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.

Are you one of those rare people, like me, with both a myspace page and a twitter account you bother updating? Want twitter on your myspace page? Or do you just want to put your twitter somewhere that’s not compatible with twitter’s own JSON powered badges? Well, if you have 1) a webhost, and 2) that webhost has php, here is your answer. You can see that code in action on my myspace page. Pretty!

There’s also this thingy if you prefer something with a slightly lower barrier to entry — just put in your username and it works. Though the results are, in my admittedly biased opinion, not as pretty.

I received the free offer for Amazon Prime again this year, so I’m using it. (Boy howdy am I using it.) Noticed though, not for the first time, that it’s pretty hard to use with so many third-party sellers hooked into Amazon — Prime won’t save you any shipping costs with them. Worse, some categories give you the option to filter by who is actually selling the item, but other categories inexplicably do not. The filtering functionality is still there, it’s just not exposed.

That was the problem. This is the solution: Amazon Only Items. Use that bookmark on any list of products on Amazon, even on searches, and it will filter out any items not sold directly by Amazon. This is useful even if you don’t have Prime, as it lets you see only items which are eligible for the $25-order-free-shipping thing. Glee! Now I can spend even more money and see my surly UPS man more often…

So I was bored at work tonight, despite my new cellphone and data plan combined with Bloglines mobile, so I decided to create a mobile version of Flickr Interestingness. Total amount of time it took me to write this: 20 minutes. I ♥ the Flickr API.

That code from bitprophet that makes tab key presses work in textareas was tempting me, so I made it into a wordpress plugin. Download it, or or see here for more info about how to install and activate a plugin in wordpress (this is sounding familiar…). The plugin adds bitprophet’s javascript code to the post editing page as well as the template/plugin editor.

Hello, world! I wanted a tag cloud (because, like mullets, they are just so damn sexy), and I also wanted to play around with writing a plugin, so I made it so. Download the plugin itself, or see here for more info about how to install and activate a plugin in wordpress. To use the plugin, simply put <?php echo category_cloud(); ?> wherever you want the cloud to appear. Here’s an example of its output:

aprilfools bloglines charlotte code dailyfluff del.icio.us design fame firefox flickr goog greasemonkey hacks links php projects sql travel typography voxgoogli wanking webdev widgets wordpress write. yahoo

Continued refinements to the XPCalReplace widget. There’s a new background, and the fonts are fully configurable now. The new background is due to the fact that I’ve figured out how to use msconfig to “downgrade” the Windows XP interface to something more old school and slightly less hideous.

Hot, fresh widgets: Bloglines Notify Widget for Konfabulator. Rather obviously, it displays the number of unread items in your Bloglines account. Clicking on the number will open your browser, pointed at your feeds panel. You can configure the amount of time to wait between updates (default 1 minute), and of course the widget needs to know your Bloglines login (email address) before it will do its magic.

I used a feed reader for about a week before I decided it wasn’t for me and went back to regular web-based Bloglines, but I missed having instant notification of new feed items. Bloglines does have their own notifier, but why not use a widget if you’re already running Konfabulator?

I’m beginning to see just how powerful and simple widgets can be. Total time from idea to completion was less than an hour, and most of that was spent deciding what the widget should look like.

My first Konfabulator widget: XPCalReplace. What it does is pretty well illustrated in the image at right. Once you place the widget on the screen correctly, it should blend in seamlessly with Win XP, replacing the windows clock in the system tray. You’ll first have to go into the widget preferences and set ‘window level’ to Topmost. If you notice it disappearing behind the standard windows clock at times, you also may have to go into the taskbar properties and uncheck “keep the taskbar on top of other windows.”

Pretty simple, really, but one thing I’ve learned is that all this is not as easy as it looks. I’m hoping to make improvements as I learn more. By the by, I mainly wrote this as a replacement for the handy utility TClockEx after upgrading to XP. TClockEx is much more configurable, and will run under XP, but doesn’t exactly blend in (can be read as: it’s dog-ugly).

Update 28 August: I fixed a fairly major bug regarding AM vs PM. Don’t know how I didn’t catch that before now. Oh, look over there! Shiny things!
29 August: Now comes loaded with several themes for XP and XP Media Center, as well as clear backgrounds if you want to use it somewhere else on your desktop. If you still don’t see something that matches the look of your taskbar, drop me a line.

More noodling with the My Web API: My Web tag cloud for URL does pretty much what it says. Surprisingly, this isn’t a built-in feature of My Web (…yet). It’s limited to the top 50 tags for a given URL. View the tag clouds for Flickr or Yahoo 360° for a demonstration.

As everything must have a bookmarklet: Y! My Web Tag Cloud.

Update: For an example of tags from bookmarks not marked as public showing via the API, see the tag cloud (such as it is) for my blog.

Why I think everything should have an RSS feed: because I can do really cool things with them. This page collects and collates everything I publish anywhere on the web, so long as that data ends up in an RSS feed at some point. So far I have My Y!360°, linkblog from del.icio.us, Flickr photos and comments on those photos, blog, and videos on YouTube. Best of all, the page has it’s own Atom feed (update: and RSS 2.0)! All made possible via Magpie + PHP. It’s not that hard to imagine using this same technique for something actually useful. Want to combine RSS feeds like Feedburner does, but including more than just Flickr and del.icio.us? It’s quite possible. You can see the source that makes it all run, but fair warning, it’s kind of a mess now with comments, and about as refined as it’s going to get.

Update 7/5: Dean Jackson published something somewhat related — if more complicated, with prettier output, and done up in with Feedparser and python instead of Magpie + PHP — over at the W3C. Mine has a lower barrier to entry, I feel, but then I already know how to use PHP and Magpie.

Boredom brought me to create this page where you can see my top 50 150 Myweb tags as a tag cloud. This is my first project with the MyWeb API (also making use of cached_fopen_url and xml2array). I’m seeing how it might be possible to create a much richer linkblog making use of the MyWeb API than is possible with del.icio.us’s RSS feeds. I could have the full archives right here on my site and in my design. The major stumbling block so far would be that the descriptions in del.icio.us don’t import into Myweb properly. We’ll see.

Also, if you’re logged in to Myweb, click on the following link to import your latest del.icio.us links into Myweb: del.icio.us » Myweb bookmarklet. You can bookmark the resulting URL for future imports.