2 posts tagged “hacking”

The Songbird project seems to have matured to the point where extension programming is now doable (it was possible before, but not for a programmer with my meagre skills.) Today I managed to hack up their Wikipedia lookup extension so that it displayed the Trizzle view artist page for the currently playing artist, instead of looking it up on Wikipedia.

Songbird-trizzle

We're getting closer to crazy delicious. After my post last night about using MovableType as a CMS for the Trizzle Project site, Ben Trott was nice enough to suggest that I try using dynamic publishing. He also supplied a link to the documentation that I probably should have looked at before going ahead... but I didn't, and as a result I completely broke publishing my blog. No matter what I did, I just got an Apache server error, even after following the instructions that Ben had pointed me too. I decided to back off on dynamic publishing until I understand MT better.

So I deleted my existing blog publishing directory, rebuilt my site with static pages, and that fixed the probems. Then I decided to try something else-having MT produce php pages in my site instead of html. My hope was that I could then put the trizzle php code into the

I copied my external main-index.html template file and renamed it main-index.php, then pointed to it in MT's template options for index.html. Rebuilt the site, and everything worked fine. After that, I put some test php code in my main-index.php file and lo and behold, it executed once I rebuilt the file. Now proceeding with more confidence (which required some not very robust editing of php require paths-one thing I am going to have to  figure out how to organize my site directories under this new regime) I put in some code from the old trizzle index.php site, and it worked!

If you look at the screenshot below, you will see a MovableType produced index page, but with a "Trizzle Tags" content module on the left that is producing the Trizzle tag cloud using php code.

Edit: updated the screenshot after more tweaking of the css, and adding some real content.

Trizzle-mt-home-page