blog.kentarok.org

Blue Dot is a prospective newcomer of social bookmarking systems. I knew it, try it and have been assured that it brings new experiences to our everyday life.

Blue Dot is not just another social bookmarking system. It has some features others don't have.

Easy to set up

Blue Dot provides not only a bookmarklet and IE toolbar that helps users to clip the resources on the Web quickly, but also easily understanbable presentation how to install the helper tools into their browsers.

Cool posting interface

Of cource like most competitors, Blue Dot also supports to post an entry by helper tools, but it differs considerably from others. Firing the bookmark on an entry you want to clip, a cool form appears. And you can add a note on it, rate it, tag it, set an image extracted from it as a representative. The process ends up without moving to other page, so you can post very quickly.

Access control by friendship

Blue Dot enbales you to control the access for every posts by your friendship.

A Dot for "Me" is exactly as it sounds - for your eyes only. If you mark a Dot to be shared with "Me", it will only be visible to you while you are logged into your account. A Dot for "Friends" can be viewed by anyone in your Friend List. A Dot for "Everyone" is available publicly.

Source: Blue Dot: Frequently Asked Questions

Auto-clipping your blog

Blue Dot has a feature that it observes your blog for new posts, and clips them automatically. Your friends can make a comment on them at Dots. It feature currently supports only Blogger, LiveJournal, MySpace and WordPress. I hope that it supports more blogs before too long.

I think Blue Dot still have much to be improved: more comfortable user interfaces, feeds of "Friends' Dots" and all like that, liquid designing for various environments, and so on. Anyhow, I'll watch its development for fun.

lurker-san posted an entry describes how we can make GNU screen indicate the count of unread entries on livedoor Reader on its hardstatus line. It's interesting.

Well, I think lurker-san's approach might provoke too much frequent access to LDR's API.

screen.info says:

Command: backtick ID LIFESPAN AUTOREFRESH COMMAND [ARGS]

(snip)

The specified LIFESPAN is the number of seconds the output is considered valid. After this time, the command is run again if a corresponding string escape is encountered.

How about the problem? I'm not sure that I've understood what the document describes...

So then, I'll show you another solution. typester told me it. See for the Bloglines version: .

Meanwhile, screen.info says:

If both the LIFESPAN and the AUTOREFRESH parameters are zero, the backtick program is expected to stay in the background and generate output once in a while.  In this case, the command is executed right away and screen stores the last line of output. If a new line gets printed screen will automatically refresh the hardstatus or the captions.

I'll apply this feature to this one.

First, after setting your user name on livedoor Reader as "USERNAME", save the code below as a file named "ldrcheckunread", and locate it on the path your system can find it.

#!/bin/sh

USERNAME='user name'
INTERVAL=600

while true;
  do
  echo "updating..."

  STATUS=''
  RESPONSE=`curl -s http://rpc.reader.livedoor.com/notify?user=$USERNAME | tr -d '|'`

  expr "$RESPONSE" + 1 > /dev/null 2>&1
  if [ $? -lt 2 ]; then
    STATUS=$RESPONSE
  else
    STATUS='Error!'
  fi

  echo "LDR($STATUS)"
  sleep $INTERVAL
done

Second, add a snippet like below to your .screenrc file. What kind of the settings suits for your system depends on your like, so edit it as you like.

backtick 0 0 0 ldr_check_unread
hardstatus alwayslastline "%H[%02c]: %` %-w%{=b bw}%n %t%{-}%+w"

Finally, you'll see the thing like below on your terminal.

Let's enjoy the comfortable life with GNU screen and livedoor Reader!