Blogawa.ca now has three new contributors: our geeky pals at
Zone 12, the highly fashionable
Dare to Unravel, and the contentariffic
Hello Ottawa.
((blogawa++)++)++
For some of us, making it big is getting cross posted to the
Make blog. By that measure, the folks on Ottawa’s
Zone 12 Project blog have made it with Nigel Vezeau’s fantastic
child-size recumbent trike. (And yes, I’ve asked them if they’d be willing to have Z12 added to Blogawa)
For the past couple of weeks, Blogawa has been misbehaving. It’s been quietly ignoring posts from Perspective Ottawa. I use FeedWordPress to aggregate posts from around town, so this weekend I looked into it a little more seriously.
After I upgraded to the latest FeedWordPress, I started seeing errors like:
WP HTTP Error: Operation timed out after 10000 milliseconds with 48,382 bytes received
when I manually refreshed Perspective Ottawa’s feed. With a bit of digging, I discovered that there’s a default timeout of 10 seconds in the library FWP uses to download and parse RSS feeds. I’ve pinged the author about it, but in case you’re having a similar problem, here’s my fix:
- Edit your-wordpress-directory/wp-content/plugins/feedwordpress/feedwordpress.php.
- Search for function fetch. You should find the function near line 1407 (for FWP version 2010.0905).
- Under the line $feed = new SimplePie();, add: $feed->set_timeout(25);.
- When you’re done, your code should look something like:
- Go to your blog’s Syndication admin page, and update your feeds. If you get PHP syntax errors, you made a mistake.
With that fix, FeedWordPress and I are now BFFs again.
Boo! After hours of hard work, I managed to get an
AWN helper (nerdspeak for “a thing that shows stuff on my computer’s status bar”) for
Workrave included in the official distribution (nerdspeak for “now everyone can use it”). I pinged
OMG Ubuntu to say “hey! you like docks, and I wrote this thing! you should mention it,” and
they did. They just left my name off the attribution.
All that hard work and no cred to go along with it.
ScraperWiki just got a little more awesome.
Dave0 put together a
scraper that crawls the City of Ottawa website and makes the
development applications machine readable.
A couple of years back I floated the idea of
portable website scrapers that would be able to programmatically pull information off of websites regardless of language and platform. The folks at
ScraperWiki have gone so far as to actually do it. Their version scrapes publicly available information (meaning that my use case of scraping my bank statements is out of scope) and stores the result in a
publicly accessible manner. Props!
“The problem is TransFair can’t limit the usage of ‘Fairly Traded.’ They can & rightfully do frown upon...” 
“Just for your information “Fairly Traded” and “Fairly Traded Certified” are two different things....” 
“Bevans, I think you need this plugin http://wordpress.org/extend/pl ugins/time-machine/ It lets you do hourly.” 
“you don’t have a clue unless you’ve went through it or know some one who has.My daughter was 7 of age when she...” 
