I’m building my personal page right now, and since I write 2 blogs of my own (with one more coming up) and contribute to 3 other blogs I thought it would be a nice feature to have a list of my most recent posts on my personal page. You could of course always update the list by hand, but how much easier it would be to get it done by a script. It turns out that this is harder to do than it sounds, but a tool I found, called Magpie RSS makes the job easy (or easier, rather).

If you want a simple job done quickly then download the tarball file (for Windows users, I know Tugzip will unpack it for you) and upload the four .inc files and the extlib directory to your server. You then just place some simple php code where you want the list and off you go.

There is one option that I found really useful, namely that it doesn’t only understand a set number of tags. As long as they are in the following two forms Magpie will understand them. <field_name>value</field_name> <namespace:field_name>value</namespace:field_name> This is great if you need some customization, let me show you a quick example of what I needed and did.

continue reading "Pull feeds into your website and customize them"

CD to HTML can create an html file that contains information about a directory, its subdirectories and files. The source directory can be any folder or drive connected to the Windows installation which makes it an excellent tool to create an index of files before burning them to CD or DVD. That index file could then be included on the media to provide users with fast access to all files on the disc.

The process itself is fast and simple. The source directory is chosen at the beginning. The user has the choice to select a CD drive directly or browse the computer to pick another folder.

The target folder and filename of the html file is defined in the second step. CD to HTML will automatically pick the name of the root folder as the title of the html file. The title can be changed in the same menu as well if another title is preferred.

continue reading "CD to HTML"

Open Office 3.0 beta has been released by the Open Office development team and is ready to be tested by the large community. The biggest change in my opinion is the support for Microsoft Office 2007 files, you know those docx, xlsx and pptx type of files that could not be opened not long ago and caused a lot of frustration by users who received such files from colleagues or friends. Other additions are Mac OS X and OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.2 standard support.

The beta can be downloaded and installed on computers that run Windows, Linux, Solaris or Mac OS X Intel Aqua. Localized versions are available as well and can be downloaded from the external mirrors that host all localized builds.

A Beta page lists all of the features that have already been implemented in the current Beta of Open Office 3. It divides the changes in New Core Features, like the import filter for Microsoft Office 2007 formats, Core Features that have been introduced in minor releases since the release of Open Office 2.0 and Features that have been released as extensions or complimentary tools.

continue reading "Open Office 3.0 beta released"

SMPlayer is my video player of choice. It comes with the most commonly used video and audio codecs installed and it is quite uncommon that one runs into a video that cannot be played out of the box in SMPlayer. A great advantage of SMPlayer in my opinion is the way it stores the codecs. They are actually stored in the SMPlayer directory and not global codecs which means it is highly unlikely that you will run into incompatibilities.

I recently discovered that a so called additional codecs package for SMPlayer, and MPlayer obviously, is available and can be installed to support additional video and audio formats. These codecs will also be installed as so called binary codecs straight into the SMPlayer folder.

The major problem that I ran into was that I was not able to find a list of the codecs that are installed this way. The only possibility that I can think of right now is to search for the filenames in a search engine which will reveal their purpose. The codec package adds 63 new files to the codec directory. I probably would only install it if I would encounter a video that I could not play properly though.

continue reading "SMPlayer Uncommon Codecs Package"

Another busy week with lots of software updates has ended today and I really don’t know where to begin. Many applications that I use on a daily basis have been updated again and it becomes harder keeping track of all the updates.

This week was incredible and I had some troubles picking the right software for the update of the week spot. I decided to give it to Unlocker this time, an invaluable tool that saved me many times from smashing my keyboard at the nearest wall because Windows did not want to delete a file that definitely was not in use anymore insisting that it was still in use.

As always, if you know of an update that is not in this list let me know about it and I will make sure that it will be included if it is a good fit.

continue reading "Software Updates Week 18"