digg

Huge buzz on the web today about D-Wave:

• The Techworld article that started it all: "Quantum computer to debut next week"
• The Slashdot post that followed
• Guardian Unlimited's "Computers are about to take a quantum leap into the future" and hit digg's home page.
• This blog post on engadget.com: "Quantum computer to debut next Tuesday?" was dugg and also hit digg's home page.

Here's my original post about our upcoming demo.

I found a really neat site that can generate custom feeds. I really wanted a way to not only get a feed of the most popular articles today on digg, but also have links directly to the dugg article, not to the digg page (sorry digg).

This site called RSSxl Beta could do it. I entered:

• Page URL: <a href="http://www.digg.com/view/all/popular/today">http://www.digg.com/view/all/popular/today[/geshifilter-code]
• Start String: <div class="news-body">
• Start Item String: <h3 id="title.*?">
• End Item String: <div class="news-details">
• Start Description String: <p>
• End Description String: </p>
• Link Number: 1

That will give you a nice feed of the most recent 9 items on visible at http://www.digg.com/view/all/popular/today. The only downside is that it only displays 9. I am thinking I might write my own script to do this in python using a similar method to that done by RSSxl Beta.

Update: Just modified the "start item string" a bit. Didn't realize you could use regex.

I found a secret Digg feed today. I have been looking for a while for a way to get a feed for the "Top Today" page because the regular digg feed has too many articles. It turns out it does exist although it doesn't seem to be advertised anywhere on digg's site. Here is is: http://digg.com/rss/toplinks.xml.

I can't seem to get Digg.com's "blog this" feature to work with my Drupal blog. I was able to get it to work at one point but it is really inconsistent and unrepeatable. One of the main issues I have been having is with my username having a space in it (it was "David Grant" before). Now I have changed it to "David Grant" to remove any possibility of that being a problem. I keep getting this stupid error: "You either tried to edit somebody else's blog or you don't have permission to edit your own blog." But I did have it working with these same settings before.

The same problem applies with 43things.com blog integration feature... I tried setting my blog-type to Wordpress but no dice...

Update (2006-07-29): Almost got it working. The key was enabling the blog module and enabling the "edit own stories" permission under "blog" under "access control." It turns out that there is no problem with having a space in my username. There is one small rinkle, however, and that is that with digg.com it always wants to create a "blog" content-type, not a "story." By putting a watchdog statement in the blogapi.module I was able to see that digg.com is sending "1" as the "type" argument to the blogapi_blogger_new_post function whereas the gaim-blogger plugin is sending "story". The numeric type causes drupal to create a blog entry, even though I have explictly told the blogapi to only create story nodes, at the blogapi settings page (admin/settings/blogapi). I haven't figured out exactly why this is happening yet.

Update (2006-07-29): Got it working to my satisfaction but it's an ugly hard-coded hack. I hard coded $blogid='story'; to force all new nodes created with the blogapi to be of type "story". This will obviously fail miserably for any user that doesn't have access to create stories although that doesn't matter for me since I have just a single-user blog. Well all this has made me wonder if I should use the "blog" content type as my main content type. Here's the patch anyways:

--- blogapi.module.orig 2006-07-30 00:43:52.000000000 -0400
+++ blogapi.module      2006-07-30 02:41:20.000000000 -0400
@@ -191,6 +191,7 @@
   }
 
   $edit = array();
+  $blogid = 'story';
   $edit['type'] = _blogapi_blogid($blogid);
   // get the node type defaults
   $node_type_default = variable_get('node_options_'. $edit['type'], array('status', 'promote'));