September 20, 2004

New RSS Feeds!

Earlier today my pal Eric reminded me that RSS feeds are pretty cool. I mentioned in a previous update I would eventually make some RSS feeds for the site, and since I didn't sleep tonight I did just that.

There is probably going to have to be some refinement on these, but they seem to work fine now. I have made 4 of them, and plan on making at least one more for the media section. The first one is located at http://www.dujodu.com/feeds/feed.php. This feed covers all the news sections (code, blog, updates). The other 3 are just a breakdown of that feed so that you can choose which feeds you want to subscribe to. they are:

http://www.dujodu.com/feeds/blog.php,
http://www.dujodu.com/feeds/updates.php,
http://www.dujodu.com/feeds/code.php.
and for completeness http://www.dujodu.com/feeds/feed.php.

I think that is pretty self explanatory, so that's all for now.

Oh yeah, if you want to read about RSS and how to make a feed for your site, go here.

By: Dustin DuPree

Add Comment

September 17, 2004

[PHP] Cached fopen();

Here's a great one, cached fopen.

function cached_fopen($file, $file_mode, $timeout_seconds = 600, $cache_path = "/tmp", $error_report = false){

	clearstatcache();
	$cache_filename=$cache_path . "/" . urlencode($file) .".cached";

		if (!( @file_exists($cache_filename ) and ( ( @filemtime($cache_filename) + $timeout_seconds) > ( time() ) ) ) ){
			
			if($error_report) echo 'Caching new file '.$file .' in '.$cache_path;
			
			if(!$f = fopen($file,"r")){
				if($error_report) echo 'ERROR: Unable to open remote file: '.$file;
				return false;
			}
			
			if(!$f2 = fopen($cache_filename,"w+")){
				if($error_report) echo 'ERROR: Unable to open local cache file: '.$cache_filename;
				return false;
			}
				
			while ($r=fread($f,8192) ) {
				fwrite($f2,$r);
			}
				
			fclose($f2); 
			fclose($f);
		} else {
			if($error_report) echo 'Using cached file: '.$cache_filename;	
		}
	
	$handle = fopen($cache_filename, $file_mode);
	return $handle;
}

This is based off of some code I found in a comment on php.net under the fopen function. I modified it a little bit. I've gotta find a better way to do this code section.

By: Dustin DuPree

Add Comment

September 8, 2004

Insomnia.

I don't know what it is with me and wild sleeping patterns. It's pretty annoying when it comes time for the school year though, and also pretty confusing. I mean I'm tired, I didn't get much sleep last night, I KNOW I have to get up in 4 and a half hours to go to school, but I can't force myself to go to sleep. Why? I have no idea.

While trying to sleep I came to realize that having a blog really isn't something to be ashamed of. I used to think a blog was just a place for people to whine about stupid crap like insomnia and how depressed they are, the main objective being to get attention. I've come to realize that blogging is a pretty cool concept though. Not only is it kind of like a journal that you can look back on to remember what the hell happened last week, since it always seems like last week didn't happen, but it is also great for archiving information that you might actually want to look at sometime "down the road". I'm going to start using this more for useful resources I find and things I think I'm going to want to remember/use in the future. The best part about an online blog as opposed to a written journal is that other people can benefit from it. I've come across plenty of useful information while searching that is due to a blog. Besides, no one is even going to care about the personal stuff that you write in a blog unless they are poor depressed teenagers looking for someone to relate to. The only problem I see with a lot of blogs is that people just let them die, and then they have like a 2 month archive, which isn't very useful. Also, the lack of comments on personal blogs kind of kills the "community" aspect of them, if people were more willing to add comments and contribute to the topics in a blog entry they would become even more useful. At this point I'm rambling on about how I've just discovered that blogs aren't always pointless self indulgent diaries when I should be sleeping. So I'm going to shut up about that.

A recent update that isn't really adequate for the updates section has sprung up over the last week or so. The "Dujodu Web" menu item with two children - "Games" and "Dujodu TV". "Dujodu Web" is pretty lame, so I think I'm just going to put these under "projects" since that is pretty much what they are. You can check out the Coming Soon flash animations for the dujodu tv section which I think are kind of cool, and you can click on the "games" link as much as you want.. but nothing will happen. To get to dujodu tv click one of the fifty links I've made to it here, because the button doesn't work since I changed the file names, and I'm far to lazy to fix it right now. I'll explain Dujodu TV a bit here for anyone wondering what the hell it is - I have some footage of pretty random non-contextual things (if that word even exists/is being used correctly here - if not, you know what I mean). These things don't really warrant their own media item, not that I've even added videos yet, but they are cool regardless. I'm going to use Dujodu TV as a platform for my random video doings, as well as any video projects that I might create. That's all for now, catch me next sleepless night for more pointless babbling!!!