Phillip Pearson - web + electronics notes

Update: Get the latest version from the real homepage

Taking a break from all the Java, I've had a quick play with the new Technorati API.

Here's a Python wrapper script that parses the XML the Dave's API calls send to you and returns it in a whole bunch of nested dicts, the way it would have appeared if it had been an XML-RPC call:

    technorati.py

MIT-licensed. Share and enjoy. Do send patches to me if you have any changes. The API version is probably already out of date (I'm calling the .xml urls) but it works fine for me right now, so I'm happy.

Notes:

* You need an API key. Save this as apikey.txt in the current directory.
* Run python technorati.py -u http://www.foo.com/ -t to test. (Replace the URL with your own).
* Run python technorati.py -u http://www.foo.com/ --inbound for cosmos results. Use --info and --outbound to get blog info and outbound results.
* Note that the blog info is sent in both the cosmos and outbound queries, so --info isn't really all that useful.

Here are my stats for today:

{'inboundblogs': 25,
 'inboundlinks': 89,
 'lastupdate': '2003-05-12 11:10:09 GMT',
 'name': 'Second p0st',
 'rssurl': 'http://www.myelin.co.nz/post/rss.xml',
 'url': 'http://www.myelin.co.nz/post'}

Update: I'm not the only one :-)

I had a go with Eric Sink's blogging tool, CornSharp today. Follow that link to see how it went :-)

384 megs isn't quite enough to run Windows XP with Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Eclipse, Tomcat and HSQLDB all at once and still have enough left over for a decent disk cache ...

I can get a gig for NZ$318. I wonder if it's time to upgrade ...

Today I'm having a go with the JavaLobby Community Platform. It's a community server ... but in a different sense from Python Community Server and Radio Community Server. More like OpenACS, I guess, except less mature.

(Why am I doing this? Matt Schmidt wants someone to help them do pretty much what I'm doing with my search engine project at the moment, so I thought I'd take a look.)

Trying to install it now. First up is figuring out how JNDI data sources work in Tomcat. I don't have a recent JDK on my Linux box, so it'll have to run on my Windows workstation and talk to MySQL on Linux. Here's an example.

One red flag about this package is that I haven't seen ant running in less than a couple of minutes, which means that the edit-compile-test cycle is going to be really painfully slow if I can't get Eclipse to partially compile things for me. Let's see.

[...]

Well, I got it to compile and build a WAR file, but it doesn't seem to deploy. Aha -- there's a pre-built installation that I can just unzip. Grabbing that now.