The site doesn’t contain any i18n, neither I used any PHP framework or other toolkits to built it up. It’s really just some stupid likes of PHP code bound together with the Facebook SDK. Now that’s what I’d call RAD!

It was pretty interesting for me to see, how little effort it takes to “socialize” a site, especially when it’s built from ground up with Facebook-operability in mind.

Yesterday, I additionally implemented an automatic Twitter status update. I’ve registered @likemichde on Twitter, created an Twitter Application, generated access tokens for it and implemented automatic twitter publishing within several lines of code, thanks to Abraham Williams’ twitteroauth for PHP.

It’s very neat how modern media allows us to spread information all over the planet, even with only little knowledge of technology. And if you put in the effort to dig deeper, you use these new technologies to reach even more people and provide connectivity to all kind of different sites.

For example, my photography site mariusmm.com is using Yahoo!’s YQL to query my flickr account for the latest photos and randomly pic a handful of them for displaying as a slideshow. And I’ve implemented everything in 100% JavaScript, there’s no single line PHP or any other server-side language.

I’ve always used my blog as platform to share useful information with others, get feedback from comments that were posted and mails I’ve received. I’ve slowly built it up step by step from the 20th of March 2005 with a pretty rudimentary and early version of WordPress at that time. Due to my interest and work within the open-source area around Linux and the GNOME Desktop at that time, I had pretty much content I loved to share with other people interested in those topics.

By the time passing, the content of my blog also changed. I slowly moved away from Linux as an desktop operating system, towards using Mac OS X and its tools. Meanwhile, I took my own know-how about the Linux operating system on a higher level by starting to use it heavily as server-side operating system. My blog posts became from “Hey, check out this desktop notifications daemon I’ve written! There wasn’t anything like that on the GNOME desktop, now there is!” and “Oh look, this would be a great idea for a Sync-Application on the GNOME Desktop” to information sources for setting up a Linux instance on Amazon’s EC2 service, stripping down Ubuntu Servers to several hundreds Megabytes and setting up a Debian server that provides SSL-secured WebDAV with LDAP as authentication back-end. So instead of sharing useful information for Linux desktop users, I transited to share information about my experiences and creations on the Mac.

Through the years, my blog grew bigger and bigger, with more and more content. I was pretty happy with how it worked out, except of one part: The design. “devilx.net” never really had an unique identity shaped by its own design. I switched the look & feel several times, using freely available WordPress themes with smaller changes hacked by myself. For the pure sake of information sharing it worked out, but due to that my blog never really got its “own face”. I wanted to change this fact for like ever already, unfortunately I never really had the time and – what’s even more important – the muse for doing so. Now, after all those years – and especially after the last few months, in which the majority of returning visitors probably thought of my blog being another victim by the Twitter, Facebook and other Web 2.0 platforms’ distraction-hype – I decided to take the time, search for at least some creative inspiration and replace my yet-another-downloaded-WordPress-theme with something made with my own hands, giving my blog its own shape and style.

My abilities in the matter of creativity and design clearly aren’t the best, but I thought like… “Man, 2011 is coming, you just have to!”. So I turned on Pixelmator in full-screen mode and started drawing. I kinda had like dozens of concepts, drafts and even several PXM-to-XHTML implementations, but none really was something I’d like to have running on the internet, with my name on it. Meanwhile, I was testing Posterous, one of those Web 2.0-“we can streamline your blog with your Twitter account, your Facebook profile and the two-hundred-forty-nine other platforms you might be using”-services, which should have been the second update for today actually. I really liked it and I liked their theme-templating. I gave it a first shot, by exporting my WordPress’ database and importing it into Posterous.

The result unfortunately was… well… pure fail. It stopped at twenty-one out of several hundreds and didn’t advance for a couple of hours. After contacting the Posterous support, I got the advice to first clean up my WordPress’ spam-queue, re-export the database and try it again. So I did and finally the import ran through pretty quick. Curiously I checked out how the imported Posterous site looked, since I didn’t thought of for example comments being also imported. For my surprise, they were. Unfortunately, the import was incomplete. Some why three-fourth of my WordPress blog posts were missing. Again, I contacted the support which answered after two days, telling me that they’re on the problem and can’t provide me any help yet.

