Action Streams Blogcritics Plugin

Table of Contents

1. Requirements
2. About the Plugin
3. Installation
   1. Method 1, Using the Control Panel
   2. Method 2, Manual/FTP
4. Configuration
5. Fetching your stream
6. Information retrieved
7. Known Issues
   1. Find me elsewhere
   2. Prettying results and HTML in titles
8. On Action Streams
   1. A completely gratuitous spiel on ActionStreams
   2. A bountiful harvest
   3. More is less and less is more
9. Sample Template Code
   1. Illustration
   2. Variable
10. Credits and acknowledgements

1. Requirements

• MT 4.2. Not tested with any earlier release.
• ActionStreams Version 1
• Also runs on Version 1.1-Alpha
• An account at blogcritics with something posted there (um, useful to have this, yes?)

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2. About the plugin

AS-Blogcritics uses the MTActionStreams architecture to pull your feeds from Blogcritics. Technically, you could pull the feed of any author on BC, but why would you want to do that?

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3. Installation

The usual:

Method 1 (recommended)

Upload the tarball to the root of your mt installation:

/server/path/to/mt

Unpack it there with your Control Panel's File Manager extract utility or a shell command. It will preserve the directory structure and set the file permissions correctly.

Method 2 (manual)

FTP the folders and files as follows:

/mt
   |
   |__ plugins
   |  |
   |  |__ ASBlogcritics
   |     |
   |     |__config.yaml
   |
   |__ mt-static
      |
      |__ plugins
         |
         |__ ASBlogcritics
            |
            |__ images
               |
               |__ bc.png
   

If these directories don't exist, you will need to create them. Or just FTP both folders and the files with them. Change the permissions for config.yaml to 755.

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4. Configuration

There's nothing to configure really. Log in to your MT installation. Click on your name/profile. Click on Other Profiles. From the drop down list, select Blogcritics.

Enter your Blogcritics username. Be careful about the capitalization and the spacing. If your login name at BC is, say, John Doe, your BC username is John_Doe. You can find your username by opening any article you wrote and scrolling to the bottom. In the box with the dotted lines you will find a link on the right to an RSS feed of all articles by <your username>. Click that. In the address back, you will see a URL like this:

http://blogcritics.org/archives/authors/John_Doe.xml

John_Doe is your username. This is case-sensitive. If you don't get this right, it won't work.

Do not check at your html writer's page, which is

http://blogcritics.org/writer/john_doe

because that is not case-sensitive and using this will give you an error.

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5. Fetching your streams

After you enter the username and click okay, AS will run it's first scan and start pulling your posts. You may encounter a situation where nothing seems to show on your page.

If that happens, go back into your profile page (you should still be there) and click on ActionStreams. Very likely, you wil see a whole bunch of your BC streams/feeds with little road-work caution signs against them. Select these and select show at the top of this menu (not show all, as this will display all your feeds and streams from all your profiles). They should show up now.

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6. Information retrieved

AS-BC is designed to fetch more than just the title of your post at BC. It will also (and not optionally), fetch the date of the post and its category. As explained below, you can choose to show, suppress or modify this information.

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7. Known Issues

Find me Elsewhere

Ken pointed out that on his installation, the plugin did not work with the Find-Me-Elsewhere widget. It failed to fetch the correct URL. With much help from him, I finally figured that the error is because of the difference in syntax between ActionStreams version 1 and ActionStreams version 1.1-Alpha.

AS v1.0 uses this to fetch the URL:

http://blogcritics.org/writer/%s

AS v1.1a uses this

http://blogcritics.org/writer/{{ident}}

AS v1.0 does not understand {{ident}} in the URL, nor does it parse it and returns it literally, thus throwing an error.

AS v1.1a understands both %s and {{ident}}. So I have stuck to that.

Prettying Results, and HTML in the Blogcritics Stream Title

The default ActionStream tag returns a really ugly result, like this:

<i>Kill Bill Vol 1</i> on Thu, 26 Feb 2004 23:01:40 EST 
in Video <i>Kill Bill Vol 1</i> on Thu, 26 Feb 2004 23:01:40 
EST in Video 2008-09-11T11:34:07Z 2008-09-11T11:34:07Z

Ken has confirmation from Phillip Winn over at Blogcritics that BC's stream does not strip HTML in post titles (most, if not all, other streams seem to do so). Winn also says that getting the BC stream to kill all HTML is a huge task, so that's not going to happen anytime soon if at all.

The display of HTML tags you see here has nothing to do with this plugin, but with the way AS pulls feeds, and the way <MTStreamAction> renders those results in the default template. The templte also contains a template tag modifier that strips HTML and hence any formatting.

This means that you can either live with this ugliness on your page, or you must edit the template. That's a one-time job, and I highly recommend it.

For an HTML-formatted title, you should use

<MTStreamActionTitle>

instead of

<MTStreamAction>

That will give you:

Kill Bill Vol 1 on Thu, 26 Feb 2004 23:01:40 EST 
in Video Kill Bill Vol 1 on Thu, 26 Feb 2004 23:01:40 
EST in Video 2008-09-11T11:34:07Z 2008-09-11T11:34:07Z

See below for more, including modifying the returned date.

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8. On ActionStreams

A completely gratuitous spiel on ActionStreams

ActionStreams is pure genius.

