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Pass It On
There are precious few times in life when I feel truly clever, tonight (eerrrr, make that this morning), however, happens to be one of this times.
A few days ago I saw a cool little addition on a blog that I was reading. Basically, it was a little automatic set of links that allowed readers a simple way to submit the blog post to all the various social networking sites, like Digg and del.icio.us.
I instantly decided that I simply must have this feature on my journal! (If for nothing else than figuring out how it worked from a technical standpoint.) A quick scan of Movable Type plug-ins on the Six-Apart website turned up an interesting plug-in called "Promote This!", which appeared to add just the functionality that I was looking for.
The installation instructions were sparse and thank goodness I knew about the little addition that's required for running MT cgi scripts on Version 5.0 of Microsoft's IIS server (Linux users may stop snickering now!):
use File::Basename;
use File::Spec;
use lib File::Spec->catdir(dirname($0), "lib");
(Trust me, that's vital information right there!)
Anyhow, after a little fiddling around, I got the plug-in up and mostly running, one of the news service links didn't work and there were 3 services that I wanted to add to the list.
So, after taking a deep breath, I jumped head first into the actual PERL script of the plug-in. You must understand, of course, that I know almost nothing about PERL, but after swimming around in code for a little bit the basic structure of the plug-in started to make sense.
In the end I was actually able to correct the problem with the NewsVine link and add the 3 services I was interested in: Linkroll, StumbleUpon and BlogMarks.
Pretty sweet for somebody with no functional PERL coding experience! I passed the updated version to the original author of "Promote This", here's hoping that the updated version goes public!
In the meantime, if you visit permalinks for my posts you will find a new section called "Pass It On", which, if you deem an article to be of worth, you can use to instantly submit the article to your favorite service.
Thanks and Enjoy!
Posted by Dylon on November 30, 2006 3:52 AM |
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Comments
Thank you very much. I have incorporated your changes and have released a new version of Promote This, due entirely to your changes. Awesome.
Hey, thank you very much! I wasn't sure what to expect having never contacted a software author before, thanks for making it such a positive experience!
Well you did everything right. Open source software believe it or not is kind of a lie. The idea that if you simple open source the software people will contribute is not really a realistic expectation. So having you contribute your changes back is truly awesome. You should seriously be proud of yourself. So many people I think don't contribute back because of fear, or the feeling that their change is so minor it couldn't possibly be of value.
So kudos.
Thank you once again! I have really enjoyed the experience of contributing to an “open source” project. Not being a real programmer it’s not something that I had every given much thought to, but now that I’ve had such a cool experience, it makes me wish I had the “mad skillz” to contribute to more open source projects!
I think that my fondness for contribution to software projects came from the old days when I used to tech support for a small, family-run, shareware-based, computer game developer. It was great when I was allowed to contribute to projects through testing. Although, I eventually lost my job because I was offering too many “contributions”, it was still a pretty good experience. However, I really think I prefer the community spirit of open source, as opposed to the closed world of a standard developer.
April 2008