It’s always interesting to see these release spikes in download traffic. Note that this release was on the Wednesday but that was during the day, so Wednesday’s traffic is still higher than the normal ~300/day level, while the big peak (by day) is on Thursday. Too bad wordpress.org doesn’t give me hourly stats, though I guess that would be a little ridiculous.

YARPP is just about at that 35k download mark. I’m looking forward to the next release. ^^

Related posts:

1. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin 2.0
2. Keep up with Yet Another Related Posts Plugin with RSS!
3. Modifiying WordPress plugin activation behavior

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Last.fm offers a number of Flash-based widgets you can add to your website. Unfortunately, this doesn’t give you much flexibility and, of course, requires Flash. But you, dear friend, have a site written in PHP, and the rankings are just XML files. There is a better way.

Looking around on the web, there are some good instructions and recommendations for using PHP 5’s object-oriented XML support. But, as we know, not everyone is using PHP 5. Here’s what I did on my PHP install, which includes the DOM/XML and DOM/XSLT extensions.¹

Write your XSL Transformation

The first step is to write your XSL Transformation, or XSLT, a special XML “program” which takes an XML file and reformats it into another XML file. Remember when you learned in Algebra class what a function was? An XSLT defines a function from XML to XML. In our case, we need to take a special proprietary XML file like the this one for my weekly top artists and return some solid XHTML.

Let’s take a look at the XSLT I used: (it helps to take a look at the original XML file at the same time.)

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:template match="weeklyartistchart">
<ol>
<xsl:apply-templates select="artist[position() &lt; 6]"/>
</ol>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="artist">
<li><a><xsl:attribute name="href"><xsl:value-of select="./url"/></xsl:attribute><xsl:value-of select="./name"/></a><span><xsl:value-of select="./artist"/></span>: <xsl:value-of select="./playcount"/></li>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

The full spec description will give you all the juicy details, but you really only need a few basic details (or you can just steal my code). First, we note the <xsl:template match="weeklyartistchart"> and <xsl:template match="artist"> items. Each of these code blocks describe what to do to each <weeklyartistchart> and <artist> nodes, respectively, in the input XML. In the code above, when a <weeklyartistchart> is found, an ordered list is opened and the artist template is applied to the first five (position() < 6) <artist> nodes. In the artist template (<xsl:template match="artist">), the script takes each <artist> and prints a list item with the name of the artist, with a link to the url given in the original <artist>’s <url> subnode.

Process the XML with your XSLT

Once your XSLT is written, save it to a file, like last.fm.xml. Now we’ll use the DOM/XSLT extension and apply this XSLT file to the live weekly artist chart XML file from last.fm. Here’s the code I used:

$chartxml = domxml_open_file("…/weeklyartistchart.xml");
$xslt = domxml_xslt_stylesheet_file("last.fm.xsl");
$charthtml = $xslt->process($chartxml);
echo $charthtml->dump_mem();

The code is pretty self explanatory—just four lines: 1. open the remote XML file using domxml_open_file, 2. open the stylesheet (XSL transformation), 3. apply the stylesheet to the remote XML file, and 4. echo the output.

That’s it! You can see the results here on my music page.

Related posts:

1. Updating your zenphoto theme for zenphoto 1.1
2. Buklavu
3. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

I recently got Daring Fireball‘ed too,² so that almost makes us a celebrity couple.

I personally like the caption right above. That’s the same story, right?

Related posts:

1. Great news! You can opt-out from Omniture’s 192.168.112.2o7.net

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

This posting is now outdated… for the latest information on YARPP, please visit YARPP’s very own page on my site, or its page on wordpress.org. If you have questions, please submit on the wordpress.org forum. Thanks!

