BlogDogIt

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This GIF animation assembled by masodo@BlogDogIt.com

It has long been my intent to continue running BlogDogIt.com on the Geeklog CMS platform; doing my best to utilize existing features and plug-ins to keep this place on the cutting edge. Not too long ago though, I waxed poetic over my wishing to do something with the platform that - to my knowledge - had never been done with Geeklog. (See:Getting Geeky With IT)

I am pleased to report that after having submitted my work to Geeklog.net, I was informed by them that my modification - which I have named "RSS Last Post" -  has been accepted and added to their official downloads section under the heading "Add-ons" subcategory "Hacks."

Get only the latest post from your favorite blogs.
Display in side block or static page.

A great deal of my blogging efforts revolve around promoting others' blogs. For many years I would use the Geeklog Portal Blocks to share their RSS feeds. I soon got the idea to attempt to extract a remote site's latest post and feature it in a static page or block and set about cobbling together this hack. In addition to showing the last post for the blog it also gets the website's logo and link if supplied to their feed (some do, some don't.)

Click the image above to visit the RSS Last Post download page and download the ZIP file - chocked full of tasty PHP Soup. Look around BlogDogIt for several examples of this hack in action.

Summertime from Michel De Meester on Vimeo.

Not long ago the BlogDogIt article "Bitchkoemer and Friends Go to Fano" was inducted into the K+Club (a place of honor for posts that receive over 1000 hits.) This is a story featuring a travelogue wherein three "amigos" take a motorhome on an excursion to Fano for a week of Beach Buggy hijinks in conjunction with the 2009 Fano Kite Festival in Denmark.

As I was moving that article to the K+Plus hall of distinction I was devastated to learn that the original website I discovered - that commemorated their trip - had been taken off the air (yes, that is a pun.) I was however, relieved to find the embedded video (hosted on Vimeo) was still available. In the process of investigating this business I found that Michel "Bitchkomer" De Meester had recently added a couple of videos of himself playing saxophone in what appeared to be a dimly lit jazz club. One of these videos (featured above) is of a very respectable jam session among several talented artist coming together to cover the George Gershwin classic - "Summertime"

The video lacked a description and gave no indication of the location or purpose of this performance; if not for the presence of that quarky little leather overnight case, emblazoned with the hand-painted word(s) "HerbieBlues" - situated mid-stage - I might never have learned the identity of the harmonica virtuoso, who was conspicuously absent from his signiture sachel. It was a search on "HerbieBlues" that revealed the hidden world of this most unique performer.

Lucky for you that the hard part is over, all you need do now is click the play buttons on the clips that follow. So prepare to be entertained. If this selection serves to "whet your whistle" click on the HerbieBlues logo below and visit Harbert Grezel's website and get to know this mouth-organ master.

Enjoy! 

Custom Logo By masodo

BlogDogIt has been running on the Geeklog CMS platform ever since our inception in 2010. While I have many other sites going that run on various platforms it is BlogDogIt.com that gets most of my attention these days in terms of modification / customization. It is the sensible organization of files and functions within Geeklog that makes tinkering around in the code so much fun for those so inclined. Add to that a great group of developers eager to help and you will understand why the thought of moving this website to another platform has never crossed my mind.

As I am sure any frequent visitor of BlogDogIt will attest, we exist mainly to highlight interesting findings from the "web less traveled" and through the years have found many interesting purveyors of content and have made it a point to show appreciation in the form of gratuitous promotion by sharing of content and providing links to these virtual friends of BlogDogIt. On several occasions I have featured the RSS Headline Feed of many of my favored internet sites so that I could stay abreast of activity from this collection of bloggers and content creators.

RSS (Rich Site Summary - also affectionally known as Really Simple Syndication) is a method for making available regularly changing web content. An RSS Feed is a specially formatted file that is created by default by most blogging software platforms and by accessing this file anyone can see a summary of the latest posts without even having to visit the source website proper.

Geeklog CMS comes with a feature known as "Portal Blocks" which allows the webmaster to add an RSS Feed "widget" for any known website by simply entering the URL for that special website summary file. For example, the address for BlogDogIts' Feed File is http://blogdogit.com/backend/BlogDogIt.rss and by using any of several various so called "Feed Readers" a person might follow the posting activities of this website without necessarily visiting us directly.

The "Portal Blocks" feature will typically deliver a list of the headlines for a site, displayed as linking text to each article. I have long wished for the ability to capture only a sites latest post and have it reproduced in a dedicated widget to add this syndicated content directly into the page here at BlogDogIt.

Rather than wait, I have begun working on the development of an extension for the Geeklog platform that will allow the creation of a customized widget for featuring the latest content from a selected website. The working title for the project is RSS Tail.

The project is coming along nicely and the results will be exhibited among the left and right columns in the BlogDogIt Topic Area. Using the RSS Aggregator Function hack  as a starting point for the source code I hope to develop this feature into something useful for the many Geeklog aficionados.

If I am featuring your site and you would like that to stop please let me know. If your site is featured and you would like to offer advice on how you would like to be featured we can have that discussion as well. Your own website should offer several configuration options for how your RSS Feed file is created but the actual options are platform dependent. If your RSS is featured here feel free to tweak your RSS settings and see the results by checking right here.

