Very cool, if true

Sorry, even with the explanation the final setting just confuses me completely.

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When you make a post to Livejournal it makes it with a date/time stamp on it. If you try to make another post with a datetime stamp before an existing one, LJ will not let it go through (and if you click on the "backdate" option to force it, then said post does not appear on people's friends list.).

Therefore, when it makes the post to LJ/DW it needs to make the post _now_, so that it doesn't cross over with either any posts you've already made (in which case it would get refused), or with any posts you may make in the future (in which case _they_ would get refused).

In order to work out what "now" is for you it needs to know your timezone.

Does that make sense?

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That only makes sense because I *vaguely* remember from looking at LJ XML exports that LJ has *two* datetime fields on a post.

AFAICT one was the real, actual time the entry was created, and the other is what is displayed.

Is this to do with displaying the latter?

(I can tell you write UIs for Windows ;) Or that maybe you don't write UIs at all? Labels should be full sentences, not magically completed by the thing you select, for instance.)

> In order to work out what "now" is for you it needs to know your timezone.

In which case, the label should be more like:

"Specify your timezone (for weird technical reasons you don't need to know.)"

Because that is *all* the user needs to know: what is your timezone. Everything else is complex detail that the code and the developer knows about. And hides from the user.

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Or actually, "Your timezone".

Verbs like 'specify' and 'enter' are superfluous and just add noise.

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It's the display one - but the display datetimestamps cannot be posted out of order.

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Just had a thought about all that...

What if the user goes on holiday to Australia, and keeps on posting links?

Couldn't there be a scenario in which they post from their (current) local time and then the automatic poster tries to post with a local datestamp prior to that?

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azurelunatic

Yes.

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This will be an issue, yes. And that's why they need to know what it's being used for.

Not that it's doing recurrent posts at the moment.

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fearmeforiampink

Three issues, two minor, one more major.

One: I've started using the new tags which let you use multiple words, separating them by a comma, whereas this importer assumes each new word is a new tag.

Two: Currently the tag links point at your tags of those name, not mine.

Three:I persuaded it to post the last days worth of links. I could get it to show me in the 'test' section the two days before that, but when I tried to post them, it didn't do anything (went to a blank page that did nada). And I couldn't post anything before the first, I think.

I ended up grabbing the HTML source from the two days of test I could get it to show, and bundling that in in a lj-cut post with the one day it did post okay.

Thanks for the tool BTW, even with the teething problems it's nice to be able to post the links.

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Cheers. I shall fix all three of those tomorrow!

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Okay, fixed (1) and (2). Can't replicate (3) at the moment, but I'll have a play with it tonight.

The logging is, frankly, shit at the moment. So I'll switch it to at least spitting exceptions back out to the user so that I can see them, and then work on improving logging as I go along.

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I'm guessing that this won't be something that can be brought to Pinboard – am I right?

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See my latest post.

I actually had Pinboard support semi-coded in from the start - and it's generic enough that I actually should be able to support pretty much any links site. (I have a bunch of "Reader" classes and "Writer" classes, and can just code a new one up for any site I want.

Give it a whirl - I actually used your userid as a test case. You'll have to set it to yesterday, as you didn't post any links between midday yesterday and midday today :->

Do set the output to "Test" the first time, just to make sure it's setting things up correctly.

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I did, and it appears to work just fine. But now I have some feature requests! (Not expecting them to happen immediately, but I would love it if you could implement them.)

My most wanted feature request: I'd like to be able to remove the tags from the links list and just have the app post the titles and descriptions instead (never liked seeing the tags, I don't really feel they add much, especially given my tagging scheme!).

I'd also love to be able to have the reposter automatically put the links behind an LJ cut, but that's only useful if the other two features I request happen: Firstly, I would love an option that specified how long between posts so I could do weekly linkposts rather than daily ones. Secondly, I'd like a box on the app's page in which you could type a short introduction to the entry.

Thus, every week (Tuesday, for the sake of argument), a post would appear on my blog at 9am that said, "These are links I bookmarked over the last seven days and thought you guys might find interesting!" followed by an LJ cut that then let people look at the links if they wanted to.

Least importantly, can you edit the app so it displays in Helvetica where possible? Being a Mac user, and all that... :P

Is any of this possible, or would it all be very difficult to implement?

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I'll add them to the to-do list.

It may take a while though, as this is very-much a part time hobby thing :->

(Next step is to have it remember the options you use, so that you don't have to re-enter them each time. After that is automatically running the posting jobs.)

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Thinking about it - I'll be making a fair chunk of this templatable, so removing the tags will be easy once that is in, as would the LJ-cut, and the short introduction.

Variable time-periods are also definitely doable, although I'm going to have to get the automated posting set up in the first place.

So, yes, all of this is possible, but you may be waiting a month or two for me to get through it.

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That's cool, I wasn't expecting it to be added instantly :D

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"I'd like to be able to remove the tags from the links list and just have the app post the titles and descriptions instead "
You can now do this!

I'd also love to be able to have the reposter automatically put the links behind an LJ cut
You can do that too!

Firstly, I would love an option that specified how long between posts so I could do weekly linkposts rather than daily ones.
And that!

Secondly, I'd like a box on the app's page in which you could type a short introduction to the entry.

And that!

If you set you template to the following:

Hi, my name is John, and I love links so much that I'm going to share them with you every week. How lucky are _you_?

<lj-cut>
<ul class="links">
#foreach($link in $links)
<li class="link"><A href="$link.URL">$link.Title</A>
#if($link.Description)<BR><span class="link-description">$link.Description</span>#end
</li>
#end
</ul>

the date to next Tuesday at 9am (or whenever) and the period to 7 days then it should work just fine.

Give it a go with the "Test" output first, to make sure it produces what you expect. The Lj-cut will vanish (as it will be interpreted as HTML) , but if you look at the source it should still be there.

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It worked fine, but Chrome decided that it was unresponsive and needed killing, so I'm not sure what is up with that. Subsequent tries didn't reproduce the issue :S

I love the new interface and it works brilliantly, thank you! One question: would it be possible to dictate the tags on LJ from the poster? Not so much useful for me, but I can imagine other people wanting to customise them.

Edited Date: 2011-11-12 10:07 am (UTC)

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How odd - there's only one bit of JS on there, and that's on the "reset templates" button. Let me know if it happens again.

What do mean "dictate the tags on LJ" - do you mean "have some extra tags defined by the user" that are appended to the automatic ones (or used in place of them)?

If so, then that's a good idea. I'm currently putting in "links" as a default tag, but you're right, letting people customise that would be good.

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Yeah, basically. 'links' is fine for me, but I can imagine others wanting to have a little more control – especially if they're posting one from Delicious and one from Pinboard, or from different feeds, or whatever (you never know).

For reference, I've decided not to use the automatic tags (I see my LJ and my Pinboard tags as two different subsets, and some will not make sense in the context of the other).

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