myGUIDE

To understand openID, you only need to consider the number of Internet accounts you currently maintain. Maybe you have one email account in Yahoo or Google, another account in Flickr for your photos, an account in YouTube for videos, another one in Friendster, Facebook, or MySpace for your social network, and many many more. For each of this site, you need to have a username and a password in order to use the provided services. As your online presence expands, keeping tab of all these accounts becomes more difficult. I have several so I know how difficult it is to remember all username-password combinations. This is the issue openID is trying to solve.

According to their website, "OpenID is a free and easy way to use a single digital identity across the Internet." Ideally, with one OpenID you can login to all your favorite sites eliminating the need to maintain several usernames and passwords. Imagine the convenience of using a single username-password combination for all websites you would like to visit. Well, this is still ideal since not all websites have already adopted OpenID. Surprisingly, you may already have one without knowing it. If you have an account in wordpress.com, your OpenID is simply username.wordpress.com, or if you have one in flickr.com, your OpenID is www.flickr.com/photos/username, and several others. Check this site on how to get one. The interesting thing is that you can use your own website or blog as your OpenID identity. How? Read on.

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I always wanted to create my own web-based video player to share vacation videos with relatives and friends back home. But I didn’t have an idea where to start. I initially considered Adobe Flash but it’s not free and I didn’t have a license for it. Of course it is easier to just store the video files in YouTube and it will be immediately accessible to everyone. But I don’t like splitting each video into 10-min segments, 10 minutes being the current maximum length of video clips allowed in YouTube. 

Then I came across Silverlight, Microsoft’s cross-browser and cross-platform plug-in for delivering rich interactive applications on the web. I read about it several months ago. And the first thing that came to mind was whether it could be used to create a self-hosted video player for sharing videos on the Internet. Last weekend, I finally had the time to try it out. I visited Silverlight’s web site and looked for some introductory materials to work on. Fortunately, I found a tutorial on how to use Silverlight for video playback. I tried it and it worked!

So here is an outline of my first Silverlight video player application. This is based on the tutorial from Silverlight.net. The brief explanation is based on my understanding of the original tutorial.

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After months of inactivity, myGUIDE is now back with a new look and running on a different weblog platform. Yes, you read it right, I changed my blog platform from Serendipity to WordPress. This means that although I have migrated all my previous posts to WordPress, previous links will no longer work since Serendipity and WordPress have different link structure. Now if you’re looking for a particular post, you can still find it here. Just use the search box to locate it.

How did I do it? It was quite easy. Thanks to Windows Live Writer (WLW). But before taking this approach, be warned that this may not be appropriate for your case. This worked for me because myGUIDE is relatively new and has only a small number of blog entries and I’ve been using WLW to post entries to this blog. A Serendipity importer plugin is already available for WordPress. So maybe you’re better off using the plugin. But if you want an alternative approach, you can try this one.

The first thing to do is to create a weblog account in WLW to access your Serendipity-based blog, if you have not done it yet. Then setup another account in WLW to access your WordPress blog. After doing this, you’re ready to go. Simply read your blog entries, one at a time, from your old blog using WLW, then switch to your new blog, and click the Publish button to publish the entry you just retrieved. It is that easy! You can also use WLW to create the relevant categories in your new blog. You can even set the published date so that you can keep the original date of your posts.

But there are limitations to this approach. First, you will lose all your comments. WLW will not read the comments associated to each post.  Second, WLW sometimes will not download the images in the post. Instead it will just get the link of the image from your original blog and use this link in the new one. Thus if you’ll remove your old blog, the images will also disappear. Finally, if you have many entries, transferring all of them can take some time since you have to manually repeat the process of reading your previous posts from Serendipity then publishing it to WordPress. Luckily for me, I have only 15 entries so this was not an issue.

And that’s it!

I have a couple of websites running phpwebsite. In these websites, I used the Article Manager module to handle article submission. I came up with a guide to help users of these sites. I am reposting the article here, which initially appeared at the Philippines Today website. The article is as follows:

To submit an article in this website, you need to have a username. If you already have one, you can login using the Log In box, which can be found in the left column of this page. If you don’t have an account yet, you can get one by signing up here. You only need a valid email address where your login credentials will be emailed.

After logging in, click here or the Submit An Article link from the Main menu box. A page containing an empty article will be displayed. See images below. Enter the necessary information, such as the article’s title, summary, and content, and click the Save Article button at the bottom of the page to post your article. The home page will be automatically updated with the summary of your article posted at the top of the Recent Article… section. It is that easy!

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Yahoo! Messenger (YM) 9 is now available in public beta.  For those who would try this newest version of YM, you can download it from here. The new version has a completely new look for your contact list. You can choose a detailed view with larger Avatar images for your friends or a compact view if you want to minimize space. When in detailed view, you can just hover on your contact to send instant messages, SMS, or place a call. It has also brand new skins and emoticons.

Sharing videos becomes a lot easier. With an inline media player, you can just send the URL of the video you want to share and it will play within YM.  There is no need to open a new browser to play the video. Flickr is also integrated in the photo sharing feature. You can now share photos uploaded to flickr or save photos shared by others to your flickr account. Of course, sharing photos stored in your desktop is still possible.

YM 9 also offers localized versions for more countries including our very own the Philippines, and other countries such as Thailand, Indonesia, etc. I wonder what localization is available in the Philippine version. The menu in Tagalog? The Philippine version can be downloaded from here.

