It looks like Sprint had a router outage and it’s been going on for the past 5 days. They’re trying to get things rolling. Apparently they didn’t back up the router configs or something was hokey in their setup that some sites are not going to be viewable by everyone. Mainly it looks like because of a routing issue between us and Sprint. Go figure. Meanwhile, we can only sit back and be at the mercy of the backbone. The servers are running just fine, it’s just that outside world can’t see them. *curse sprint*

Linklist Beta 3 released. Upgrading is seamless and painless. There are no database structural changes, just basically a tweak and improvement of a few things. Some things some of you will like, and some thing you might not. :) You can find the download on the downloads page.

CHANGES this release: (view the CHANGES file for a history)

Bug Fixes/Changes

- Cosmetic changes :

changed it so that if you click on the linklist name, it will go to edit links;

changed “edit links” to “preferences”;

added a new column in edit links, “last updated”;

- When adding a site via bookmarklet, it will attempt to autodiscover the RSS and autofill the RSS url for you.

- autodetecting RSS also autodetects favicons.

- added tips and tricks for sorting the linklist in the documentation.

- Fixed a problem the get_headers function for those people running PHP 4.x. (this function was introduced in PHP5)

- Rewrote the Parser class that imports the OPML files. I’ve tested OPML files from blogrolling, bloglines, netnewswire, and feeddemon.

- OPML Importing OPML files/feeds that have folders (i.e. bloglines) will now not error out. However, you will get the import into one big linklist.

- OPML Importing now allows you to also autodetect the RSS/Favicon URLs. While this may sound good, please be warned that if you use this functionality and you have a large list of links, then this could take a long time and possibly lock up your server. Take care using this!

- RFC 3229 is now used when “pinging” a site’s RSS url. This should speed up things when doing the exp:linklist:checkupdated tag as long as the target site is up to spec with RFC 3229. (as far as I know just about all the blogging/journal software is up to par) – thanks to paul and chris for suggesting (and helping out) with this.

- There may be a few other stealth changes in this release, as I’m sure that I added some things here and there.

Ok, if you downloaded the linklist module before this time this has been posted, then please re-download the module and replace the mod.linklist.php file in your modules directory. There was an issue with the prepend_str and append_str variables that made it show ALL the time and not when the site was updated. Oops! :)

After some tweaking, adding new changes, Beta 2 of the Linklist Module is complete. You can download the beta 2 from the left side under downloads. Please be sure to read the README file for instructions on how to install/upgrade from beta 1.

Here are the CHANGES:

5/17/05 – Beta 2.0 Release

Bug Fixes/Changes

- fixed an issue with call-tim pass-by-reference warning. (mcp.linklist.php)

- changed the query method of the linklist tag. (mod.linklist.php)

- fixed issue with OPML import not having a date inserted along with the link. (mcp.linklist.php)

- fixed documentation error {xfn_linkcode} description was labeled as {normal_linkcode}. oops! (mcp.linklist.php)

- changed the OPML parser class into a generic parser class that will also parse out the RSS URL of a given website. (mcp.linklist.php)

- added RSS discovery : this will attempt to get the RSS URL of a given link. this will work provided the site in question is using the link rel=alternate rss tag in their site. (mcp.linklist.php)

- added recently updated : If a site has been recently updated, then when displaying using the {normal_linkcode} or {xfn_linkcode} this will be denoted by the prepend/append string, which are set within the linklist preferences.

- added tag checkupdated : This tag must be run on a regular basis to “spider” your links which have RSS feeds to find out if they have been updated or not. This tag will check each individual site every hour, in batches of 5. (So if you have 20 sites with RSS feeds, it will take 4 hours for all of them to be actually checked to see if they’ve been updated.) (mod.linklist.php)

- added new variables and conditional statements. – please see documentation for details. (mod.linklist.php)

Perusing deviantart today, I found some awesome photos. Truly inspiring ones too. So inspiring, I’m gonna show them here. :)

phlegmatic’s sit and watch – Loved this. Totally. I want to take pictures now.

lilylover’s it’s not what you see – Loved this shot. It seems to capture just the exact moment… just right. I must take more pictures. I must.

I also noted that I’ve been a member of DeviantArt since 2001. How come it doesn’t seem like 4 years? LOL It doesn’t seem quite so long ago that I joined up with them.

I know what you’re thinking, “para…what?” Paraskevidekatriaphobics! Those are the people are fear today. i.e. Friday the 13th. Prettty long phobia name for such a simple and widespread superstition.

So pray tell, what have you done today? Have you met with some misfortune? Or perhaps you are one of those who thrive on this day. I myself have not experienced any type of mishap, or “bad luck”.

But the day is not yet over.

Well, I’ve finally finished up documentation for this project, and while it’s not perfect, it’s functional. I’m now officially releasing my Link List module as beta. What does this mean? Well, it’s not perfect, but I would definitely like to know what kind of bugs are in this now before I decide to actually release this module as a release.

Features:

Multiple Link Lists – You can have any number of Link Lists to distinguish your different types of links.

XFN support – If you use the XFN, Link List already figures out the XFN code for you and displays it.

Bookmarklet – You can create a bookmarklet to add a site to your link list at any time.

Those are a few things that you can do with the Link List.

As of yet, a “recently updated” function is not added. This is a truly cumbersome thing!

I appreciate the feedback and would love to hear from anyone that is using this module.

For those of you by chance who have installed this before, please let me know so I can create an update script for you. There were a few database changes, but since I can’t remember which ones are different, I need to find out. :)

You can download the LinkList from the left sidebar.

I was driving to the store, and I saw this kid and thought, “damn he looks like he’s gonna grow up to be a geek.” I nodded to myself and thought, “definitely.” Then I laughed since I realized that I am one of those geeks. :)

I’ve been looking over my Expression Engine module, “Link List” and have been tweaking it out and will be working on full documentation on it. I’ve decided to take a couple features out (such as favicon), but nothing that will impede the function of the module itself.

I’ve decided to forego the “updated” part of the module for right now for many reasons. One of them is Really performance. Yes, I could have it query the weblogs.com changes.xml or any other changes.xml list and see if it’s been updated there every hour, however, this may or may not work 100% correctly, and well, it’s Really very slow.

I’ve also considered using the RSS/XML feeds as a method of seeing if a site is updated, however, while this would be relatively speedy on a “per site” basis, if you have a lot of sites in your linklist, this could prove fatally slow for your site.

So as you can see, I’m still throwing things around on how the “recently updated” thing can possibly work. Without having a dedicated service (imho), it’s Really tough to get a good, accurate, and fast method of finding out if a site has been updated.

Once I’m finished with the small things in the app and write up the documentation for it, I’ll release it to the general public. If you’ve gotten the module already, then you probably won’t need to Really “upgrade” since it’s essentially the same thing, it just doesn’t have some dialogue boxes that seem to do nothing. :)