Blog television

Some time ago I’ve read somewhere that blogs are a television of the Internet. Well, I do kind of agree to that, but the statement is still arguable. Not any more. With BlogTelevision.net you get exactly that. A syndication of movie clips from a huge number of blogs. Their motto is: “Stop reading and start watching”. Overall a cool site that will eat all your bandwidth limitations in no time. Be warned!

lj2mail

With this script I will terrorize my friends from today onwards. What it does is get all the recent posts from some LiveJournal blog and email them as separate messages to a list of recepients. Subject of the blog entry is used as a subject of the email. Body of the message contains of text and the permalink.

In order to use, first configure few simple variables at the beginning of the script, providing LJ credentials, list of recepients, address to use in the From: field and a file to keep the timestamp of the last syncronization.

Changes: in this version I have fixed encoding fo the body and subject. Body can now be recoded with Text::Iconv module to any encoding from the default UTF-8. Subjects are additionally fixed to be base64-encoded.

lj2mail.pl

Continue reading lj2mail

Yet another blog

Some time ago I have registered at LiveJournal.com. Originally, I did it to be able to search for blogs by region. It turned out that this feature was available only to paid accounts. I thought that I won’t be needing this account anymore.

After some time I found myself posting comments to different LJ blogs using my account. But I was getting warning that my account is about to be deleted due to inactivity.

Today I got an interesting idea. I am getting emails from some mailing lists with jokes and funny stories. I usually forward the best ones to few friends of mine via email. Instead, I will post them in my LJ blog and will do the forwarding from there using RSS feed and a simple Perl script.

This way, I will be able to maintain my LJ account and share the funny stuff with more people, while doing less. Long live Perl and RSS!

Pulp Blogging

Do you know all those cheap newspapers they sell at the city square kiosk? They are printed on the cheap recycled paper, which looks yellwish. If it doesn’t, than it gets yellow from time, but very shortly after you buy it. These kind of newspapers always carry really strange and weird stories about aliens, superpowers and such. In Russian, these are called “yellow press” (word-to-word translation).

There are similar newspapers in many countries of the world, I guess. Additionally to such newspapers, there are cheap books about pimps, drug lords, supercops, etc. They are roughly of the same quality and value as those “yellow press” newspapers. These books (and sometimes journals) are known by the name “pulp fiction”, if I am not mistaken.

Considering all of the above, if I am writing some “serious” stuff like this post about Keanu Reeves soul, using only free (as in beer) software, then does it mean that I am doing “pulp blogging”? Or am I writing “yellow posts”?