HasEditableOptions

So I took a break from doing some WLWP work to check out the latest beta of Firefox 2. While the new UI is nice in some places and well not so nice in other places, it seems very stable.

The one thing that caught my eye with the first Beta release was the announcement of Microsummaries in FFX2. Basically, if the site has a microsummary file (an XML doc), this summary file can be used in your bookmark area to show a snippet of the site. Or a kind person can generate one for your site if there isn't one already. Check out the ones that have already been created here.

So if you bookmark w00t and select the Live Title version of the bookmark, your book mark will display the current item and the price for it. Clicking on this will, of course, take you to w00t.com.

You can read all about on the Mozlla site.

I'm still not exactly sold on the idea. I mean really what can this functionality give me that RSS doesn't already? Even so I decided to create my own. I decided to create one for last.fm to pull the last track that a person listened to.

Click here to install the last.fm microsummary.

Here is what the summary should look like if you were to bookmark my last.fm page:

I'm not sure the duration between updates is. So far I have to manually refresh the title by right clicking on the bookmark and clicking 'Refresh Live Title'. There also is no setting for changing the iterval of updating the title text.

I'm still scratching my head about how useful this feature is. I'm still going to get the most up to date information from a sites RSS feed.

Or maybe I'm missing the point? Maybe it's really there for users to get updated information from sites that don't expose RSS. If only you could cache each update somewhere. Or maybe that's the next evolution for microsummaries, could the possibility for updating the RSS integration in FFX2 to use the microsummary generator functionality for sites that don't have RSS.

I'm releasing my .Net iTunes Album component. It works just like this one for perl, only you can use it from your .Net Applications. I'm actually going to be building a WLW Plugin that will allow you to embed your Currently Listening Tracks Album art into your blog post.

Download here

I'm rocking out to Sleater-Kinney's song Jumpers.

Scott's new plugin is hella cool. Copy the URL of the video (YouTube, Google Video, Yahoo!, MySpace or MSN SoapBox) you want to embed and paste it into Live Writer and it will auto create a thumbnail for you and the appropriate HTML Object stuff.

Nicely done.

So keeping with the theme that I'm a horrible coder, I created a SongBird extension that will put all of your track information in the same place that iTunes and Windows Media Player do. So needless to say, this is pretty much a Windows only extension. Now all of you that are converting over to SongBird can still get the Currently Listening love in your Windows Live Writer.

You can snag the xpi here: http://jtsquared.net/songbird/media_blog.xpi

Since there really isn't an UI for this and knowing that some people still want screenies, here is one of the Extensions dialog showing the extension (Media Blogger) is actually installed.

As with all my little coding tidbits you can send me any issues at soulposition at msn dizzot com or leave a comment here.

Also, I'd be remiss if I didn't give a huge shout out to the guys that came up with the Audioscrobbler plugin. With out that as an example I would have never completed this plugin. Huge thanks!

I'm currently listening to Admit It!!! by Say Anything from the album ...Is A Real Boy (With Bonus Disc)