Chris’ Blog

I am always looking for new ways to do things. A few weeks back I wanted to subscribe to some newsletters at work. I noticed however that my inbox (which I try to keep empty) was being cluttered with newsletters I had not yet had a chance to read. Newsletters just don’t work in my inbox for me, I’d rather have an rss feed – but these companies don’t offer them – so I started looking for an email to rss feed application. I’m not going to be specific with what I found (you can google if you are interested) but there are some that use IMAP, some that are disposable emails, but nothing that really did it for me. Then I stumbled upon something someone had written and it was just what I needed. It still works great so I thought I’d share. What I did is I created a new blog for that topic or newsletter (some go to the same blog) on blogger. I then use a filter to forward my newsletters to the blogger auto post email which is setup to publish automatically. The emails become blog posts which has an rss feed which I can then subscribe to. I even set the filter to archive the messages and mark them read (and in some cases apply a label) – I still have the email if I want to go back and read it, but now I have it as am rss feed too!

I have finally uploaded my Ajax Todo list so that others who want to can use it. There are a bunch of files so I zipped them all together into a zip file which can be downloaded from the page. It requires PHP and MySQL to work. A working example can be seen here: http://hesswebservices.com/download_scripts/TodoV1

This script is an extension to one found here.

More information (and eventually more scripts) can be found here.

BYOOS stands for Build Your Own Operating System – it is our final project for my Operating Systems (IT 344) class. Its a bit deceiving as it sounds like we are going to build the whole OS, however we just have to basically implement an OS into a system. My system is two Linux web servers that are backups of the other. When a person connects to the system they are sent to a load balancer (this is actually running on CYGWIN on my windows desktop machine). I am also going to use this setup for some of my Networking project. If you want to see the servers, you can get to the webpage at hess.selfip.com – Right now all it does is tell you the server that you got sent to. It will be either 192.168.4.100 or …4.101 – I’ll update when I get a chance.

Well life has gotten busy! School starts, and thats the end of it! I have to work 20 hrs a week, and now I have labs, homework, and just busy work. Physics is killing me because probably mainly because I don’t own the book… I’m thinking maybe I need to buy it. And Probably spend time reading for my classes… Well I don’t really like that idea, but I’m guessing I’ll have to. I also worked a bit more on the family web page this weekend. It was a day off and I didn’t feel like working. I now have a way to upload pictures (only *.jpg now) and it creates a thumbnail for each image. It also now has an image viewer that is written in ajax. This was a nice setup but now I have to setup a way for it to only show the particular user or family pictures. I also fixed the time option so that it displays as AM and PM, and that it shows NONE if no time is given. I also started to create a date range option which shows a calendar that someone can click to fill in the date boxes. It looks ok although I haven’t uploaded it to the live site yet. Maybe sometime this weekend… Back to school work!

Well, it seems that I am not very good at this blogging thing… I only choose to do it when I don’t want to do what ever it is that I am supposed to be doing. Well this weekend was a busy one… I worked long and hard on the Family Web page. Its looking pretty good, however I noticed that much of the work I did was more fine tuning, and not huge breakthroughs – on the live site that is. I spent a considerable amount of time working with file uploads, and an ajax image viewer, but I don’t yet know how to implement that within the whole thing. should every user get their own image folder? or how do I really want to do it… Its funny how I might leave these questions now for a couple of days, and when I come back I may just have an answer… Or… I might not… So I’m supposed to be doing some kind of homework right now – well, I have a reading and quiz due at 9 am, a set of homework problems due at 5pm (for the same class, but I don’t have the book here…) And I have a lab due at 5 also. To top it all off, tomorrow is supposed to be the day that I work real hard and get lots done at work so that I don’t have to work so hard the rest of the week So its going to be a fun day! I really should do some of these website evaluations for my lab… Or maybe I will find a good way to do repeating events in a mysql calendar…