Zoundry Raven: Preventing Double Line Spacing In Blogger.com

I have to enable the "Remove Newlines" option, found in the "Account Manager" dialog box, when publishing my blog post to Blogger.com. If I do not, I will get double line spacing between paragraphs.

Zoundry Raven: Inserting Amazon Affiliate "iframe" Ads

The offline blog editor Zoundry Raven converts my Amazon Affiliate "<iframe><iframe/>" tags to "<iframe/>" upon publishing my blog posts. As a consequence, my Amazon Affiliate "iframe" ads do not get displayed correctly when viewed from the Opera desktop and Opera Mini web browsers, and perhaps on other web browsers too. What puzzles me though is that Raven displays these ads correctly while editing - albeit the ad must be inserted at the end of a blog post and no editing is allowed in the "Design" tab after these ads have been inserted. I wonder why?

The Problem

After having successfully installed the development environment, I went about searching and digging into Raven's source code and I managed to narrow down the problem to the 4Suite XML processing library that Raven uses.

For any XML tags containing empty element (elements are the text between the opening and closing tags), the tag will be represented as a single tag ended with a slash in 4Suite. Amazon Affiliate "iframe" ads have empty elements and hence, self-terminating "iframe" tags upon publishing.

My Work-around

To enable me to insert these "iframe" ads, what I did is to filter my blog post through uTidyLib just before publishing so that any invalid HTML tags generated by 4Suite will be corrected by uTidyLib (uTidyLib is just a wrapper for TidyLib, and TidyLib is just a library version of Dave Raggett's HTML Tidy, a program that fixes invalid HTML markups). To achieve this, I added 3 extra lines of code (enclosed between "# ---- START ----" and "# ---- END -----" in the code below) to the function _transformContentForPublishing in the file "zoundry\blogapp\services\pubsystems\blog\blogpublisher.py".

Ginger And Turmeric - The Best That I Have Ever Grown

I am so happy. Since moving them into the shadow of my house in April this year, I now have the healthiest and loveliest ginger and turmeric plants - the best that I have ever grown. The leaves are lusciously green with abundant foliage attached to thick stalks and shoots. And as an added bonus for me, the plants on some pots are beginning to bloom too.

I have been planting ginger and turmeric for about 8 years now after been inspired by a local TV documentary that I saw back then. My success have been mixed previously. Direct sunlight and ginger is actually a bad combination (likewise with turmeric as it is a plant that belongs to the ginger family). But I did not know about this until recently. Previously, I have always assumed wrongly that I had problems with the soil whenever I get ailing looking plants. I tried adding additional fertilizer and this obviously did not help. It is only later that I realized, through my own observation and confirmation from Google searches, that ginger and turmeric must be kept away from direct sunlight.

My wife loves home grown ginger and turmeric. And I like growing them. They are some of the easiest thing that I have ever grown as they do not require much care. The only pests that I can see so far are grasshoppers and garden snails, but that is not something that is unmanageable. I used to plant them in the ground, but these days, I only plant them in pots so that I can move them around easily when the need arise. I only water them like once a day at around noon - lazy me. I also mulch the top soil in the pots with garden clippings to minimize weeding.

I will need to find a new place soon for my ginger and turmeric plants as the sunlight is slowly creeping nearer and nearer towards the house as we head towards the end of the year. The sun swings from the Northern to the Southern sky between the June and December solstice, and then back again from the Southern to the Northern sky between January and May. Some sunlight is already touching the outer and top leaves on some pots at noon.

Setting Up Zoundry Raven's Development Environment

When Push Comes To Shove

The offline blog editor Zoundry Raven self-terminates my Amazon Affiliate iframe tags. It converts my <iframe><iframe/> tags to <iframe/> upon publishing my blog posts. And my Amazon Ads do not get displayed correctly when viewed from the Opera web browser. I reported this issue at Zoundry Raven's Open Source website, but I received no reply. I tried accessing the Raven's support forum but it seems to have gone offline. So the only thing that I could do is to install the Raven's development environment, peek at its source code and try to fix this problem myself, if possible.

