Social Share 1.5 - the new and improved social sharing Blogger widget

A new version of this widget has been released. You can find it here: Social Share 2.0

Having a little spare time and not being particularly happy with the first version of my "Social Share!" widget, I thought I can make a better one. And I believe I did. Introducing "Social Share 1.5" Blogger widget. It's not a great improvement when it comes to how it looks, but rather how it is generated.

The new generator uses jQuery to dynamically update the widget code and allows for a greater customization of the widget. You now have the possibility of choosing which links should appear in the widget. The order of the links can also be changed by drag & drop. You can also select from a range of color schemes for the icons.

From a design point of view, it's not at all brilliant. But the fact that the code can be changed easily allows a more flexible evolution of the widget, in the sens that future changes can be implemented with much more ease. So without any further ado, I invite you to use the generator bellow to generate your very own Social Share! 1.5 Blogger widget.

Appearence

Below you can select the size of the widget and the icon set it will use. If you leave the sizes empty or auto, the widget will fill the entyre width of the container unless other CSS rules are applied to it by your template. Width: px Auto

Height: px Auto

Icon set: Default Grayscale Green Blue Red

Select items

Select below the items you want to appear in your widget. Make sure you select at least one. An empty widget serves no purpose. You can also drag them to specify the order you would like them to have.

If you have already installed the previous version, make sure you remove it if you plan to use this one. I doesn't matter if you remove it before or after you install this version.

Please stay tuned for future releases. If you like this widget, all comments are welcomed and tune in soon for a new version. I plan to make the next one (maybe named "Social Share 1.6" as an external script. Hopefully it will allow dinamic updrade of the widget in the sense that you will not need to reinstall it manually. So make sure you come back soon.

PS: if you notice a long time has passed and no new version has been released, drop me a comment. I might have forgotten.

Playing around with my phone

It's been a few days now since I noticed that the battery on my Nokia N81-8GB is starting to discharge a little faster. I think it might die on me. Or maybe I installed some sort of application recently that's using it. Or just maybe I used the phone more during this period.

In any case, I was looking around on Nokia's Ovi Store and I accidentally found an application that shows you in real time the power consumption on your phone. The app is called Energy Profiler, ver. 1.22. Because it was free, I decided to give it a try and see what it does. After reading the instructions I got a little more details about it. It seems to be intended as an "S60 development tool that enables programmers to optimize software for maximum battery time by profiling power consumption of applications". Or at least that's what the Help file said. It computes the power consumption by reading the built-in current meter once every 0.25 seconds and the voltage meter every 10 seconds.

What I really liked at it was the fact that you can save your recorded measurement and the fact that you can export them as PNG or SVG file. Bellow I added two images created with this application, recording power consumption while performing some tasks on my phone.

What I noticed from these is that wireless connections consume more power than Bluetooth and browsing and streaming video consume a lot more. I forgot to try a Bluetooth file transfer or communication with another Bluetooth device, but I expect it to bee lower than browsing. I was surprised that listening to music doesn't consume that much. Taking that picture with flash turned on was killer, almost 4W. And even moving the camera around uses more power than listening to music. I really enjoyed the fact that when the screen is turned off, the power consumption is close to 0. So it really does save power.

Anyway, that seems interesting. And this application does have a lot of other features, but not being involved with mobile phone programming, I can't really appreciate them to their real value.

Are these readings normal? If anyone else has done this kind of tests on a Nokia N81-8GB, please let me know. I'm really curious to see if there are any differences.

Social Share! Blogger Widget

A new version of this widget has been released. You can find it here: Social Share 2.0

This is the first version of what will be known as Social Share! Blogger Widget. The name is not very cool, I know, but it will have to do. What this widget does is it provides you, the owner of a Blogger blog, with a list of links your visitors can use to share whatever they like on your blog.

I came up with this little widget because I wanted to have an easy way to bookmark or share my posts on social networking sites with the help of a Blogger widget and I couldn't find one that gave me everything I need. If you find it usefull, please feel free to share it with others or install it on your own blog.

The widget currently provides your users 8 easy ways to bookmark or share your content. The list contains so far the following:

• Facebook
• Delicious
• Digg
• Reddit
• StumbleUpon
• Technorati
• Twitter
• RSS feed

The icons used in the widget have been created by plechi.

To install this widget you must have a Blogger weblog. All you have to do after that is click the following button and you will be taken to the installation confirmation page. By default it installs itself in the sidebar, but you can place it wherever you like.