I mean that. Seriously. Every which way you look at it. The idea behind it: automatically pull information about all your activity on the Net and put it one place. The way it's been done, with such elegance, speed, economy and lightness of code. Ok, so it may have a few bugs, but it's really one of those breakthrough plugins.

It's a Black Swan event ... now that's from Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book, The Black Swan in which he argues that seemingly random, totally unpredictable events that are considered improbable in the current received wisdom have a disproportionate impact in their field and beyond.

Of course Taleb is talking about history and economics. But much the same is true here at MT. To my mind, there have been only two Black Swan plugins: Kevin Shay's Right Fields and Mark Paschal's ActionStreams.

Neither was a mere workaround or solution to an existing problem. Both came out of nowhere, with no antecedent or precursor, displayed a breathtaking leap of imagination and effected a radical change in the way we use (even perceive) MT. It's sad that we don't have RightFields for MT 4+.

An aside: It is unfair to compare Arvind Satyanarayan's CustomFields with RightFields. CustomFields is totally brilliant, but it is in many ways a descendant of RightFields. Back in the days before MT4, with all its bells and whistles and asset-management, RightFields did everything that CustomFields later went on to do, and more. RightField's "LinkedEntry field" functionality is totally awesome. It is only recently being deployed in PHP over at ExpressionEngine, in a sort of souped-up version that combines a free or tag search with a LinkedEntry paradigm.

RightFields and ActionStreams stand alone. There must be a different universe for them. More than any other single plugin I can think of, they showed us the possibility of the improbable.

MT is never going to be the same again.

A Bountiful Harvest

AS is a combine harvester. 

It grabs everything you want it to grab. With all the online services available today, whether they're blogs, websites, seeds, articles, whatever, you sign up, put in your name and AS tracks what you're doing and spits out the result. No more copy-pasting of Javascript code that might or might not work or might or might not be updated and might or might not leave ugly error spaces at 12 midnight so you get a heart attack the next morning when you look at your page.

More is Less and Less is More

AS's documentation isn't complete by any means, and it doesn't address itself to any principle of design or usability (and no reason it should). The temptation then is to pull every single thing and have it displayed.

I think this is utterly and totally wrong. AS gives you options. Pulling everything is not a viable option.

If we are to design attractive, meaningful pages that draw viewers and readers, we need to exercise restraint and make intelligent choices. Banging in every little bit of trivia is not an intelligent choice. It is, in fact, guaranteed to put people off.

The default template code is only a demonstration of AS's capabilities. I don't believe it's meant for real-world deployment. I dislike intensely  the "noisiness" and chatter it generates. It makes pages looks terribly busy.

Also, I find that muddling these streams is really messy. I like the idea of separating the content otherwise than by date; ideally, by stream. That makes it easier to position constantly updating events on your pages. You could, for instance, in a three-column setup, have one sidebar with just your books and music, and in another, perhaps slightly larger, sidebar, some photos from Flickr or Smugmug or whatever. There are some excellent examples by Richard Benson, some based on Mark Paschal's own Order plugin. I can't believe that Order was written without precisely this realization—the need to sort content—in mind.

But it all depends on your approach and your audience. If you think your viewers are going to be interested in every single thing you've done, then by all means put it out.

More likely, though, you will hook a viewer and have him come back to your site if you give him something of substance. And to do that effectively, you do have to organize the material.

And that means you do have to get your hands dirty and modify the default template code.

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9. Sample Template Code

Illustration

Here's what this does:

1. The first line limits the entries in the stream to 5 (lastn="5") and to the blogcritics service (service="blogcritics")
2. <MTStreamActionTitle strig_tags="1"> puts out an html formatted version of the title. Strip_tags is an alternate to the remove_html template tag modifier.
3. <MTStreamActionVar name="written_on" trim_to="16"> pulls out the date of the post and trims it to the first 16 characters, so you get Sun, 26 Jul 2008. trim_to is a template tag modifier.
4. <MTStreamActionVar name="in_section"> pulls out the category/section of your post at Blogcritics.

Typically, this would give you:

The Lazarus Project on Sun, 26 Jul 2008 in books 

Without this template modification, you will get

<i>The Lazarus Project</i> on Sun, 26 Jul 2008 23:01:40 EST in Books 

or

<i>The Lazarus Project</i> on Sun, 26 Jul 2008 23:01:40 EST in Books 

The variables

The plugin has two special variables:

• written_on : which pulls the date of your entry (not the date of the modified stream)
• in_section : which pulls the primary category/section of your entry.

You can use them in the manner shown in the illustration.

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10. Credits & Acknowledgements

Impossible to thank Ken Edwards enough: for his patience, good humor, his horrifying ability to manage (apparently) without any sleep or rest, for correcting the PNG icon, for pointing out the %s v/s {{ident}} discrepancy. I couldn't have finished this without him. I started it, but it's fair to say that he completed it.

Su at the forums for pointing me to the subversion. Arvind Satyanarayan for sorting out the permissions problem for plugin submissions. And, of course, Mark Paschal ... sans qui, rien.

All defects, errors and mistakes are mine.

Nothing in this plugin is in any way protected. Feel free of modify, change, chip, chop at will. A little credit goes a long way, though ...

Feedback much appreciated.

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