More news on the BritBlog XML-RPC ping update service! I’ve re-written it, so we’re back to alpha testing. This is a public trial, so it would be good if you could help test it. More details can be found on the BritBlog blog…

We’ve just added a blog review section over at BritBlog. The plan here is to highlight blogs that deserve more exposure…

I’ve been playing around with the Technorati API today. Got an interesting addition to add to BritBlog soon… I’m basically using Technorati to tell me the RSS and Atom feed URLs. This is then stored in the database and will be published on the the member blog profiles.

Once I’ve got this data, I can use the feed URLs to keep an eye on member blogs, and hopefully publish recent member posts. This will tie in to the XML-RPC ping update service. Anyway, more info will be published about this when it’s up and live.

On the topic of the ping service, it’s all nearly done! I’ve been working out how to optimise it for performance, and there doesn’t seem to be any really clear way to do this. As I think I’ve mentioned before, it’s easy to set up a ping service, but getting it to stand up to the spammers is another question!

Not had a good day today. Slept very poorly last night and have had a headache all day. I was either too hot or too cold in the office, and found it very hard to concentrate. I really really need a holiday!

On top of that the journey in was slow because of traffic, and the journey back was slow because of some twit doing 30 m.p.h on a 50 road (one without overtaking bits). Frustrating when all you want to do is get home and go to bed.

Bah. Still got loads to do though - it just seems to be accumulating.

On a totally different note, Nancy has joined the fold and become a BritBlog editor. And what can I say but I’m impressed? By my calculations she has been reviewing blogs for the last three hours and the queue (as I write) stands at just over 70. A remarkable feat Nancy - well done!

There is some activity over at BritBlog that I think I ought to mention.

First of all, I’m looking for some beta testers for our new XML-RPC updates service. This should make a huge difference to BritBlog (especially if the traffic kills the server!), and I’m quite excited about this.

Additionally, there has been some talk about setting up a traffic exchange-like system. I’m still not sure what the best approach would be, so if you have any thoughts please mention them over at the BritBlog blog.

Two things to mention:

1) BritBlog now has a blog, so you should read it/subscribe to it/leave a comment! It will cary on in the same vein as the old news system: announcing new features, newsworthy things, and bringing up questions for general discussion. You not there yet? Go and read it!

2) I’d like to introduce our latest BritBlog editor: Merialc. Welcome to the team Merialc!

I’m off for a couple of weeks hoilday in a few days! Should be good, and I’ll tell you all about it when I get back. No doubt I’ll take thousands of photos too

Anyway, while I’m away comment moderation will be on for this blog I’m afraid. There may not be anything going on in the way of BritBlog signups and reviews either if I don’t get a chance to set it up before I go. I hope this doesn’t cause anyone too much of a problem; normal service will resume when I’m back.

I’ve been playing around with embedding images directly in HTML documents. The main driver for this is the huge load and bandwidth suck that BritBlog experiences as a result of most our members linking directly to our little icons. (Don’t get me wrong; it’s great that so many of our members help to promote us, I just wish a few more folk could host their own icons!)

You may have noticed that that Internet Explorer can save web pages (images and all) as one file. This seems to be MIME-encoded (like HTML email) with boundaries, which is fine for standalone documents, but no good for me if I want to embed an image directly in an ordinary HTML file.

So after hunting around a bit I came across an alternative technique, that still uses base64 encoding. It’s a great approach, but unfortunately it only seems to work in Firefox. This is great for me, but alas a large proportion of internet users still use IE so I can’t really use it for my stated application.

Anyhow, it’s an interesting technique, so I thought I’d share it here. This is what I was planning on doing:

<?php
$file = "icon.gif";
if($fp = fopen($file,"rb", 0))
{
   $picture = fread($fp,filesize($file));
   fclose($fp);
   // base64 encode the binary data, then break it
   // into chunks according to RFC 2045 semantics
   $base64 = chunk_split(base64_encode($picture));
   $tag = '<a href="http://www.britblog.com/"><img ' . "n" .
          'src="data:image/gif;base64,' . $base64 .
          '" alt="British Blog Directory" width="80" height="15" />';
   echo $tag;
}
?>

This is roughly what it produces:

<a href="http://www.britblog.com/"><img
src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhUAAPAKIAAAsLav///88PD9WqsYmApmZmZtZfYmdakyH5BAQUAP8ALAAAAABQAA8AAAPb
WLrc/jDKSVe4OOvNu/9gqARDSRBHegyGMahqO4R0bQcjIQ8E4BMCQc930JluyGRmdAAcdiigMLVr
ApTYWy5FKM1IQe+Mp+L4rphz+qIOBAUYeCY4p2tGrJZeH9y79mZsawFoaIRxF3JyiYxuHiMGb5KT
kpFvZj4ZbYeCiXaOiKBwnxh4fnt9e3ktgZyHhrChinONs3cFAShFF2JhvCZlG5uchYNun5eedRxM
AF15XEFRXgZWWdciuM8GCmdSQ84lLQfY5R14wDB5Lyon4ubwS7jx9NcV9/j5+g4JADs=
" alt="British Blog Directory" width="80" height="15" /></a>

And if you paste this into your HTML document, this is roughly what you get (I had some problems getting this code through WordPress, so this may be another reason not to use it!):

Depending on your web browser, you will either see a broken image, or a nice little BritBlog icon!

So I wonder when the next IE will be out, and if this will fix the problem?