While I was waiting for a solution to my problem, I already translated one of my drafts into Posterous’ templating format – but soon I kind of realized, that Posterous isn’t pretty much what I needed. It works for many people and it surely is a very cool service, free of charge! But for me, as someone that’s pretty much into technology it’s just way too inflexible and closed. For example, I have found a way to import my WordPress’ data, but none to export the Posterous data. I guess, hacking through the API is probably the only way to do so. Also, Posterous’ content delivery isn’t performing really well, at least when requested from Germany. I built in some Base64-encoded images and a @font-face (because Posterous does not provide you any space for actually uploading pictures, which is why you would need to pay for some webspace or at least an Amazon S3 account anyway) and as soon as they were live, the page’s loading-speed decreased to a quite ugly value. Also I was unsatisfied with the template-editor/-previewer Posterous provides – it is really slow and for me (as web developer et al.) a pure pain to use.

Please don’t get me wrong – as I’ve said before, Posterous (as well as Tumblr and all those other services) really is something great, especially when you’re into writing quick shouts most of the time. But for me, as a person who likes the ability to extend the platform for sharing information to fit my (growing) needs, Posterous and others simply are too limited.

However, after realizing that I won’t give up my WordPress from one day to another (and by that actually had no second update to share with you today while I’m still sticking with the plural “updates” in this article’s first few lines), I’ve re-started concept-creation, drafting, mocking and all that stuff professional designers probably do the whole day. In the end, I came up with a pretty neat design that fits my taste pretty good and isn’t too exaggerated or improper to be used on a blog: It’s the design you’ve been staring at for the last, well, I would say fifteen minutes, if I haven’t already talked you into sleep.

“Okay, so your blog isn’t dead yet, huh?” – Yepp, that’s right (and that is the second update, hah!). I’m really looking forward to the next years of blogging, sharing and communicating with others. In the past several years digital life changed a lot and blogs became more and more irrelevant thanks to the possibility of fast and instant exchange with each other through Twitter for example. Unfortunately people sometimes tend to forget, that all those tweets would be nothing without the information behind them, that contains more than only 140 characters.

Having said this, I wish everyone a nice evening (CET UTC+1) and furthermore a great year in 2011. Have fun!

I thought, it might be a cool idea to actually proof that something like that should be possible within a few lines of code. No C code, no Objective-C, even more simple: AppleScript (and a little bit of Bash scripting).

However, so I just took about an hour and a half and wrote down this little bad boy:

global used_codes
global code_used

on run
	set used_codes to {}
end run

on idle
	set promocodes to paragraphs of (do shell script "/opt/local/bin/wget --quiet -O - http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/166916511.rss | while read sentence; do for word in $sentence; do echo $word | grep '^[A-Z0-9]\\{12\\}' | sed 's/\\(.\\{12\\}\\).*/\\1/'; done; done | sort | uniq")
	repeat with promocode in promocodes
		set code_used to false
		repeat with used_code in used_codes
			if promocode = used_code then
				set code_used to true
			end if
		end repeat
		if code_used = false then
			tell application "iTunes"
				launch
				activate
				open location "itmss://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/freeProductCodeWizard?code=" & promocode
				copy promocode to the end of used_codes
				set used_codes to used_codes & promocode
			end tell
		end if
	end repeat
	return 30
end idle

Simply hack it into your AppleScript editor and save it as “Application” with the “Stay Open” option clicked. Now after double-clicking the file that has just been created the script starts fetching a Twitter RSS-feed (in this case @verbsapp’s, heh) every 30 seconds, grabs all iTunes promo-codes it can find and automagically redeems them in the iTunes store. If the could is still valid – lucky you. If not, better luck next time! In any case each code will be added to a temporary “black list” so it won’t be redeemed again.

Feel free to customize and use this script! GNU GPL v2 and stuff. Enjoy.

