Nilesh's Weblog

Simple:

<MTBlogTimes>
  <img 
  src="<$MTBlogTimesFileURL$>" 
  width="<$MTBlogTimesWidth$>" 
  height="<$MTBlogTimesHeight$>" 
  border="0" 
  alt="B L O G T I M E S" 
  title="B L O G T I M E S" />
</MTBlogTimes>

Customised:

<MTBlogTimes 
  fillcolor="#4a4a4a"
  textcolor="#4a4a4a" 
  linecolor="#FFFFFF" 
  bordercolor="#4a4a4a" 
  width="400" 
  height="30" 
  save_dir="images" 
  show_text="on">
  <a href="http://nilesh.org/mt/blogtimes/">
  <img src="<$MTBlogTimesFileURL$>" 
    width="<$MTBlogTimesWidth$>" 
    height="<$MTBlogTimesHeight$>" 
    border="0" alt="B L O G T I M E S" 
    title="B L O G T I M E S" />
  </a>
</MTBlogTimes> 

<$MTInclude module="BlogTimes"$>

<MTBlogTimes name="<$MTDate format="blogtimes-%Y-%b">">
<img src="<$MTBlogTimesFileURL$>" 
  alt="B L O G T I M E S"/></a>
</MTBlogTimes>

44 comments have been added. Add your comments.

1. Reference from Arnab's World :: Weblog


2. Reference from blog.bulknews.net


3. jeremyw said...

very cool plugin. I love how the graphic looks. vertical implementation would be nice, too. thanks. nice site, btw.

4. Nilesh said...

Ya, I want to do that. I have it in my TODO.

5. Reference from J : Da Blog


6. Reference from masala


7. yosshi said...

cool plugin!
but i got a error massage as "Can't locate object method "png" via package "GD::Image" at plugins/blogtimes.pl line 131. " from MT when I'm going to rebuild INDEX template.
what should I do?
I am using dreamhost.com sharing sever.

8. Nilesh said...

Yosshi,
can you find out the version of GD that your host has? Most probably it is an old version which does not produce PNG images. GD has since long removed GIF support because of licensing issues.

9. Nilesh said...

There is a test script in the source tarball of Perl::GD. You can use that to check the version. i.e. if you have telnet/ssh access to your server.

10. yosshi said...

hello, Nilesh

I asked to my host company about the version of the module. they answred like this;

> We have 1.18 installed. If you need a newer version you can probably
> either download it from the MT people and place it in your 'extlib'
> directory under your main MT install (see MT support about this).
>
> If they don't have a version available, you can compile it yourself in
> your home directory. It's for advanced users but will do exactly what you
> want.

i have no idea about compiling perl module.
i want to ask you again that there is the way to use GD function with MT's 'extlib' directory.
I really want to use the plugin, MTBlogTimes!

11. Nilesh said...

Yosshi,

Take a look at the MTBlogtimes thread on Movabletype forum or at its homepage here ->

http://nilesh.org/mt/blogtimes/

I have posted some precompiled perl modules. i doubt whether they will work on your server, but nevertheless try them out. Extract the files in the extlib folder.

12. Emmanuel said...

On my setup, the date based example that you give above (to save the graphics over time) does not work.

I have modified the source code so that the name parameter is passed through date format specification. In my modified implementation, you can simply have: <MTBlogTimes name="blogtimes-%Y-%m">. Do you want the code to generate a 1.1 version?

13. Emmanuel said...

Of course, the HTML markup disappeared in my example. What I meant is name="blogtimes-%Y-%m" as a parameter to the MTBlogTimes parameter.

14. Nilesh said...

Emmanuel, thanks for bringing that to my notice. I had written the tip expecting that I'll enable the MT tag parsing. I finished the code without it and forgot about it. You can send me the code. I'll put it out with the 1.1 version with proper credits.

15. Amit [Netahoy] Agarwal said...

innovation at work here :) the over outlook is cool now it timme to put it to my use ;) keep pluging!!

16. Chandler said...

Put me on the interested parties list for 1.1 as I got flumoxed by the date format thing too. Nice eye-candy btw

17. Jason said...

Any progress on a 1.1 version to fix the name attribute, or at least a work around? I'd love to use that attribute but so far can't get it to work.