Description

Today I’m releasing Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP¹) 1.0 for WordPress. It’s the result of some tinkering with Peter Bowyer’s version of Alexander Malov & Mike Lu’s Related Entries plugin. Modifications made include:

1. Limiting by a threshold: Peter Bowyer did the great work of making the algorithm use mysql’s fulltext search score to identify related posts. But it currently just displayed, for example, the top 5 most “relevant” entries, even if some of them weren’t at all similar. Now you can set a threshold limit² for relevance, and you get more related posts if there are more related posts and less if there are less. Ha!
2. Being a better plugin citizen: now it doesn’t require the user to click some sketchy button to alter the database and enable a fulltext key. Using register_activation_hook, it does it automagically on plugin activation. Just install and go!
3. Miscellany: a nicer options screen, displaying the fulltext match score on output for admins, an option to allow related posts from the future, a couple bug fixes, etc.

Installation

Just put it in your /wp-content/plugins/ directory, activate, and then drop the related_posts function in your WP loop. Change any options in the Related Posts (YARPP) Options pane in Admin > Plugins.

You can override any options in an individual instance of related_posts using the following syntax:

`related_posts(limit, threshold, before title, after title, show excerpt, len, before excerpt, after excerpt, show pass posts, past only, show score);

Most of these should be self-explanatory. They’re also in the same order as the options on the YARPP Options pane.

Example: related_posts(10, null, 'title: ') changes the maximum related posts number to 10, keeps the default threshold from the Options pane, and adds title: to the beginning of every title.

There’s also a related_posts_exist) function. It has three optional arguments to override the defaults: a threshold, the past only boolean, and the show password-protected posts boolean.

Examples

For a barebones setup, just drop <?php related_posts(); ?> right after <?php the_content() ?>.

On my own blog I use the following code with <li> and </li> as the before/after entry options:

<?php if (related_posts_exist()): ?>
<p>Related posts:
<ol>
<?php related_posts(); ?>
</ol>
</p>
<?php else: ?>
<p>No related posts.</p>
<?php endif; ?>

Coming soon (probably)

1. Incorporation of tags and categories in the algorithm. I’ve gotten the code working, but I still need to think about what the most natural algorithm would be for weighing these factors against the mysql fulltext score currently used (and works pretty well, I must say).
2. Um, something else! Let me know if you have any suggestions for improvement. ^^

Version log

1.0 Initial upload (20071229)

1.0.1 Bugfix: 1.0 assumed you had Markdown installed (20070105)

Related posts:

1. Introducing Smartdate

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

This blog post describes release 0.1… For the latest description, check out the WP-Smartdate plugin page or mitcho.com/code.

Please comment! I would love to hear your feedback on the plugin.

Description

WP-Smartdate looks for relative date expressions in your blog posts, such as “tomorrow,” “this coming Monday,” “last Friday,” and adds the date reference (like “2007-11-26”) as a machine-readable microformat.

Why Smartdate?

WP-Smartdate was created for three simple audiences:

1. For the machine: While many professional information retrieval algorithms go far beyond the scope of this program, smartdate helps the process along by adding machine-readable tags to relative date expressions.¹ In addition, these machine tags, in turn, help the human: a search on Google for “November 7th, 2007,” for example, will not pull up a document talking about “yesterday,” written on the 8th, but it will pull up the smartdate output of 2007-11-07.
2. For the human reader: Blog posts are often written in the “now,” using relative time expressions without concern for how the text will be read in the future. WP-Smartdate makes such posts easier to read and comprehend temporally².
3. For me: Because I think this sort of thing is fun!

A typology of smartdate date expressions

The following types of expressions are resolved with respect to the speech time—in WP-Smartdate’s case, the blog post date.

1. simple references: “yesterday,” “today,” “tomorrow,”
2. next/last DOTW expressions: “next Friday,” “this past Sunday,” “this Monday”

For the future

• static dates: “January 1st, 2007”
• duration shift expressions: “5 days ago,” “fourscore and seven years ago”
• day of the week shifts: “2 Fridays ago”
• clean up the code!

Related posts:

1. Yes, I have a blog
2. How I name my kids

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

The goal is to document my experience and thoughts. I fully expect my biggest reader to be myself. ^^

“By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.” -Confucius (citation needed)

mitcho

ps: I’m experimenting with WordPress and my custom theme… please be patient as I tweak this setup to match my needs.

pps: Oh no! My Chinese is MIA! Wehave to fix that, won’t we? UPDATE: Fixed.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.