//update: I’ve just adapted the script a bit more to include promo codes with more than 12 characters length. Besides, I’ve applied John’s “patch” to it – thanks for that one John!

global used_codes
global code_used

on run
	set used_codes to {}
end run

on idle
	set promocodes to paragraphs of (do shell script "for word in `/usr/bin/lwp-download 'http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/166916511.rss' -`; do echo $word | grep '^[A-Z0-9]\\{12,16\\}' | sed 's/\\(.\\{12,16\\}\\).*/\\1/'; done | sort | uniq")
	repeat with promocode in promocodes
		set code_used to "false"
		repeat with used_code in used_codes
			if promocode as string is used_code as string then
				set code_used to "true"
			end if
		end repeat
		if code_used is "false" then
			tell application "iTunes"
				display dialog "Found a new code: " & promocode & " - use it now?"
				launch
				activate
				copy promocode to the end of used_codes
				set used_codes to used_codes & promocode
				open location "itmss://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/freeProductCodeWizard?code=" & promocode
			end tell
		end if
	end repeat
	return 30
end idle

However, I could philosophize even more about the pros and cons of this themeable-web-interface-for-YQL but I’m actually not that much into it to do so. The reason for registering was mainly for the hype’s sake and besides, I actually planned to reserve my everywhere used nickname “devilx” – unfortunately it was already taken by an as-it-seems porn addicted guy.
If this guy should coincidentally follow my blog and read this: I would be very thankful, if you could pass me that subdomain name, so I can make use of it for more than just an empty page named “Default” and following porn. Thank you!

Oh well, enough for today. Read (someday) more on http://mariusmm.tumblr.com/. Enjoy!

And yet another, brand-new Bluebird Theme: Plain.

It’s simple.

It’s light.

It’s Plain!

Download plain.bbtheme

UPDATE: Plain v2!
… just as requested.

Plain v2

Download: plain-v2.bbtheme

Indie Bluebird Theme

Indie-Compact Bluebird Theme

Indie-Mini Bluebird Theme

Three brand-new Themes for Bluebird: Indie, Indie-Compact & Indie-Mini.

Themes were inspired by the Indie Labs.

Download the Indie-Collection!

Simplifique

Yay! Yet another excitingly fresh Theme for the best, free Twitter-Client available for Mac OS X: Bluebird.

“Simplifique” is a very aquaish theme that makes use of WebKit’s features to draw CSS gradients and reflections. Also, Simplifique includes the JavaScript-library written by Na Wong, to convert TwitPic and YouTube URLs to thumbnails.

I hope you like this brand-new theme for Bluebird!

Enjoy.

Download simplifique.bbtheme.zip

Sleek Bluebird Theme

Yay! Yet another cool, new theme for one of best Twitter-clients available on the OS X platform: Bluebird. This time, the theme called Sleek is inspired by 2Smoke’s Silent Night Theme for Bowtie, what’s one of the best Bowtie themes available out there btw.

The theme itself is 100% CSS without any pictures besides the background-image. That one’s the same I’ve also already used within my HUD and HUD-Mini themes. I call this environmental-friendly recycling.

I made use of the cool features Safari already implements, like for example round corners or gradients. It’s just nice to see how much can be done using these features – at this point, the CSS hacks replaced any kind of image plus the whole work needed to make gradient-images in HTML/CSS scalable. A very cool time- and work-saver!

However, I hope you enjoy this new Bluebird theme!

Download sleek.bbtheme

Refresh Bluebird Theme

A fresh theme a day. My latest creation for the Bluebird Twitter-client is called “Refresh” – a refreshingly new theme!

This time it’s no modification or port of another app’s theme to Bluebird. Instead, it’s a new theme from scratch. The theme is held in a dark mood combined with orange and sky-blue colorized elements. For the background picture I made use of zygat3r’s Dark Wood wallpaper, which I’ve modified a bit in order to still look good if the window would ever get too big and the image’s borders would be visible.

The icons for the individual tweets are the very same icons from Mark Jardine’s “Mars Metallic” theme, with the difference that I’ve inverted their colors to make them fit better into my theme.

The tweets use rounded corners and all kind of transition effects provided by the WebKit CSS-properties. I actually also inserted a property for making the avatar images have rounded corners, but as it seems either Bluebird or WebKit itself doesn’t honor this at that point.

However, the theme is written using Bluebird’s new theme-definitions and should be compatible with Bluebird 1.0 Beta 1.1 and (hopefully) later.

