Stefan’s Stuff

Lately I’ve been using Facebook a lot, so I installed the Wordbook Wordpress plugin to update Facebook when I update my blog. Hope it works.

I wrote a plugin for MT called MTYahoomaps. After a little research, looks like Avi Alkalay made a Google maps plugin for Wordpress. The implementation is very straight forward and well documented. I should have a lot of fun playing with it and checking out the PHP code.

11 Madison Avenue
NY, NY 10010

Music I’m listening to right Now:
“Goodnight Goodnight” Maroon 5 from the “It Won’t Be Soon Before Long” Album.

After Updating the DB via the command line (NOT a fan of a GUI update!) and following my own instructions on how to install my own plugin, So far so good.

After I'm happy with my Test Server results, I'll document each step I took. Each One Note: rebuild seems to take longer than the 3.2 version, but it might be just my perception as I'm not really timing it. 

Image from my Poor Editing of a "Built for Movable Type 3.2" banner…

Music I'm listening to right Now:
"Over My Head (Cable Car)" by The Fray from the "How to Save a Life" Album.

Update: Got my first "HTTP Error 500 - Internal server error"! This is reassuring since I'm running a server with less than the recommended Hardware specs. Everything looks ok, probably took too long for the Web servers liking. You can see the test server here.
 

Took a look at the Yahoo Maps API Flash Docs and discovered that they updated the API to version 3. Seems to be a little more stable, so I’m adding some functionality to the MTYahooMaps Plugin I wrote. I’ve added a “mapsathyb” keyword that will take “map”, “sat” or “hyb” as Parameters.

Update: Got the bugs out and it seems to work well in the Flash version. Need to clean the code a little and figure out how to add a recenter button.

Another Update: Fixing the AJAX version. Also Switched to Yahoo Geocoder. Above is the Flash version and below, AJAX.

Yet Another Update: Just a comment really; I haven’t looked at the code in a long time. Even though I Commented it, it still took me a little to figure out Why I did somethings in the Perl Code…

You can get the Updated program here.

Music I'm listening to right Now:
"All Eyes on Me" by Goo Goo Dols from the "Dizzy Up the Girl" Album.

Every now and again I visit Arvind Satyanarayan's blog just to see what latest goodies he has come up with. After using EnhancedEntryEditing and SCode, He now has LivePreview. You can read about it here .

The long and short of it: It allows you to preview the Entry Prior to publishing. This saves a lot of time and effort. Like his other plugins, fairly straight forward to set up.

Music I'm listening to now:
"Wisemen" by Jame Blunt from his "Back to Bedlam " album.

After seeing plenty of Downloads of my MTYahooMaps Moveable Type plugin, I received my first Email asking for help making it work. (They left out a step. Note to self: make Documentation more readable…)

I write programs for purely selfish reasons: I like writing something and seeing it work as intended, preferably doing something interesting. I do it as a professional and as a hobby. When someone else can use something I’ve done, I get satisfaction that it’s useful to other people.

The MTYahooMaps plugin isn’t a terribly complicated program and I wrote it using MTGoogleMaps by Nick Punter as inspiration. Yahoo Maps isn’t quite as ready for Prime Time as Google Maps is, but it’s a start. I’m hoping that Yahoo Maps will become more functional as time goes by (It’s still Beta, after all)

If I write another plugin, It will be for my satisfaction, but I hope other people find it useful.

After much trial and Error, I'm just about ready to release the MTYahooMaps Movable Type Plugin.

It works in a similar way that MTGoogleMap by Nick Punter does (in fact this was originally based on MTGoogleMaps). A container tag called "MTYahooMaps" is created that accepts the following Parameters:

• address = Postal Address i.e. "499 Park Avenue, NY, NY, 10022", Required
• lat = Latitude i.e. "40.762979"
• log = Longitude i.e. "-73.969966"
• info = Informational Text (No HTML)  i.e. "Corner of 69th and Park Ave."
• zoom = Numeric Zoom Level i.e. "3" (Defaults to "2")
• width = Width of Map in your Post. Numeric and in Pixels i.e. "540"
• height = Height of Map in your Post. Numeric and in Pixels i.e. "300"
• align = Alignment of your map in your Post. i.e. "left","center", "right" (Defaults to Center)
• maptype = AJAX or Flash. (Defaults to AJAX)
• mapsathyb = map, sat, or hyb (Defaults to map)

Example:

<MTYahooMaps
address="11 Madison avenue,NY, NY, 10010"
info="A Nice Place"
width="540"
height="300"
zoom="3"
maptype="ajax" mapsathyb="hyb"></MTYahooMaps>

String this out with no Carriage returns. My Advice, try resolving addresses at http://maps.yahoo.com/ and get the ZIPCODE. 

If you use  lat and log, address will not be used to resolve the coordinates, but is still required.

Update: Now Handles multiple Markers 

Update: Now uses Yahoo Geocoder, uses MAP, SATELITE, or HYBRID and the FLASH version works better too. It will also convert "|" to "<BR>" when put in the info and address parameters.

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