<style type='text/css'>ul#social-share-widget{list-style-type:none}ul#social-share-widget li{display:inline-block;padding:5px;margin:0}ul#social-share-widget li a{display:block;width:32px;height:32px;text-indent:-5000em;background:url(https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhf1d4QZxZCL1BTi_8N_CVDnSnVMozUZ5x8v97sqc2wSBElAYSEeQuKSoqoML47RbCuOsIPZu4ifdJJ9tGBdfaaoV8kyVYr_IL4DBoquHg8ev5mK-rMLJ2aBobZzpbJovPD2WpCnd4FEAYd/s800/social_share_1_0.png) no-repeat 0 0 transparent;margin:0;padding:0;outline:none}ul#social-share-widget li.facebook a{background-position:0 0}ul#social-share-widget li.delicious a{background-position:-32px 0}ul#social-share-widget li.digg a{background-position:-64px 0}ul#social-share-widget li.reddit a{background-position:-96px 0}ul#social-share-widget li.stumble a{background-position:-128px 0}ul#social-share-widget li.technorati a{background-position:-160px 0}ul#social-share-widget li.twitter a{background-position:-192px 0}ul#social-share-widget li.feed a{background-position:-224px 0}div#social-share p.link-home{font-size:10px;font-style:italic;text-align:right;padding-right: 1em;}</style> <div id="social-share"> <script type='text/javascript'> function php_urlencode (str) { str = escape(str); return str.replace(/[*+\/@]|%20/g, function (s) { switch (s) { case "*": s = "%2A"; break; case "+": s = "%2B"; break; case "/": s = "%2F"; break; case "@": s = "%40"; break; case "%20": s = "+"; break; } return s; } ); } var pageurl = php_urlencode(window.location.href); var pagetitle = ''; var t = document.getElementsByTagName('title')[0]; if ( !t.childNodes.length ) { pagetitle = php_urlencode(t.firstChild.data); } else if ( t.innerHTML ) { pagetitle = php_urlencode(t.innerHTML); } document.write('<ul id="social-share-widget">' + '<li class="facebook"><a href="http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=' + pageurl + '&t=' + pagetitle + '" title="Share on Facebook">Share on Facebook</a></li>' + '<li class="delicious"><a href="http://del.icio.us/post?url=' + pageurl + '&title=' + pagetitle + '" title="This is Del.icio.us">This is Del.icio.us</a></li>' + '<li class="digg"><a href="http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=' + pageurl + '&title=' + pagetitle + '" title="I Digg this!">I Digg this</a></li>' + '<li class="reddit"><a href="http://reddit.com/submit?url=' + pageurl + '&title=' + pagetitle + '" title="Reddit me!">Reddit me!</a></li>' + '<li class="stumble"><a href="http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=' + pageurl + '&title=' + pagetitle + '" title="I Stumbled Upon something">I Stumbled Upon something</a></li>' + '<li class="technorati"><a href="http://technorati.com/faves?add=' + pageurl + '" title="My fav on Technorati">My fav on Technorati</a></li>' + '<li class="twitter"><a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=' + pagetitle + '" title="Tweet this right now!">Tweet this right now</a></li>' + '<li class="feed"><a href="/feeds/posts/default" title="Feed me!">Feed me</a></li>' + '</ul>'); </script> <p class="link-home"><a href="http://theyoboo.blogspot.com/2009/10/social-share-blogger-widget.html" title="Get Social Share! for your blog">Get Social Share!</a></p> </div>

Enjoy it and I hope someone finds this useful. Please let me know if there are any problems and if you have any suggestions on expanding it or improving it. I thought about a few things but I haven't had the chance to implement them because I was too eager to release it. Maybe in a latter version, if it ever catches on.

Now we're getting somewhere

This Friday was the last day I worked on the ASUS WL-500g Premium Routers, but I've been out of town for the weekend and never got a chance to write about it. Not that there is much to brag about. With the DD-WRT firmware it was pretty easy to configure the routers to work in WDS (Wireless Distribution System). They all talked one to the other, everything was all fine. Until...