Enjoy!

Download refresh.bbtheme

Minimalistic Tickets Bluebird Theme

Yet, another Bluebird theme.

“Minimalistic Tickets”, like the name already says, is a minimal theme where each tweet is being displayed as a “ticket”. The idea came me, when stumbling through the currently existing themes and noticing that each one has something in common: They all go from the top to the bottom. There was none, where the tweets are right next to each other, side by side.

The theme is pretty much just a demonstration of how new themes could look like. “Breaking the ice”. Trying out something new.

Whatever. I hope you enjoy!

Download minimalistictickets.bbtheme

Sicker Style Bluebird Theme

And yet again, a new theme for the Bluebird Twitter-Client. This time I didn’t just modify an existing one – I took two themes and mashed them up, heh. I took the Bubbling Citrus Bluebird Theme by Sarah Tan and Laurent Baumann and took the Adium Message-Style “Sticker Style” by “bobjr” and threw both in a mixer, heh.

This is one of my first tries to create a bubble-style Bluebird theme. The theme as you can see it on the screenshots uses the DIN Medium font, which is a commercial font. The font is not included in this theme, but it uses alternatives as a replacement, if the font can’t be found on the system.

However, I hope you like the theme. Enjoy!

Download stickerstyle.bbtheme

Modification of Flarup's "Glow"

Today I’ve just played around a bit with Bluebird and its theme-ability to make it fit more into my actual desktop. First of all, I took a look at what theme I could use best for my first tries. I decided to choose Michael Flarup‘s “Glow”-theme. The theme itself looks very neat and tidy and provides cool effects like avatar-reflections and a menu for each tweet.

First of all, I took some new picks on the colors of each tweet (regular tweet, reply, direct message, own tweet) and turned the gradient around, so that it doesn’t “pop-out” but looks more like “punched-in”. Then, I’ve changed the fonts used by the theme. The CSS definition for the fonts now look this way:


...
font: 12px/16px "Berthold Akzidenz Grotesk BE", "Lucida Grande", "Verdana", "Helvetica Neue", "Arial", Sans-Serif;
...
font: 13px "DIN Medium", "Verdana", "Helvetica Neue", "Arial", Sans-serif;
...


Unfortunately the first fonts to be used (Berthold Akzidenz Grotesk and DIN Medium) are commercial fonts which I can’t just pack-in and distribute. Though, it doesn’t look that bad using the Lucida Grande/Verdana fonts.

However, after that I’ve fixed a bug the theme had at least on my Mac (Safari 4), where the background-height was too small so that a small white line always remained at its list’s bottom.

If you like the theme, feel free to download it here and comment on it.

Enjoy!

For example, on Twitter it’s possible to personalize messages by inserting the user it’s destined for with an @ as prefix. By using applications which spread the Twitter status-messages all over the net, you begin to see posts from the very same person on platforms like Facebook, where the @user doesn’t make any sense. Also it’s a matter of syntax: While Twitter allows you to write messages the way you want to write them, Facebook forces you (by placing your Name in front of the actual status-message) to use sentences like “has gone away.”, “is finally back home”, et cetera. Since many people now seem to be using Twitter as primary input-channel, you often get to see Facebook messages that look like John Doe Going now to bed. – what’s really ugly and doesn’t make sense in any kind.

I’m asking why? Why do people need to spread one and the same message over dozens of web-platforms? Why can’t they just personalize each message to not make the other “friends” think it’s just another-useless-nonsense-mass-message?

I mean, come on. What’s the deal with multiple platforms then? I still keep each platform personalized and decide what information I would write on what platform. I mean, maybe the circle of followers of my Twitter account (where I personally have more techies than regular people) aren’t interested in reading about stuff I would write to my “normal” friends in Facebook – and the other way around. And as I just said, by making Twitter (or whatever other service) the first input-channel, people kinda stop caring about the other platforms they spread their information at – so it’s actually useless to comment on their status on other platforms than Twitter.

Of course, one could argue of this being a time problem, since he/she would not have the time to write messages into each platform separately – but I mean, why is he/she then registered on every web-community existing on the internet? If time only allows me the usage of one service, I choose the one that fits best for my needs and keep using it.