Displaying Amazon "iframe" Ads Without The Scroll Bar In Scribefire

As I have mentioned previously, a scroll bar will appear when I place an Amazon "iframe" ad in Scribefire Chrome for Opera, resulting in the ad not being displayed as it should while editing, and indeed after publishing, while in "Edit Visually" mode.

After having gathered enough courage to peek at Scribefire's source code, I am glad that I have found a fix to this problem (see Note 1 below on extracting the source code from the Scribefire Extension file "scribefire-4.oex").

This is what I did to remove the scroll bar. I appended additional parameters to line 964 in the file "events.js" - they are actually just parameters found in the code given by Amazon that were not defined in this line. Below is how the line looks before modification:

extended_valid_elements : "iframe[title|width|height|src|frameborder|allowfullscreen]",

My modified line now reads:

Inserting Amazon Affiliate "iframe" Ads With Scribefire

Scribefire Classic Fails With "iframe" Ads

I use Scribefire Classic (version 4.0.0.1) on Firefox (version 3.6.8) to compose my blogs. I tried inserting three Amazon affiliate "iframe" ads into my blog post last week and failed. Not only did the ads not get displayed in the Scribefire's "Rich Editing" tab, but upon publishing and accessing my blog post from Opera desktop and Opera Mini, only one ad was displayed instead of three.

When I looked at the HTML source (by selecting "source" when I right click in Opera desktop), I noticed that the "iframe" tags in my Amazon ads were modified by Scribefire upon publishing. The closing tag "</iframe>" was dropped and the opening tag was modified by making it self-terminating for each inserted ad. For example, the tag code provided by Amazon was:

My Contribution To The 2013 MY Garden Birdwatch Survey

Here is my contribution to the 2013 MYGB bird count (MY Garden Birdwatch) - an annual survey of garden birds in Malaysia, initiated by the birdwatching chapter of the Malaysian Nature Society. I did my bird counting of my front garden up on the first floor from my bedroom window on 15th June 2013, between 4:15pm and 4:45pm. This is the second year that I am participating in this survey. Participation is voluntary. I find that the count is more or less the same as last years. I did my count last year on 3rd June 2012 between 4:00pm and 4:30pm.

Revoking Picasa Access Rights From Scribefire

I do not use Scribefire, a free Mozilla Firefox add-on offline blog editor, for uploading my blog pictures to Picasa Web Albums anymore. Instead, I am now using Picasa3 Desktop. Uploading pictures via Scribefire is a little rigid and the pictures' file names do not get set upon a successfully upload. In contrast, Picasa3 Desktop has more options - like selecting a destination web album to upload to for example - and I do not lose my pictures' file names.

The right thing to do, since I do not use it anymore, is to revoke all access rights that I have granted to the website www.scribefire.com previously. After some searching, I finally found the URL for doing this - which is at the Google "Account Overview" page, and not at Picasa Web Albums website. Yes, a little misleading.

Faster Page Loading With Google+ Mobile On The Desktop

Mobile sites are websites that are designed to be viewed from a mobile device, like on a mobile phone for example. They are simpler in design and more focused. I love using mobile sites, quite simply because I can get faster page loading time on a desktop browser even though I am still using a slow 50kbps dial-up line. I am not really into those dynamic and interactive web pages. So the absence of such feature on mobiles sites is not a problem for me.

Daily Programme Summary For TV Alhijrah

I have finally found it. I have been looking for this for quite some time now. There are actually some decent shows and documentaries on TV Alhijrah. And the list of TV programmes for the day for TV Alhijrah can actually be found at their Facebook page.

Now, if only the other Malaysian TV stations would follow suit since most Malaysian newspapers have stop publishing complete daily TV programme summary for quite some time now. A bit unfortunate and unconvenient I think.


Update (4th July 2013)

TV Alhijrah has stopped posting the list of programmes for the day at their Facebook page, as mentioned above. Instead you can now find it at their website at the following URL : http://www.tvalhijrah.com/jadual-rancangan.aspx - not just for the day but for the week and with synopsis too. Yeah!