If you would like to see your RSS Feed featured here please let me know and I will see what I can do. If you are interested in obtaining the code for use on your own Geeklog site I will gladly make it available to you on request - that's why it's called Open Source :D

 

My bookshelf has long been home to one of my all-time favorite non-fiction books: "Pirating Plants: The Gardener's Guide to Getting Something for Nothing" (1975 - Tobey Publishing Co.) This is a book I refer to often for both the information it contains as well as the swashbuckling entertainment it provides. In a purely innocent "where are they now" internet search for its author, Peter Tobey, I found myself emerged in some of the most enjoyable internet I have encountered in quite some time.

Thanks to his LinkedIn profile, I discover that not only is Peter Toby alive and well (a genuine concern often expressed toward those of my contemporaries who tend to exist mainly in my memory) but find him to be the CEO of an East Coast boutique marketing agency by the name of Fuse & Company. Among the impressive display of clients listed in this companies portfolio section of their website is one aptly (if not redundantly) named "EncoreAgain."

After exploring the highly effective e-commerce solution developed by Fuse & Company for EncoreAgain, I immediately sought and secured permission to share elements of his self-described "Tobey-esque" website with the readers of BlogDogIt and encourage each and every one of you to visit this most unique creation and by all means take full advantage of the "Once in This Lifetime Offer" presented therein (and only hinted at below...)  

 

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Brianna Wray - Interdisciplinary Artist

I have been keeping an eye on this lady for a couple of years now and feel the time is right for shining the BlogDogIt Spotlight her way. As a self-described interdisciplinary artist, Bri - I hope I can call her that - has her hands in many media of self expression.

With a flair for the upbeat she imparts through her art those properties we all associate with sunshine. With warmth she illuminates her world, highlighting the colorful nature of her creativity. Like those rays of sunlight we have all seen breaking through a sky filled with clouds Brianna breaks through the internet with a fresh and honest presence; a truly spirited artist and skilled internet artisan worthy of attentive patronage.

"...I’d like my work to contribute to fond memories and reflect the world around us in a whimsical way."
-- Brianna Wray - [Artist Statement]

On the WraysOfSunshine.com website Brianna has interviewed several of her local compatriots in the art world - gain insight into her love of art as she celebrates others who are driven to create. Perhaps one of the best introductions to Brianna Wray herself is in the form of this video self-portrait; Brianna: Wray of Sunshine - Final Project for Art360: 30:60:90: Identity & the Moving Image.

Enjoy!

The Video: https://youtu.be/eNl6j3B69AQ

Now how could you not want to learn more about this
ray of sunshine named Wray?  Her linkage:

After taking a little time off from blogging to recover from a debilitating, unannounced GoDaddy server swap^† I am happy to report BlogDogIt has (finally) been upgraded to the latest version of GeekLog CMS (GL_2.1.2 up from GL_1.8.1.) I had been putting off the upgrade because so much of the new system was not directly compatible with the older system, but when I could not get BlogDogIt to run on the new server I decided to "take the plunge" and do the update.

Although I had backups of the website complete with database I was still concerned since the tables used to store the articles were not the same as the backed-up version and required modification of the existing data structure to make it readable, so as to restore all articles to the BlogDogIt archives.

It was a learning experience that - in all likelihood - served to up my geek score a few points. It highlighted the fact that I do indeed know enough to be dangerous but also restored my confidence in my ability to learn what I needed to know to get the job done. There are still a few features around here that have yet to be restored (if you noticed any of them missing then bless your heart.)

After working so hard behind the scenes - up to my belt-loops in code - I have been itching to get back to the entertaining task of posting to this blog (in an effort to get that whole episode behind me.) It is only natural to wish to record for posterity the events of the last couple of weeks but I was torn as to whether I should share this tale or just opt for the usual sharing with y'all of something interesting that I've happened upon while perusing the interwebs.

Since I had not really taken the time to enjoy the internet at large lately, I instead choose to rely on my email inbox that today shared with me a suggestion from Ello.co that featured Lucya Koroleva; the creator of the goofy little gifs that now adorn this article. Those who regularly follow BlogDogIt will know I have an underutilized fascination with stop-motion animation (clay and otherwise - see The Great Race - among others) so you will have little trouble understanding why I chose to use these active little images as apt illustrations for this piece.

After following Lucya (nothingisfunny) on ello.co I was anxious to discover which (if any) other vehicles she has chosen to utilize to highlight her craft - I was rewarded with quite a number of sites and would like to share the following introduction made by the artist in a BoredPanda article:

I Make Short Claymations For Fun
Hi! Just wanted to share silly short claytoons, that I make. Shot on an iPhone attached to a tripod that is wrapped around a wine bottle, which is taped to the table - the usual setup in my "studio". Thanks for taking a look!

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 Explore the fascinating world of Lucya Koroleva
with the following links:

https://ello.co/nothingisfunny
https://nothingisfunny.tumblr.com/
https://www.instagram.com/ohmannothingisfunny/
https://www.etsy.com/shop/nothingisfunny
https://www.depop.com/nothingisfunny
http://www.boredpanda.com/author/if_the_kids_r_united/
https://medium.com/@nothingisfunny
https://www.facebook.com/nothingisfunnystore/

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