Things I have done in the last week or so:

• Turned my MySpace page into a tumbleblog (cooler non-myspace version here) to try to funnel some of my friends who live on myspace out into the actual internet. This is all powered by standard PHP5 with lastRSS.
• PHP script to provide an RSS feed of your weekly last.fm charts. It just displays the most recent week’s charts, but that’s enough really. Useful for, say, including the charts in your tumbleblog. [source]
• Updated Flickr Photo Page Enhancer greasemonkey script. Changes to flickr site = changes to script.

I’ve also worked 43 hours as of Thursday, and also, excitingly, my car blew up. Which means lots of exciting meetings with loan officers at my bank as they try to find polite ways to say “have you actually seen your credit report, fool?” So I don’t know what else you might want from me, but you ain’t getting it. I’m going to bed now.

• TechCrunch » Yahoo Opens IM to Developers: This is awesome. Better: open source IM client from one of the majors, written in XUL.
  » api hacks im yahoo
• The Rewards of Being Shy — ScienceNOW: The brain chemistry of shyness: FMRI’s show shy children experience both negative and positive emotions more strongly than outgoing peers. All kinds of implications here, addiction among them.
  » health neurology news science

So I fixed my problem with wordpress’s blogger importer script with one line of SQL and a fairly simple PHP script. Being a complete SQL n00b, I backed up my database first anyway. Here it is: SELECT ID, post_content FROM wp_posts WHERE post_title REGEXP '[0-9]{18}' That was it. I’m starting to like this stuff.

That ‘Daily Fluff’ entry is the result of a script I wrote. It pulls my photos and favorites from the Flickr API, my links from the del.icio.us API, and when webcron tells it to run, turns all that into a post on my blog. I’m eventually going to add items & reviews from my junklog account, as well. This took me two days to do, primarily because I was at first trying to use Wordpress’s XML-RPC interface to create the post, with very little in the way of success, until I realized I was being stupid. It is much (much, much) easier with a db-driven app like wordpress to just insert the post directly into the database with PHP. Of course, I had to learn how to do that first.

In other words, yes, so far I’m having fun with wordpress. <glee>

Yeah, I converted, and it was crazy easy with the importers they have now. Beating this beast into a form more pleasing to myself, though, is going to take a bit longer.

Already I don’t like that all of the posts I imported without a specific title defaulted to their unix timestamps. I found a couple of places where I was able to hack it into displaying something else instead of the ugly 18-digit number, but I’ve yet to find the silver bullet that will fix this problem everywhere titles show up in wordpress (which is a lot of places). If anybody could point me at the specific function in wp, it’d be appreciated.

One success story so far is that I got category lists to use proper grammar. This is why below you will see this post is tagged “wordpress, hacks and php” instead of “wordpress hacks php”. The relevant function is get_the_category_list, ask me how if you’re interested. And yes, I really am this anal about small details like that.

Further updates as events warrent.