Google Sitemap template for Movable Type

I got annoyed that all the current Google happy site maps for Movable Type out there are not complete, and do not span you're entire site's pages… therefore I made another one. Feel free to take it and play, so long as the top notice is kept.

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
    <urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84
    http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84/sitemap.xsd">

<!– Google XML Sitemap Template for Movable Type by Andy Callaghan –> 

                <url>
                          <loc><$MTBlogURL$></loc>
                          <priority>1.0</priority>
                                <MTEntries lastn="1">
                          <lastmod><$MTEntryModifiedDate format="%Y-%m-%d"$></lastmod>
                                </MTEntries>
                          <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
                 </url>

                 <url>
                        <loc><$MTBlogURL$>archives.html</loc>
                        <priority>0.9</priority>
                               <MTEntries lastn="1">
                        <lastmod><$MTEntryModifiedDate format="%Y-%m-%d"$></lastmod>
                               </MTEntries>
                        <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
                </url>

                <MTEntries lastn="5">
        <url>
            <loc><$MTEntryPermalink$></loc>
                  <lastmod><$MTEntryModifiedDate format="%Y-%m-%d"$></lastmod>
                        <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
                        <priority>0.8</priority>
        </url>
                </MTEntries>

                <MTEntries lastn="5" offset="5">
        <url>
            <loc><$MTEntryPermalink$></loc>
                  <lastmod><$MTEntryModifiedDate format="%Y-%m-%d"$></lastmod>
                        <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
                        <priority>0.7</priority>
        </url>
                </MTEntries>

                <MTEntries lastn="10" offset="10">
        <url>
            <loc><$MTEntryPermalink$></loc>
                  <lastmod><$MTEntryModifiedDate format="%Y-%m-%d"$></lastmod>
                        <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
                        <priority>0.6</priority>
        </url>
                </MTEntries>

                <MTEntries lastn="1000" offset="20">
        <url>
            <loc><$MTEntryPermalink$></loc>
                  <lastmod><$MTEntryModifiedDate format="%Y-%m-%d"$></lastmod>
                        <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
                        <priority>0.5</priority>
        </url>
                </MTEntries>

              <MTTopLevelCategories>
                <url>
                       <loc><$MTCategoryArchiveLink$></loc>
                       <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
                        <priority>0.8</priority>
                       <MTEntries lastn="1" category="<$MTCategoryLabel$>
                        <lastmod><$MTEntryModifiedDate format="%Y-%m-%d"$></lastmod>
                       </MTEntries>
                </url>
            </MTTopLevelCategories>

             <MTArchiveList archive_type="Monthly">

             <url>
                       <loc><$MTArchiveLink$></loc>
                       <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
                       <priority>0.6</priority>
             </url>
            </MTArchiveList>

    </urlset>

How to Hack Silverlight for Linux in 21 days

A developer and his team from the Mono project were offered by Microsoft a 10 – 20 minute presentation on the Mono project's efforts on bringing Silverlight to Linux. As all they had working at that point was a rectangle that could move a bit and not much else, the team decided that they would stage a 20 day hack-a-thon to complete as much Linux XAML implementation as possible before the talk which was going to be 21 days later.

At the SLIDE7 event a Microsoft speaker said that they were developing the Silverlight plugin for both Mac and Windows; IE and Firefox — but not for Linux, as there was 'not enough demand' for it. 

It'll be great to see the new 'Moonlight' plugin for Mozilla when the first few alpha or beta builds surface.  

MS Slide7: Go to hell Hull

I recently went to a Microsoft event in Reading called SLIDE7. We were informed of the event by a lecturer at the University. It is a Web development day put on by Microsoft, dedicated to students; Or at least I thought it was…

Upon arriving at the event, we passed mild-to-medium security, as each visitor had a unique badge to identify them, and to allow them access to the event. As I am an idiot, I signed up my Hotmail account over 5 years ago, so my badge said (with all appropriate Microsoft branding, of course ;P ) …

Andy Callaghan
Jib Corp.

The day began with a strongly Silverlight themed keynote speech by a senior education guy at MS. We were shown what could only be described as an advert for Silverlight, including skaters, young people, 'Web 3.0', nothing related to Silverlight whatsoever and lots of lovely swirling colours. Pretty!

What I couldn't stand was that at the beginning of the presentation, the speaker personally thanked the University of Hull for various things (I can't remember what now). This is the same University of Hull who have three of the five Software Engineering Imagine Cup invitationals, and stole the title this year away from fellow friends competing in the UK finals. It was so plain to see that some obvious dodging dealings had happened between Ms and Hull over money and Imagine Cup success in exchange for fresh young MS ready clones graduates.

A little birdie told me that the 'reason' why Hull 'win' the IC UK final so much is that their first year Computer Scientist's get taught C# in the first term. Not exactly from basics… At Reading, we got taught C and then C++ which is a lot more solid introduction to good programming skills. C# teaches jack.

Ehem. 

