTML markup is a bit of a drawback. This has a couple of issues. One, if you have a Rich Text area installed it will stuff things up for you. And secondly, requiring the links to be in HTML is a bit of a drag for userfriendlyness.

Another useful feature would be to allow authorized users to add extra links through a button on the block. So, as relivant links arrise they can be easily added.

Similar Entries
This is a content level related link. This appears to be a really cool and interesting way to get related content. However, when I tried the module on my test site the block never displayed.

Panels
Panels offers a neat structured layout based on blocks and HTML elements. This allows you to transform the front page from a blog link news site, to a professional, non-scrolling introduction. This seems to be a very neatly put together module, including AJAX lookups for nodes.

Hopefully more to come soon.

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