The UK TV Guide for Mambo component is basically a XML RPC client thats talks to the XML RPC server here at nodetraveller.com and renders the data it gets back in a nice way. The component has been released for a few weeks now and I’ve actually been using the service for a long time before that too so its probably a good time to let people know how to access it….
Because the UK TV Listings webservice is implemented using XML RPC it means anyone can access it via a XML RPC client. More…
I was a bit disappointed with the standard rss feature in Mambo as it only supports rss 0.91. Suprisingly, there wasn’t a component available that outputs the content in any of the other formats so I thought I’d give it a go. No point in reinventing the wheel so I made use of an excellent class called FeedCreator. It can output in RSS 0.91, 1.0 and 2.0 as well as OPML and ATOM 0.3.
Also supplied is a module that will display the links. The actual links are configurable, in that you can specify what formats your feeds are in (Take a look on the right). Also you can add custom links and images with the module eg the mamboserver.com link is a custom one.
You can download it at mamboforge or from the my downloads section
[Update]I’ve released a beta version of RSSXT 2. New features include remote blogging and pinging of aggregator sites. You can download it at the mamboforge site
I’ve just completed a component for Mambo. As you can probably guess by the name, it retreives and displays the TV and Radio listings for the UK. At the moment, there is a choice of over 60 channels and two ways of displaying the listings; columns and timeline.
I spent a bit more time on the UI than normal but finally I’m pleased with it. It works using XML RPC, connecting to my service and then displaying the listings. I hope to post more about the XML RPC service soon but I need to finish off a project before I do…
Anyway, click the link in the menu and take a look. You can also download the component here from this site or from mamboforge.
I knew I hadn’t posted in a while but I didn’t realise it’s been almost 3 months! What have I been up to?!
I’ve been doing a lot of work with Mambo recently and I like the thing so much I think I’m going to be moving the backend of this blog form Movable Type to Mambo. The main reason for this is that I’ll need to put up a version of Mambo up anyway to demo the things I’ve been working on, so I might as well use it to blog as well. Also any features that Mambo doesn’t have or I don’t like, I can add it myself, someting I couldn’t do quickly with MT as I don’t know much perl.
So quite soon, hopefully within two weeks, this site will change quite a bit. After that I should have more time to blog about what I’m up to….
I’ve been using an opensource CMS application recently called Mambo.
We needed some kind of CMS for our own site and after looking around, weren’t really happy with what was out there..
The sites based on *nuke seem so chaotic. But not Mambo. The sites created with Mambo are nicely designed and user friendly. But the admin interface is absolutely brilliant! Its a well designed system with a great community. Theres quite a few templates around which quite nice to look at. Also there are some components and modules around which are actually useful for non-community sites.
If you need a nice CMS and more, take a look…and prepare to dance…
..since I’ve posted. I’ve been busy with a couple of projects and haven’t had much time. These projects were Java and PHP based with pure HTML frontends but could probably be enhanced quite nicely if using Flash. I’ll probably add this to my list of things to do with Flash. Lately this list of mine is getting longer; either my creative think tank juices are overflowing or there’s never enough time.
Having said, things have eased up somewhat though and I’m hoping to squeeze some time in to look at Central. It’s been near the top of my list for a while and it looks like fun….If I get the time to really get into it, I’ll let you know how I get on…
This may be a few months old but I only just discovered it. This article discusses Jakobs Nielsen 1994 usability heuristics for desktop applications with respect to Rich Internet Applications. Most of us might be used to website heuristics but RIAs are more like desktop applications and should be treated similarly and the article explains how.
I’ve been a bit busy over the last week or so and haven’t had time to do post anything or even read ppls blogs. But I had a rather pleasant surprise when I caught up on my reading and found Mario Klingmann at Quasimondo had mentioned this site on his blog! Very nice indeed! Thanks Mario…
I’ve got a few flash projects in the pipeline that I’m hoping to find the time to work on. When I do, I’ll expect to post a bit more frequently…..
I haven’t had time to post anything recently but I have had time to quickly cobble together a little app using flash 2004 and its components. Yet another rss app but it shows nicely the usage of various components, old and new, that 2004 offers.
It uses the Accordion and TextArea UIComponents and the XMLConnector to load the urls of the feeds to download. Flash’s css support is also demostrated within the textarea. The actual loading of the feeds is done via remoting (2004 remoting and amfphp) which utilises a nice little rss parser from www.readinged.com called onyx-rss. The feeds are cached on the server and updated every 3 hours.
You can see it here. Depending on your connection it may take a few seconds to get the data so please be patient. If you want to download the fla,.as files and server code then grab this zip. Read the comments in the .as files if you want to run it on your server.
Update: Noticed that Jesse Warden also has a accordion based rss app. Besides the use of the accordion, it is different, but shows a slightly different way of doing the same thing. Go on take a look…
Now Actionscript is OO, I thought it would be useful to try out implementing a design pattern in Flash. The pattern I chose is the Memento pattern, which is mainly used to implement “undo” functionality in applications. The reason I chose Memento is because its a pattern that uses interfaces and I wanted to explore this in AS 2.0. An interface is an object that defines methods but has no implementation.