LiveJournal Niftiness

Hi all!

I'd seen the rotating header image code before and it got me thinking what else you could do with a nice bit of php and livejournal.

So, I've made a PHP page that returns a different CSS depending on the weather in your current area!

It uses a Yahoo weather feed to figure out the current weather and picks from a list of stylesheets you can provide it with.

Well, I thought I'd share it with everyone!

instructions and code at my journal

I'm happy to answer any questions.

I'm not sure if anyone else has ever posted something like this. I have always been frustrated at being limited to one banner image to encompass all the things that interest me. Because of this, when I was revamping my LJ the other day, I decided to see if I could get it to randomly display a banner on each page load from a select group of banners I had created.

I found a way and have put it into a five step process for anyone to use.

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Click for a Five Step Process to Random Banner Selection

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Examples of this code in action can be seen by reloading the pages on my LJ, kaylashay81. I currently have six different banners to rotate out on my LJ and I'm working on more.

Tired of typing ".livejournal.com" into your browser's address bar to open a journal?

I've written an XML file which allows you to use the browser's search box as a LiveJournal shortcut. Once installed, you can type only a journal name - "news" for example - into the search box to visit the journal.



If you check many journals by name, it's often faster than URL completion. The source code is available here and it is compatible with Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox. Opera users can modify their Preferences manually for the same effect.

You can install it by visiting this page.

To install, click the LiveJournal link on the installer page.



You can also see an orange highlight in your search box (browser dependent). This indicates a custom search is available.



Here you can try out the functionality within the page, or add the settings manually.



And now you can save some typing :D.

Hi, I want to present you QBee.
QBee is a simple Livejournal client written on C++ using Qt 4. Not it`s compiled under Linux, but you can compile it for Windows or Mac. QBee is free software distributed under terms of GNU Public License. Now QBee is only for enthusiasts, not for the most of users.
You can download QBee here (and there you can find all useful information about QBee).
The community for users is ru_qbee.

Soooo recently I slapped together a little Python library that can graph LJ relationships. It uses NetworkX which uses matplotlib. While fairly rudimentary, people have expressed enough interest in the output that I figured some of you might like to play around with it.

Basically, it makes a graph of people you've friended who have friended each other. The size of the dots is scaled to the number of mutual friends that person has. So, people with a BUNCH of friends will have a bigger circle than people with fewer.

( small example )

The functions in the package also provide some nice functionality for on the fly processing (ie, figuring out who do X and Y have friended in common). There's a fdata download and caching manager, and it rate limits its requests, so you don't have to be concerned about being hard on the servers when running it.

It can be found on BitBucket. I'm not too familiar with Python yet, though I have been enjoying it immensely, so anybody who Knows Better on how to do things is free to give me a guiding poke.

As of last Thursday, you can specify the exact height and width of the image you're looking for in Google's Advanced Image Search. This is a great way to quickly find 100x100 images on any topic you might want.

Hint: after the first search, you can do it without going to the "advanced" page by just typing a query of the form

kitten imagesize:100x100

Also, if you like, you can look for actual LJ icons like this:

snowflake imagesize:100x100 site:livejournal.com

asLJ is a new client for Macs running Leopard that easily handles multiple accounts on LiveJournal and other LJ-based sites and facilitates cross-posting across accounts. Release notes and download link are in aslj_client. The community for users is aslj_users.

I've collected about 57,000 cities from a city field found in LJ user foaf feeds. This field has its problems. It might be blank 90% of the time, people write mumbo jumbo in it, and people often write the same city's name more than one way. Still, it can sense large city names.

( #1: Moscow! )

I wasn't going to post to this community but after some prodding I thought some folks here would get a kick out of it. I re-created the old Dystopia site scheme as a layout layer for S2 based on Smooth Sailing. It's fully customizable but if you leave the defaults alone your journal will end up looking like the site did back in the day. I've written up an entry summarizing the whole project over on my journal. This might be a good alternative for folks who don't want to give up the orange and purple but still want to access the new features available in either Vertigo or Horizon.

Greetings!

It's almost four years now, but I had to rewrite this hack, and host it someplace so that it wouldn't melt my server.

Without further ado, check out LiveJournal friendsCollage!