This post is a test to determine how Windows Live Writer handles image upload and storage. WordPress normally uploads images to your wp-content folder. So what does Windows Live Writer do - the only way to find out is to put a few local images from my laptop in this post.
So here’s a cell phone pic my daughter took. Inserted into this post using the "Insert Picture" action in Live Writer.
After publishing this new page, where does the image go?
RESULTS: Windows Live Writer handles the image upload the same as the native WordPress posting interface. Cool!
I have quite a few Wordpress sites online. My main pet peeve in this otherwise excellent software is the editing interface. For short posts I suppose the editing interface is ok, but when I want to write longer posts the interface can be a royal pain.
So I’m trying out Windows Live Writer from my laptop. My first impression is pretty good. Sometimes folks find it fashionable to slam Microsoft products, but Live Writer is going to get a good look from me.
I’ve been a programmer since 1985 or so. Started off with good old COBOL then progressed through a long line of procedural language, from PL/1 up to VB.NET etc. I’ve never much played with dynamic languages before.
But I read about Ruby - Ruby on Rails - I see the code snippets, I read blogs…it’s a beautiful language and seems to bring out a new fresh approach to solving problems.
So I’m going to start playing with Ruby. I have quite a few projects on tap and Ruby seems like an excellent choice. Now, the easiest way to learn a new language is to simply write code in it, look stuff up and basically just learn as you go. A piece of one of the projects I have in mind is to utilize Google Hottrends in a mashup sort of way.
The first step is to read the Hottrends page and store the data. I have SQLLITE on my laptop so that’s where the data will be stored.
So, my first actual Ruby program. I’m sure its quite rough and a real Ruby guru would do it so much better but this is for learning and it does work. Simply scraping Hottrends using an XPATH expression and then storing a few pieces of info into a SQLLITE table (avoiding storing duplicate terms).
Here’s the code - beautifully concise and readable!
# hottrend-scraper
# 1/31/2008
# Extract anchor text from Google hottrends
# Store all anchor text strings into sqlite db
require 'rubygems'
require 'open-uri'
require 'hpricot'
require 'sqlite3'
@url = "http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends"
@response = ''
begin
# open-uri RDoc: http://stdlib.rubyonrails.org/libdoc/open-uri/rdoc/index.html
open(@url, "User-Agent" => "Ruby/#{RUBY_VERSION}",
"From" => "",
"Referer" => "") { |f|
puts "Fetched document: #{f.base_uri}"
puts "\t Content Type: #{f.content_type}\n"
puts "\t Charset: #{f.charset}\n"
puts "\t Content-Encoding: #{f.content_encoding}\n"
puts "\t Last Modified: #{f.last_modified}\n\n"
# Save the response body
@response = f.read
}
# open database
db = SQLite3::Database.new( 'scrapedata.s3db' )
# HPricot RDoc: http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/hpricot/
doc = Hpricot(@response)
# Pull out hottrends anchor text - stuff into database but don't stuff in duplicates
(doc/"//td[@class='hotColumn']//table[@class='Z2_list']//td//a”).each do |anchor|
anchortext=anchor.inner_html
count = db.get_first_value(”Select count(*) from gtrends where scrapetext=’#{anchortext}’”)
if count.to_i==0
puts “INSERTING #{anchortext}”
db.execute(”INSERT INTO gtrends (scrapetext) VALUES(’#{anchortext}’)”)
end
end
db.close
rescue Exception => e
print e, “\n”
end
