Blog finally upgraded from v2 (!) to v4. Not much new to the blog except some minor details such as Gravatars, comments RSS, upgraded XSLTSearch from Percipient Studios, design polish and more.
However, under the hood there are some enhancements such as Darren Fergusons excellent Feed Cache Package to speed up Last.FM, Twitter and Google shared RSS listings, and last but not least MetaWeblogAPI integration via Umbraco Content Channels. Man, I love blogging from Windows Live Writer!
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Blueprint is a lightweight and pragmatic CSS framework that works really well. It’s based on work by Jeff Croft, Erik Meyer and others and developed by a fellow norgweigan named Olav Bjørkøy. At its core the framework gives you a column grid where each column has a relatively small width and right margin. Then you have some CSS rules that lets you span, prepend, append, push and pull div’s inside this grid. Blueprint also gives you reset CSS, printing stylesheet, form styles, a typographic baseline and at there are tools out there for generating grids with custom column width and margins.
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Scott Hanselman had nice talk on OpenID recently. OpenID is the next generation of light-weight identity services on the web - one username, one password for all the sites you go to on the web. After listening to the show I headed over to www.myopenid.com (the OpenID provider atm) and created my very own account: http://solberg.myopenid.com/. Then I had to add a couple of lines to my blog to tell OpenID enabled sites I log into which OpenID server I use and my delegate:
<link rel="openid.server" href="http://www.myopenid.com/server">
<link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://solberg.myopenid.com/">
The registration process was very easy and I even got the chance to register on a couple of sites. The process goes something like this:
- Enter the URL for your OpenID enabled site, / in my case.
- You're then redirected to MyOpenID that identifies you and asks for your permission to send specific data about you back to the site, usually at least your e-mail address and name.
- You can the allow once, allow always or deny permission and if you permit your in :-)
At MyOpenID you can also view the places you've been to and remove permanent permissions etc. Really simple.
There are a few .NET libraries out there. I guess I'll wait a bit until they've matured a bit, hopefully an OpenID HTTP module will see the daylight in near future! OpenID enabling sites should be really easy though, not even Javascript is required.
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Here's a list of online tools I use on a regular basis:
How about you?
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Last.fm is a social network and music tracking site that is built on top of the Audioscrobbler system, a huge database that tracks listening habits and calculates relationships and recommendations based on the music people listen to. Audioscrobbler exposes a bunch of REST web services with profile data, artist relation data, recently played tracks etc.
With 3 lines of XSLT code you can have a list of your Last.fm top albums, just like in my About section. Umbraco extends XSLT files by default with the Umbraco.library. In this library there is especially one method that opens up the mashup-doors to Web 2.0 apps, namely the GetXmlDocumentByUrl(). The method wraps a WebRequest() and returns the content prepared as XML. (To create your own XSLT extensions, check out the Umbraco Wiki books).
XSLT:
1: <xsl:for-each select="umbraco.library:GetXmlDocumentByUrl('http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/rabagaz/topalbums.xml')//album"> 2: <img src="{image/small}" alt="{artist} - {name}" height="50" width="50" hspace="5" vspace="5"/> 3: </xsl:for-each>
Umbraco is your perfect companion for so-called mashups, especially because of its excellent Macro system that renders Macros (XSLT or .NET user controls) real-time in the Client. Head over to http://www.programmableweb.com/apilist and start mashin’!
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