10 posts tagged “vox labs”

Do you use Vox? Do you use Twitter? Do you use Greasemonkey?

If you answered yes to all of these, then you might enjoy this quick little script. With it installed, whenever you post to Vox, you'll be prompted to Tweet. Click Cancel to not Tweet it. Click OK to Tweet. When you do that, that post's URL is converted to a Tiny URL, and posted to your Twitter.

To install:
1. Install Greasemonkey
2. Click here to download and install the script
3. Go here to encode your Twitter credentials - put your username and password in the box, with a colon between them, like this:

vespa59:password

That's it! If all goes well, then whenever you choose to Tweet a post, you should see a confirmation pop up after a few seconds. If not, it didn't work. Bummer.

Wednesdays are hack days here at Six Apart. It's a day where we can work sort of independently on projects that we think would be cool. Lots of great stuff comes out of Hackathon. 

A while back, you might remember that I released a photo widget for Vox that will let you build a little slideshow of photos and show them. I've been planning to use it to show my Egypt photos (they're still uploading to Vox as I type this), and today I realized something that's sort of a bummer: Vox returns photos in reverse chronological order, always. This means that if I were to do a slide show of the Egypt trip, or any event, you'd see the end of the trip first and work backwards to the beginning. That's ok in some cases, but in the case of a trip, I want to be able to show it to you in the order that I experienced.

So today I added an option to the slideshow configurator that will let you do just that. It seems simple on the surface, but behind the scenes it's a little complicated... What it used to do is go fetch all the photos that match your criteria and loop through them, rendering a playlist that the flash component could read. Now, it goes and gets all those photos, stuffs them in to a big array, and if you've chosen chronological order, it sorts the array by the publish date on the photos (the date/time you uploaded them) and then renders the playlist. I consider this to be quite a triumph and I hope you find it useful.

I made this little widget on Wednesday that shows your Vox photos in a nice embeddable slideshow. Well, I didn't make the entire thing. I used a really slick open source Flash widget for the front end, but I wrote the back end and javascript that work together to feed the Flash widget the data to show.

If you'd like to use it, simply go here and configure a widget for yourself. You can choose the blog or group to get pictures from, a tag to filter on, how long to show each photo, and what size to use. Hover over any field in the configurator to get information about what it does and what you should set it to. I recommend the big size for slideshows that you want to embed in a post, and the small size if you want to embed it in your Vox sidebar. You can see an example in my sidebar, and here's a slideshow of a scooter rally I went to last year (user=pop, tag=lambretta):

I built a new little Vox widget over the last couple of weeks. It scrapes your Vox favorites and shows them in a square that changes every five seconds to show a new one at random. Check it:

You can use it too! The code is below (make sure you change "pop.vox.com" to your own Vox domain. You can embed it anywhere that allows you to embed an iframe (which Vox does, obviously). It fits nicely in your Vox sidebar, as you can see on my blog. Enjoy!

UPDATE: You want to set this script to run on *vox.com/compose* in the Greasemonkey settings. Sorry about that.

Here's a little Greasemonkey script for you. What it does is make linking stuff from your Vox entry a little easier. How to use:

First, type some stuff in Compose. Next, highlight the word or phrase you want to link. Now, normally, you'd click the link button and type the URL... With the script installed, you get a couple of extras: If you hold down SHIFT while you click the link button, Greasemonkey will go off and grab the URL for the top search result for the term you highlighted, and fill it in for you. If instead you hold down ALT while clicking the link button, Greasemonkey will fill in the box with a Wikipedia link for whatever you highlighted. Try it out and let me know what you think!

The other day, I wrote a little GreaseMonkey script that generates code for you to use to embed public assets found on Vox in your other blogs or pretty much anywhere else where you can embed stuff. Just like you can embed things in your Vox blog, you can now easily get the code to embed your (or other peoples') photos, videos, audio, and books elsewhere. Audio and video play inline just like they do on your Vox blog, and everything is credited back to the blog where it came from. It's especially useful if you use Vox as your photo repository but you want to be able to insert your photos in to your posts or profiles on other services.

If you'd like to try it out, click here to grab the script. Once installed, you'll notice a little Embed link in the right toolbar on the details pages for photos, audio, books, and video, just below the Share link. Click Embed, and you'll get a little box with the code in it. Simply paste that in to your other blog or place that supports embedding, and you're done!

We'll probably do a proper implementation of this in Vox soon.

Small update to the KVOX player. You can now generate a bigger version, which looks as it does below. The smaller version was originally created when we started working on embeddable sidebar assets (it's coming... it's coming...), but since we did embeddable post assets first, I figured I'd let you make a slighly larger player which will show off that album art better. Unfortunately, most of the album art that I've attached sucks. Damn.

Make sure you insert as Extra-large. In the next release, we're going to sort of auto-size and auto-center your embeds, so it won't look so wonky when your size doesn't match ours.

Oh man.. I spent a little time last night and tonight on a little Vox hack for the upcoming release. I can't tell you what it is just yet, but suffice it to say that it's THE BALLS. It's a neat little chunk of code, comprised of some PHP, HTML, XML, and a stolen flash component. It took way too long, but it was a learning experience.