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Google Docs (GD) is an online word processor, presentation, and spreadsheet application offered for free by Google. According to its documentation, it is possible to post created documents to a blog, which can be configured by the writer. Curious, I setup GD to point to my serendipity-based blog myGUIDE. After entering the required information, GD appeared to communicate successfully with my blog’s XMLRPC server. So I am testing it now if this document will get posted. (NOTE: This is an experimental post.)

But before doing that, let me explore a bit some of GDs features. Inserting a table is very easy. Just click the insert link and then table. Below is an example table, center aligned, with two columns and two rows. You can right-click on the table to cut, copy, or paste selected items or change table properties. You can move rows up or down, insert rows or columns, or delete the entire table. You can also specify the alignment of the table, or its float property.

It is also possible to insert an image from my computer. The image on the left is an example. I can change the size of the image, its alignment, among other properties. It is also possible to drag the image wherever you like to place it in the document.

I can also insert page formatting like superscript¹ or subscript₂. I miss this feature in Windows Live Writer, the blogging software I am currently using. I don’t know if I can compose equations using GD (I wish). But it is possible to insert special characters. Here are example Wingdings characters: Q1ºV

While editing, you can also move from WYSIWYG editor to raw HTML editor. It is interesting, for the Wingdings characters above, the HTML source uses the <font> tag with the ‘face’ attribute set to ‘WingDings’. I dont know if this will be displayed properly in browsers which do not support the font type.

Okay, here it is!

UPDATE: The document did get posted, but without the title. So I have to add the title from here. Hmmm…

Interested in creating your own search engine? Try google custom search engine (CSE)! With google’s CSE, you can customized your search experience, including in the search only sites that are relevant to you. You can also host both the search box and search results in your site. You can even create custom search engine on the fly. (For example, creating a search engine for sites included in your blogroll.) For those interested, you can visit this webpage on CSE’s API.

It’s really easy to configure but you need to have a google account. If you already have one, follow the link above, login, and start building your own search engine. I already made one and called it Search Philippines! SP! can be found in this URL: http://search.philippinestoday.net/ This search engine only includes Philippine-related websites (well, that’s the target). For now, I have only a couple of websites included. I plan to include more Philippine news sites, pinoy blogs, etc.  Here is the image of the site.

What is this for users? Since the number of sites to search are limited and focused (say, only for Philippine news sites), users will be able to get more relevant search results as compared to using the entire google search engine. For website owners, this will give more visibility to your website. For instance, search the term ‘phpwebsite’ in google. This blog (myguide.bagarinao.com) appears in the 5th page. Search it again in my custom search engine Search Philippines! This blog is now on the first page.  This is because I included my blog in the list of websites for Search Philippines.

Any way, if you are interested in helping build Search Philippines! or want to include an SP! search box in your website or blog, drop me a note! It will be great to have our very own custom search engine.

In my previous post, I outlined my unsuccessful attempt to use windows live writer (WLW) to connect to the XmlRpc server of PhpWebsite’s article manager module. I experimented using both the Metaweblog API and the Movable Type API but with no success. When attempting to post an entry, WLW always returned the following error message “The response to the metaWeblog.newPost method received from the weblog server was invalid: Invalid response document returned from XmlRpc server.” However, the entry did get posted. Republishing the same entry would create a new post instead of replacing the one posted earlier. And each time, WLW gave the same error. 

I searched the Internet for possible solutions. I found out that the problem is quite common and not unique to PhpWebsite (PWS).  The same problem has also been observed in other blogging platforms such as wordpress. Luckily for wordpress users, there are already solutions posted in several blogs for some of the problems with WLW. Unfortunately for me, the solutions were not applicable for PWS. I could not even find other sites or blogs talking about PWS and WLW except this one. It seems I am the only soul trying to do this in the entire world wide web.

Since most of the websites I’m maintaining are powered by PWS, I thought it is worth the time and effort to figure out the cause of the problem. I am also in need of a good editing application that I can use with PWS. The provided text editor is only good for basic editing and not for more advanced formatting. For instance, using tables in entries can really take a lot of time. Anyway, since I am using WLW in my other blogs, I thought it would be great if I could also use it in my PWS-based websites.

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Anyone using Windows Live Writer (WLW) in PhpWebsite (PWS)? I searched the web but got no relevant result. I asked the question in phpwsforums, and am still waiting for replies.  So I tried it myself.

PWS has a third party module called article manager, which has an XML-RPC capability. This should enable PWS users to post entries to a PWS-based website with the article manager module installed using offline blogging tools such as WLW. But I wonder why nobody has tried doing this yet. So using a local test installation of PWS, I configured my WLW to connect to the article manager’s XML-RPC server. This can be done by simply pointing WLW to http://localhost/index.php?module=article&xmlrcp=1 (NOTE: replace "localhost" with the actual domain name of your PWS installation.) First, I used the metaweblog API.

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In case you haven’t noticed yet, Yahoo! now offers unlimited storage for Yahoo! Mail. This means that you don’t have to delete old emails to keep your Inbox under the storage limit. You can now keep your emails for as long as you like and enjoy limitless storage for attachments and photos. Well, that is, if you comply with their anti-abuse limits.

With an unlimited storage, the number of emails in your Inbox can increase considerably with time. Sorting these emails manually into different folders can take a lot of your time. In this post, I will outline how to use Yahoo! Mail filters to automatically perform this task for you. Like in the previous post, we will create an example filter such that emails from family members will be automatically stored in a “family” folder.

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