I've been a fool!

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Made a classic, school-boy error last night...

Was moving a movabletype installation from 2 recently decommissioned dedicated servers to a cloud hosting environment and noticed that the wonderful people at the new place allow you IP access to the MySQL servers.  "Great" I though, I can use the MySQL migration toolkit, this will be a breeze.  So I restored the backup from the dedicated servers to an intermediary server (can you see where this is going yet?) and the proceeded with the transfer.

I didn't think to check if the database name from the backup was the same as one on the intermediary....

And so I lost everything!  Scoured all 4 PCs I use regularly for backups and found one from January (it's just a personal/dev server so I rarely back it up).  Luckily I'm not a prolific poster so putting back all the posts was easy but I've lost all your comments since then.  And I had to take the site down to stop any republishing overwriting what I have left.

Sorry about that!

Hoping to get back to normal (ish) soon, the biggest loss to me is the massive archive of action stream data I had built up, I use it as a personal link/video archive and also like to go over and see what other things I was doing on certain days, now it's all gone!

YUI Editor in Movabletype v1.2

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Another simple update to use the latest YUI library (2.7.0)

There's changes in config.js and js/load.js as the Element utility came out of Beta

BBC Publish F1 Calendar as iCal

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Congrats BBC, this is a brilliant idea, everyone go there and tell them how wonderful an idea it is and that they should carry on doing it.  Go on, do it now, I'll wait.....

For those without iCal, here's the schedule displayed nicely on the web for you.  This should keep itself up to date, and if the BBC add the rest of the season, I'll update this page as well so bookmark it to keep up to date with the schedule.


Embedding YouTube videos from Action Streams

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The next logical step from displaying a thumbnail of your posted or favourite videos is to actually enable playing of the video in your own webpage.  Thankfully, this is simple with youtube's embed code and your Action Stream.  I've now added this to my video calendar page and i think it looks good and works rather well.  It may be a little to much to add it to the home page, plus we don't want that to slow down any, it's already having to grab resources from all over the place anyway, so adding 9 embedded videos may be a little too much!

Code after the jump..


Action Stream 2.0 field list

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Please Note: This is for version 2.0 of the Action Streams plugin, for the 1.0 list see this post.

Differences and additions between v1 and v2 are highlighted in yellow.

Additionally, v2 has not yet been officially launched, as such this list may change between now and launch and I will only be highlighting differences from v1 to v2, not from now to v2.

The following is a description of all the fields found in the default plugin (without any additional profile plugins) in the following format:

  • service_type
    • stream_type
      • MTStreamActionVar name="xx"
One important difference to note is that between "stream_type" and "service_type". The difference is a stream type gathers together similar feeds, i.e. the photos stream_type will be all services where you post photos to, whereas a service_type of “flickr” will just be all actions based on flickr (including favourites etc).

Removing a Drive from a Spanned Volume

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When I needed more space in my main PC, I went for the (then) cheaper option of 4x 250GB drives over one large one, and as I wanted to avoid problems with moving the disks I didn't use the motherboard's RAID features and instead went with Windows dynamic discs and a spanned volume.

Time moved on and I wanted some of the contents of that drive on my main PC and the rest on the media PC, but I had nowhere to store roughly 1TB of data whilst I re-arranged the disks.  After much research on the net everyone told me that it wasn't possible to remove a single drive from a Windows spanned volume.  That's never stopped me trying before and I am glad to say that I managed it!  Instructions after the jump.

YUI Editor in Movabletype v1.1

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This update merely makes the plugin use the latest (2.6.0) library.

A small change was made in config.js, so back that up if you've made your own customisations, and change ConfigYUIBase to be "http://yui.yahooapis.com/2.6.0/build/".

The other change is in load.js, so if you are hosting the YUI scripts locally you'll still need the update.

Download YUI Rich Text Editor for Movabletype 4 v1.1

Sporepedia Action Stream v0.3

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Updated to show creations now that the official site has an RSS feed.

Working on achievements and Sporecasts for the next versions

2008 Christmas list #0000001

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Anyone out there trying to find the perfect Christmas present for me (surely you all are?) need look no further, as always, eBay has the answer.


Built for a TV special, this working Ballista weighs 12 tons and is about 7.5m high.  I'm sure for the extra £17.5k their asking to put it up, they can find a way to squeeze it into my garden.

MT.org Action Stream 0.1

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A very simple action stream to add your activities on MT.org to your stream.

The plugin pulls in plugins you have posted and your "activity" as defined by the list on your profile page.

As the actual XML for your recent activity is not very useful, this pulls out the relevant information and formats it for stream display.

This first version is rough round the edges for the "activity" stream, I would prefer it to display exactly as it does on mt.org, but the plugin section is as good as it will get!

Feed and category available as usual.

Download movabletype.org Action Stream v0.1

Recent Comments

  • Hey Richard, this plugin is great on the formatting and usability side. There's one slight (well, bi

    me.chrisfullman.com
    YUI Editor in Movabletype v1.0
  • Many thanks, Richard. This is very useful. I have to confess that I am having great difficulty wrap

  • The main reason is because of the quality of the feeds, that there is more than one of them and that

  • Hi Richard, I just installed the plugin and was surprised by the action streams it registered. Look

    Arvind Satyanarayan
    MT.org Action Stream 0.1
  • Richard, this is AWESOME. Thank you so much for writing it. Your plugin directory submission sugge

    Arvind Satyanarayan
    MT.org Action Stream 0.1
  • For the benfit of anyone else reading this, here is an example of adding another service to the ones

  • Thanks Phillip! The easiest way to collate other streams is to duplicate what is in the code for la

  • Hey great tutorial. How would i do this for my twitter and digg streams - they get VERY busy in my

  • Hi Richard! A perfect approach and it is a pleasure to read a native speaker's words. PS I borrowe

  • Hi Richard, I've just teached my Actions Streams a new trick: Grouping of Action Streams items, jus

  • Hi Richard, many thanks for your perfect translation. I couldn't have done it better and so this tr

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