I think otherwise the whole idea of different platforms is for the birds – why not creating one huge web-community which includes every platform like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc. into one service, so nobody would need to spread the information anymore onto ten different services.

Hmpf… oh well.

Twitter database maintenance

Seen some days ago on twitter.com

The first Snow, this morning.

When I got this morning, I’ve been pretty shocked when my precious girl happily screamed “SNOW!!!” through the apartment. First I actually did not believe her and though she would just want to fool me, but after taking a look out of the window (yepp, I don’t do that right after I wake up, …) I saw it myself: This morning the first snow for this year just fell and accordingly to that the traffic was chaotic and dangerous. I’ve seen three accidents on the highway while driving slowly to work and really had to pay attention to not involve myself into a fourth one. I guess I really need to buy snow-tires this year.

I was really surprised of the snow, especially with the past few years in mind. In this region of Germany we didn’t had snow until the middle of Januar in the last two years, so I assumed that it’ll be the same this year – which is why I didn’t organize myself some snow-tires till yet. I’m really afraid of tomorrow being even snowier than today.

Anyway, what else happened in the last few days/weeks(/months?). I haven’t been blogging anymore, since I’ve ordered an upgrade of my webspace at Strato (on the 10th of October) and they told me to backup everything I have uploaded on my account. This request made me think “Hm, let’s not write anything anymore, let’s not change content, in a few they the upgrade will be done and I’ll be able to blog again.“… WRONG!* They didn’t seem to be doing anything till now. And besides, they didn’t even answered the mails I wrote, in which I asked for some status info about the upgrade. I’m kinda disappointed of the Strato support on this, because actually I had the support center as a pretty good and reliable contact point in mind. Eh, I’ll just wait and see what happens. At least they didn’t charge me for anything – yet.

What else is new… well. Today my salary arrived, so I ordered a new iPod Touch. But I think this is not worth mentioning, since everyone has an iPod Touch today. Lately I’ve seen the Apple Keynote for October and I really fell in love with these new aluminum (A-LU-MI-NI-UM, dear AE-speakers, not “aluminum” ) MacBooks Apple presented. I think it would be a great gadget for the Norway trip mpain and I’m planning for next year.

However, so far. I think I’ll start up blogging again, until I’ll receive at least some info from Strato.

* Thanks again to Michael for this link! It’s amazing funny.

Thanks to tuhl for this info.

Gwibber on my GNOME Desktop

Just tried out Gwibber and I gotta say that it’s a pretty nice and smooth-looking Twitter client for the GNOME Desktop. It’s written in Python and uses GTK2 in combination with Webkit to display the eye-candy-tweets. It was pretty much a pain to get the Ubuntu-Packages working on Debian, but now it’s running pretty good and yet it seems stable. I’m wondering where to configure the appearance, hm… well, however.

Just try it out yourself!

Besides of all the hacking I’ve also contacted the actual developer(s) and wrote about the changes I’ve done to gTwitter. Regarding this, Nil Gradisnik already mailed me back and asked for my GMail-Account to be added to the project. Unfortunatelly I had to reject, since I’ve got a lot to do with other projects. I sent them the package containing the changes and hope now that they will introduce them into the upstream. If you’d like to try out my hacked version, just feel free to download it. Enjoy!

I’ve just checked out gTwitter’s CVS and modified a bit its sources to get rid of this very annoying and ugly blue text that will be used for messages in general. Besides, I added a bit more info to the roster-entries and sized-up the author’s name a bit. Unfortunatelly the CVS version seems to have a bug in parsing a message’s timestamp, and this is why there actually is no “…wrote at <time>:” in this screenshot. I just played around a bit with the sources, but later I’ll try to debug the timestamp thing to get that displayed correctly. Also I will try to implement some more ideas I have in mind. Because of the not-so-heavy-development I mentioned before I don’t believe that the author will release another version that soon. Actually there is no real needs to do that, since gTwitter works very stable, by comparison to Twitux in which I often saw some parsing-errors displayed in its statusbar. However, when I finished hacking I might mail the author and ask him if he would like to apply my modifications to the upstream. Let’s see…