The Backburner
“The road to hell—
—is paved with good intentions”, they say. Here is all the old stuff that I've done and just don't have the time or effort to look after any more. Some of these things will rise again, some are just not priorities, and some are doomed to obsolescence.
Snow Leopards
This is the most popular part of my site, but it's not actively maintained, and the whole thing is getting a bit long in the tooth. It's at least 5 years old, if not 7 or 8, and I won't get rid of it because it's obviously useful enough to get as many hits as it does.
Python iTunes library and favourite albums tool
A python library to parse the iTunes library XML file. The script that it comes with is one I wrote to list my top albums for the Library section of this website. It only works because I've rated all my music, so your mileage will vary enormously. It's written for python 2.3, and iTunes 4.7, but I've since tested it with python 2.4 and iTunes 6, so it seems to be coping with the mad future of robots, jet-packs and food pills quite nicely. It's a bit slow, and doesn't really tell you anything you don't already know, but I'm perversely proud of it. If you improve the code in any way, do let me know.
Thanks to Adam Twardoch for spotting a minor bug.
Download the python iTunes library and best-albums tool
Real True News
The back-end was accidentally lost in a server move (d'oh), so this no longer gets updated, but this was probably my favourite university project. It still works, but it's not updated any more, so go have a poke around and read the documentation to see what it's about. RTN is fun enough to get re-written one day, I think. Especially now that the BBC have Backstage.
Add stripes and highlights to tables
We use this on our internal contacts database; just include it in a web page's <head> section, and it'll add styles to certain HTML tables to colour alternate rows, and highlight the row your mouse is hovering over, without messing up your HTML. It's a peculiar hybrid of two javascripts, neither of which are mine, so all credit to them. An example can be found at the bottom of the file.
PHP Livejournal tools
Old, probably-broken, throw-away scripts I wrote in the dim pre-history of time (okay, three years ago or something). Here are scripts to turn Livejournal XML backups into browsable HTML, and turn Livejournal XML backups into Movable Type import format.
Snippet - Livejournal Latest Entry
This one's for a friend's website, but it might as well be for yours too. Feed this function a Livejournal username and it'll run off and get the Atom feed that LJ generates, then extract the first entry from it, up to the first lj-cut tag (if there is one). It's not perfect, but it's pretty good, and (I think) nearly always returns a usable array of information (Title, Link, and HTML content), even if it's old or made-up. It requires a couple of PEAR modules, but there's details in the script about that and how to get around it if you can't install your own. I've tried to make it a good net citizen - it won't make concurrent requests (i.e., it won't spam LJ servers), and it only downloads the full Atom feed if the header's "last-modified" date is newer than the cache file, so it should stay comparatively quick.
Known issue: this occasionally buggers up, and I've not had the time or the will to debugger it, because deleting the cached files seems to solve the problem.
Download LJGetLatest (documentation in the comments at the top of the file)