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Monkey TV
So, my latest little project, Monkey TV is about to shift from the aleph to the bet testing stage (Hebrew's much more fun than greek). The site's only been up in its current state for less than 3 days and already it's been hammered by hundreds of spam bots. Really, they're faster than google.
More info and cool stuff when I finish.
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Finally, It's cold!
After an excessively long summer, it's finally beginning to cool down here. I can't believe I was getting a tan in November.
Of course, I'm now beginning to realise that this flat is built for the summer. Air conditioning, thin curtains, no heaters... but I shan't complain. I survived typhoon season unscathed and there are a lot fewer cockraches around at this time of year...
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Earthquakes = Bad
That's it, I've decided. On the whole, earthquakes are a bad idea. Not that I've experienced any particularly bad ones while I've been here – the biggest being a 5.2 about 70 miles north-east – but the ones I have had have been...unsettling.
A particularly strange thing happens when I'm on Skype to someone during an earthquake, though. Due to the computer being on the desk, the desk being in the room and the whole room moving as one, it appears on the other end that I start swaying slightly for no apparent reason.
I have prepared myself a little emergency bag, though, just in case there's a big one. It's got spare socks, my solar charger and – when I'm not using it – my Nintendo DS. At least if there's a disaster, I'll still be able to play Mario Kart.
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s is small
The reason I finally got round to finishing my site is that I built a neat little CMS temporarily called 's is small' and wanted to do something interesting with it. It doesn't really do anything that other CMSs don't, I just felt like making it.
It does, however, have some fairly cool things built in:
Media
- If you attach a video to a post, it'll be automatically converted from whatever format you have (AVI, MPG, WMV, MP4, MOV, etc) into FLV and embeded in your post using Jeroen Wijering's FLV Player.
- If you upload an image, it'll get resized then wrapped in Lightbox
- MP3s are automatically embedded in a flash MP3 player
Integration
- Put your last.fm username in and you can get a flash or image based list of your Top 10 artists (or most recent played or whatever...)
- Put your flickr username in and it'll include your latest photos.
- You can set up your flickr account to 'blog this' to automatically include people's flickr posts in your blog (using the Metablog API)
- Put your Open Source Food username in and it'll randomly include one of your recipes.
- You can set it to be your personal OpenID server
- Automatic inclusion of a bunch of Google stuff: calendars, analytics and maps.
Other stuff
- RSS feeds for each category
- Some nifty anti-spam stuff...
- ...which comes in handy for the comments
- A simple way to add on any kind of extra functionality as modules
- Support for MySQL and PostgreSQL
- Automatic installation and database setup (just upload the files and everything will install the first time you visit your site)
- Depending on your server setup, the whole thing generally comes in at about 2MB (including the flash movie player and everything)
Of course, the next thing I need to do is make a site for the CMS itself and let other people have a go at it.
