Category Archives: Software

YOURLS + Twitter for iPhone (UPDATE: TweetDeck Too!)

Software, , , ,

UPDATE: These instructions now apply to TweetDeck as well! You can find the field at Settings -> Services and pick “Other” for the shortening service.

Do you run YOURLS? Do you use Twitter for iPhone (aka Tweetie)? If so, this post will be of interest to you.

Twitter for iPhone supports using a custom shortening service. Thankfully the YOURLS API will output a format that Twitter for iPhone will accept.

So how do you go about setting it up you ask? Start by going to your YOURLS admin area and clicking the “Tools” link at the top. About half way down the page will be your signature (it’s like a password). It will be a 10 character string. Hang onto this, you’ll need it soon.

Now open up Twitter for iPhone and go to the “Accounts & Settings” screen. You can get there by pressing the three dots in the bottom right and then scrolling to the very bottom of the screen that comes up and pressing the “Accounts & Settings” button. There will then be a “Settings” button in the bottom left. There in the Settings, select “Services” and then “URL Shortening”. Lastly pick the “Custom…” option.

Now to enter the URL to your YOURLS API script. I found it easiest to craft this URL on my computer and then e-mail myself the URL which I could then copy/paste on my iPod Touch. It was a lot easier than typing it all out on the little keyboard.

This is the URL you will need to use:

http://yourdomain.com/yourls-api.php?action=shorturl&format=simple&signature=YOURSIGNATURE&url=%@

Replace “YOURSIGNATURE” with your signature that you located earlier in this post and leave the rest alone (the “%@” is the placeholder that Twitter for iPhone will look for). If you e-mail yourself the URL, make sure that you still have “%@” at the end of the URL and not “%25@” or something.

Now when writing a tweet, press the character count button and the keyboard will disappear. There in the bottom right will be a button to shorten all URLs in your tweet. They’ll be shortened using your custom domain!

Cool, huh? :)

Posionous People

Software, Videos, WordPress, , ,

If you’re involved in the WordPress community (or any open-source community for that matter) and have never sat down and watched (or at least listened to) this presentation by two of the founders of the Subversion project, I strongly recommend you do. It is an hour very, very well spent.

Thanks to Ryan McCue for sharing the video with me.

I Need GPL-Compatible Flash Video Player Suggestions

Coding, Software, Video Quicktags, , , , ,

I am in the early stages on recoding my Viper’s Video Quicktags plugin from scratch and in the process I will be replacing JW Player with a free and open-source alternative. JW Player is really great, but sadly it’s released under a non-commercial license which just won’t do.

So please, if you know of any good Flash players that will do FLV, MP4, etc. please leave a comment with a link!

Here’s my list so far of players to compare and pick between: (I’ll update this list with suggestions)

  • Flowplayer (currently leaning towards this one, it seems really badass)
  • OS FLV

Hiding Microsoft SyncToyCmd.exe For Task Scheduler Purposes

Software

Now that I own a laptop, I needed a way to keep some folders in sync between my two computers (my web development folder for example). While there are plenty of options that use online methods (Dropbox for example), I needed one that was strictly offline. The free accounts only offer a few gigabytes (I’ll eventually be syncing a few hundred gigabytes and am currently syncing around 30,000 files) and I’m much too cheap to purchase space upgrades (they’re crazy expensive anyway).

So in comes SyncToy 2.0 from Microsoft. I installed it on my desktop (you only need it on one computer), shared the folders with my Homegroup on my laptop that I wanted to sync, and set up some folder pairs. It works awesome and only takes about a minute to check both my desktop and laptop (via wireless) for file modifications and then sync the changes.

However it has no UI for setting up automated syncing. You either have to do it manually or set up a scheduled task using the command line program that comes with SyncToy called SyncToyCmd.exe. The problem with there’s no way to hide it’s window. Every time the task runs, a command line window pops up while it’s syncing. Highly annoying and distracting, even if I’m only syncing once an hour.

Well thanks to a bit of Googling, I found a solution. It’s a little NET application someone wrote that acts as a wrapper for SyncToyCmd.exe and makes it run silently in the background.

Success! :)

Snow Leopard Is Considered Fast?

Software

I was reading the New York Time’s technology section this morning on my iPod Touch (ironically) and ran across something I found quite humorous in an article about Apple’s latest version of their operating system, Snow Leopard:

In any case, Snow Leopard truly is an optimized version of Leopard. It starts up faster (72 seconds on a MacBook Air, versus 100 seconds in Leopard).

72 seconds? Really? I don’t know if it’s just me or what, but I find that very slow. I realize that is on a laptop so the CPU probably isn’t great, but comon.

For comparison, I just did a cold boot of my computer and timed it with my iPod’s stopwatch app. It’s specs are nothing amazing (it’s over 18 months old) and I’m running Windows 7 RC1 (build 7100).

  • 0 sec — power button is pressed
  • 10 sec — BIOS screen pops up
  • 25 sec — Windows logo appears (i.e. Windows starts loading)
  • 50 sec — login screen appears (25 seconds after Windows started loading)

After I typed in my password, it only took about 5 seconds (10 max) for my desktop, start bar, start menu, etc. to show up. That’s nearly 15 seconds faster than Leopard, 40 seconds faster if you ignore the 25 seconds that it took my computer to run through it’s pre-OS checks.

I admit it took another 30 seconds or so before everything else was loaded, but in Windows 7′s defense I have about two dozen programs set to auto-start (IRC, BitTorrent, twhirl, etc. etc.). When the install was fresh, it loaded the desktop in an instant.

Or is my reverse Apple fanboism clouding my judgment?

Automatically Keep Your SVN Checkouts Up To Date In Windows – Rev. 2

Software, Technology, WordPress

This is an improvement upon my earlier post on how to keep SVN checkouts automatically up to date.

DD32 used his awesome Googling skills to find this page in the TortoiseSVN docs that talks about automation. Turns out you can launch TortoiseSVN via the command line, have it update the folder(s), and then close when done. So here’s an updated guide.

These instructions are for Vista, but they are likely similar for XP.

  1. If you don’t already have TortoiseSVN installed, download and install it.
  2. If you don’t already have a copy of WordPress checked out to a folder, do it. WordPress’ in-development SVN URL is http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/trunk/
  3. Start -> Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Task Scheduler
  4. On the right, click on “Create Task” (not the basic one)
  5. Fill out as follows. Paths will likely be different! Click for bigger versions.

Done!

To test it to make sure it’s working properly, delete a few non-custom files from your SVN’ed folder. wp-trackback.php, xmlrpc.php, etc. are good test files. Then click on “Task Scheduler Library” in Task Scheduler (it’s on the left), click once on your new task, and then click “Run” on the right-hand side. If it’s working properly, the files your deleted will be restored.