It all got turned upside down when I've tried to implement a measure of protection. You see, in WDS, you have the option of selection which type of network you want to use: B-only, G-only or mixed from what I can remember. The first type I saw this I was like "What the hell are these?" Even now I'm somewhat confused. I've found a pretty good explanation about it here: http://cwnp.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=1244. Everything was fine up to this point. Only the problem is WDS can't accept WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) except if it's set to use a G-only network. That shouldn't be a problem if you use a laptop to access the Internet. But since this guy wants to have access on his mobile phone, we have a problem. The phone doesn't work in G-only WDS. It manages to connect to the first router, the one that's closest to it or has the stronger signal. But after that it can't go any further. WDS is not working. So we were forced to switch to a mixed network type in the settings. It started to work again. We were on the right path. Until we remembered that we need to implement at least a method of protection. So this guy, although I told him that WPA will work only if the network is set as G-only, went ahead and placed a WPA pre-shared key protection. And guess what? It didn't work. The WDS stopped functioning so I guess we're stuck with a WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy). An older and less secure method of protecting your network, but I guess it's better that nothing.

I'll get back to those routers as soon as the guy that has them returns to the country. He'll be gone for two weeks. Until then, I'll try to find out how to implement a VPN (Virtual Private Network) server and what else we can do with there cute little toys.

Damn Asus router

I said before that I can't wait to see what we can do with those routers. Well, we managed to do something: we locked ourselves out. Great, huh? But luckily that problem was solved by flashing a new firmware. And another one. And then another one and the whole problem was solved. The good thing is, now there is a firmware, DD-WRT, that allows great access to the settings required for the WDS (Wireless Distribution System) part of the router. This was the main thing that interested the person that has the routers. What he wants to do is to set them up in such a way that he can have access to the Internet from anywhere inside the building. So that shouldn't be a problem. These routers have a pretty good range and the area is not that large.

But here's the catch: he wants to have wireless Internet access on his mobile phone. You're probably saying now: "Of course wireless, you moron! That's why it's called «mobile»". OK, so I could have said just Internet access, but what I meant is he wants to have it while he walks through the building. Still everything clear? Fine! His phone has a crappy antenna and only works around 6 to 7 meters from a router. Oh, things start to make sense now?

What I need to do is to figure out how we can set the routers in such a way that it will cover the entire surface of the building. I hate it when people give me tasks. It puts the responsibility on me, and I'm not very responsible in my nature. Anyway, the best way, and the recommended way from what I understood, that I can set up these routers is to use a "star topology" and to place the routers in such a way that I have a complete coverage on the building. I see a lot of walking around with a phone in my hand in the near future. To test the connection of course. The reason for a star topology is that with WDS, at every hop you lose half of the bandwidth because of the communication with the master router. So if you would have to use two hops (I presume it's possible) you would just have a quarter of the bandwidth, with three hops just an eighth and so on. I found the formula on Wikipedia when I did a search for WDS. Here it is: T=1/2^h, where T is the throughput or available bandwidth and h is the number of hops a client has to take before it reaches the server or the master router or whatever. So "star topology" it is.

The funny thing is he said at some point that it would be great if he could have access from a pub near by. I felt like chocking him to death. Maybe it would be easier if he would buy himself a better phone.

Another day, another post

Today is a day not different from all the other ones. I get up, I go to work, I waste my time and I go home. Talk about monotony. Or so I thought. Today is one of those days in which I have the chance to do something different. Like what, you ask? But please, let me tell you.

I met some guy that needs a certain job done, but doesn't have the required technical know-how. Neither do I, but that didn't stop me to give it a try. You see, he has purchased several ASUS WL-500g Premium wireless routers. And what he wants to do is this: he plans to spread them all over his office building creating something like a hot-spot that he can have access at any time. And he doesn't need just that. He wants the standard firmware that they have installed on them replaced with a modified one. For this we might choose either Oleg's firmware or FreeWRT or OpenWRT. We'll see. The advantage with these is that you can practically create a miniature Linux server that can incorporate a Samba server, a small web server, a FTP server, it can act as a firewall and many others. The possibilities are limited only by the small amount of flash memory that these routers posses (although 8MB is fairly enough for these minimalistic distributions). The cool part about them is that you can attach an USB hard-drive and thus the storage space increases greatly, or you can install the operating system directly on an USB memory stick. I can't wait to see what we can do with these. The fact that you can have a fully functioning Linux server that can sit on your desk, it doesn't have a fan or a hard-drive to make the noise a non-stopping server would, small and with a possibility for wireless connection, is absolutely great.

After work I'll be on my way to see what we can do with them. If anyone has any good suggestions or knows of a great walk-through relating these devices, please drop a link. I've already found all sorts of information relating to them on http://wl500g.info and other great discussion boards.