My group of friends then decided to go with the beginner track rather than the advanced track, so we got ASP.NET and more interestingly a mis-titled talk called 'Mobile Web Development' after lunch, which was incidentally extremely nice and was effectively all-you-can-eat, as MS had order about two lunches per person at the event. Woot!

The mobile development talk however was presented by none other than Hull's very own Rob Miles. The lecture was good, but we were all a bit miffed to be taught in effect, by the enemy. Here a picture of the event that the lecturer took on the day of all the attendees in his talk…

I am the hairy on the 4th row from the front, 3 seats in from the right.

I think this is a good place to point out that in all the talks, something went wrong. Not saying that it's the speakers fault, as I know how hard it is to put on events, but it is sweet to see MS techies squirm as they claim that the application is failing as "it's only an beta version".

At the end of the day we received a surprisingly good lecture about Silverlight. MS plan to make Silverlight compatible with IE, Firefox and Safari on Windows and MacOSX.

At the end of the talk, my friend Ruben asked the speaker "Why are you providing Silverlight support in Linux?", at which point the speaker conveyed that there is simply not enough demand for Linux for it to be worth their while. Fair enough I guess, at least they acknowledged it's existence…

After the Silverlight talk we had a complementary BBQ, and then we all went to the pub and then back home. Good times!

New personal code website

I'm setting up a new C, C++ and PHP coding website, where I'll be releasing select scripts and programs that I complete.

The first project that has just been uploaded is the Facebook + MovableType Mashup plugin. 

Please visit: http://code.andycallaghan.com

Facebook App v1 complete

After a good coding session, I've completed version 1 of the Microplop.com Feed App.

This is it's main canvas page:

As you can see, the layout is not completely polished, but it does the job quite nicely at the moment.

Here is a use of FBML, the Facebook markup language:

Tacky, I know.

Here is the settings page.

This is  where the true desiging comes in: Left nav canvas.

This appears in the profiles of the users who add the application. 

… and so do this – the wide nav canvas.

I will soon release this as a Movable Type plugin, so that blog owners can install it on their webserver, and have a permanent presence on Facebook. 

I love the Facebook Platform

Of late I have been tinkering and experimenting a lot with the new Facebook Platform which has recently been released.

Firstly, I created an app that pulls the last 4 entries from a Movable Type installation, and presents the page in such a way that enables Facebook users to comment on posts, which the current 'Notes' application from Facebook does not. My app also grabbed the text and comments straight from the database rather than the RSS feed – therefore enabling a lot more functionality.

I plan to release this as a Moveable Type plug-in when I get the time to normalise the code and clean-up the appearance a little. Apart from that, the bulk of the system work is done.

The new Facebook platform in my humble opinion is excellent. It allows you a clean and consistent bridge from php (or perl, java……) to a Facebook canvas page. You can have as many canvas pages as you wish and they are essentially glorified iframes, which are hosted on apps.facebook.com/whatever.

They produce a great challenge for up-and-coming programmers (such as me) to flex their implementation skills at php, Moveable Type mark-up, and the new Facebook mark-up language – FBML.

After a little while of my app appearing on my Facebook profile, my lecturer for Programming (who is also on Facebook) liked it, and offered me to do a presentation and workshop with fellow Computer Scientist peers at University next Wednesday!

I can't wait!

Here's the Microplop.com Facebook App

Apple release Safari Beta for Windows

In a move to further Apple's brand on PCs, they announced yesterday that the new Safari 3 beta version is to be made available for Windows users. In a statement, Steve Jobs said:

"We think Windows users are going to be really impressed when they see how fast and intuitive Web browsing can be with Safari. Hundreds of millions of Windows users already use iTunes, and we look forward to turning them on to Safari's superior browsing experience too." Source

I believe that the new version of Safari will convert some Firefox users, and hopefully in time – IE users. For Apple, it is yet another demonstration of Apple furthering their brand to the average Microsoft user.

Without the iPod, Apple may well be now dead or nearly so. 

So far, the iPod has been hugely successful at making young people aware of Apple, and the style they bring. The Safari GUI being a more mature version of the iPod's design will inevitably draw the iWhores in.

ProBlogging

I'm curretly in a special IT lecture called ProBlogging that the University of Reading is putting on after the end of exams, run by Mike Evans. We are to start a new blog of a high quality and with focused articles with a mind to optimising the content and eventually making a mint with Google Adsense.

I heard about the course early on in the year, as Mike was heavily gloating at the fact that he makes enough money to retire on. He showed his Google Adwords earnings gleefully to the open day students we were showing round. It was so funny to see all the eyebrows in the room raise as the seemingly timid lecturer demonstrated that you can earn a hell of a lot of money.

Being a poor student, I plan to create a seperate ProBlog with my Uni friend Ruben, and report back on here to how it's going.

Visitors up by 300% on last month

Woo!

I must be doing something right: Visitors increased three fold from April to May. This may not sound like a big deal, but if my stats keep improving like this, I should be getting upwards of 12,000 visitors a month by next month.

From last month, the most popular visitor origins were as follows:

1. USA
2. UK
3. Australia
4. Japan
5. China

Good to see Microplop not banned by the Great Firewall of China just yet then…

Blog on!