I notice that I’m posting a little bit more regularly at least, I guess that’s something to be proud of. This spurred me to see if there’s a way I can feed my blog entries into my Facebook and Livejournal. So I went trolling for WordPress plugins. There’s a Facebook updating plugin for WordPress, but it’s not particularly up to date, so the new Facebook redesign breaks that one, so I put that on the backburner for now. Next up was Livejournal.  I found a WordPress plugin that allows your updates to get posted onto LJ as well, and it works a treat. So if you’re reading this on my LJ, it means it really is working!

If I don’t get a decent Facebook plugin anytime soon, perhaps I’ll dive in and see about developing one myself. But then I’d have to figure out both Facebook’s API, and delve a bit deeper into WordPress as well. I wrote a plugin for WordPress that pulls my Xbox Live gamercard throughh as a widget, and that wasn’t too hectic, did learn quite a bit about the inner workings of WordPress as such, which has come in handy in doing some cosmetic modifications to the themes and such.

In other news, new Metallica album’s pretty damn good. Harks back to vintage Metallica, and that’s only a good thing in my book.

Our puppy’s growing up fast now, but she has discovered a new favourite past-time: snail hunting. She goes and finds them in the garden, and then brings them into the house to chew on her pillow. Then she leaves the bits all over, and that’s just gross! I guess that’s just one more joy of being a pet-owner.

I got my XBox gamercard information displaying on my blog now. It lists the last five games I’ve played, as well as my gamerscore. I found a source for more detailed information without having to register with Microsoft to get access to their API, so I might recode the inner workings of my plugin at some point. I’m just glad that I finally got it working!

I wonder… I should at some point write about music too. Last year was a good year for local music, and I have a new favourite local band – The Black Hotels. More on that at a later stage me thinks.

I’ve found some libraries for PHP that will fetch the HTML from Microsoft’s site, and parse it into some meaningful variables. On my hosted site I’ve managed to replicate the standard HTML that is generated from the Microsoft site, but with images local to my server, which makes it faster. Currently I’m messing around with image creation from the information, and I’ve got a image that also looks similar to the Microsoft version. So it’s all good from that point of view.

This all leads to the next step – creation of a WordPress plugin. I’ve got the working skeleton for that, and now I need to plug in all the new wonderful code I’ve written into it to make it work. Will attempt that this weekend I think.

After that, I’ll probably tackle some other things that WordPress plugins don’t have, in particular the one for a Movie watch list. Will have to think about that one a bit.