Thanks a bunch. Love the plugin. Now to just get my site totally converted to MT from my home grown code....

18. Reference from Unix Gal


19. Reference from J : Da Blog


20. Rick Zhang said...

oh, sorry, it seems that this cool plugin can not work on my blog. It cannot generate the png file, and all the html codes turn out as follow:

I use the gd.pm u provide, i am sure that all the files are in the right place
The version of my mt is 2.63

21. Reference from YABlog


22. Lisa, Gal of Unix said...

Does it use the server timezone to determine the date? It's already switched to the June image on my site even though it's only 6:21pm here.

23. AMK4 said...

Same here. It's already showing June, when it's not anywhere close to midnight over here. Both the server, as well as my MT installation both are running on Mountain Time. And of course, it overwrote the old file, so there's no way to get the May image back up. And was the problem with creating different images based on <$MTDate format=...$> been resolved?

24. Nilesh said...

Does it use the server timezone to determine the date

It doesn't need to. It simply picks up the date from the database and plots on the image.

As far as the image going blank is concerned, Blogtimes behaves like any other plugin on the index page. Whenever the index page is rebuilt, either when a new post is made or when someone comments on your posts, blogtimes is executed and it generates a new image. If the month at the time of generation is June, Blogtimes will show June in the chart. You can observe the same on my index page now.

25. AMK4 said...

Then there's something wrong, because when I did mt rebuilt end of last month, it was around 8pm mountain time, however BlogTimes rolled over to June. From reading comments on here, I'm not the only one with this problem. The server is running in Mountain time, and my MT installation is running Mountain time. So then why did BlogTimes roll over to June when it wasn't June yet?

I know MT's internals still work off of UTC (look at your activity log, and you'll see those aren't correct times, those are UTC times - at least on every MT installation I've seen they are), so maybe BlogTimes is doing the same?

26. Nilesh said...

AMK4, you are right. I somehow managed to skip that. However, it would be a few days before I try to fix that as I am preoccupied. Any volunteers?

27. Reference from Reflective Reality.


28. Reference from Maybe later....


29. bwana said...

Im getting a similiar problem where the dates on the images do not match the current date. Is this still being looked into?

30. Gareth Edwards said...

Is there any news on a fix for the name attribute to enable files to be saved each month with filenames based on the date? Aside from that small issue, great and interesting plugin idea, and looks terrific.

31. Reference from Vlokfeest.net


32. Reference from Vlokfeest.net


33. Reference from Vlokfeest.net


34. kat said...

I love the idea of the BlogTimes but I've reset the module over and over again to get the name= attribute to work and it just won't. I only get the current month and then an extra "> prior to the image.

HELP!! Please email me if you can help a sample of it would be http://www.whats-crackin.com/archives/2003_12.php

if you go back a month or forward a month it just doesn't create the image. Or am I wrong that it can do this?

35. Reference from NEKO:MANMA


36. Reference from NEKO:MANMA


37. @nak(A) said...

Hi,
I keep getting the output :
--


--
The server reports an error that says :
--
Can't load '/home/public_html/blog/extlib/GD.so' for module GD: /home/public_html/blog/extlib/GD.so: Shared object has no run-time symbol table at /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.8.1/mach/DynaLoader.pm line 229.
--
Do you have any suggestions ?

38. brian said...

Sign me up for that 1.1 version

39. Reference from brian saar


40. Kingsley said...

I love this. I have suggestions too: What if the image was sectioned by weeks and hotlinked to weekly archives? That would be cool, and move it beyond eye-candy to a navigational aid. I can imagine using this instead of my Monthly archive links, so people can reach directly for times when I posted more. What if the stripes where color-coded to indicate number of comments? I wouldn't make the stripes clickable (too fine a target) but a week seems like a decent enough target t select.

41. Nilesh said...

Nice suggestion, Kingsley. You know off late, I have received mails from people suggesting to turn blogtimes into an informational and navigational aid. I am working on a brand new MT3.0 version. If you want an immediate solution on something similar to what you need, try Srijith's hack of MTBlogtimes.

42. Kingsley said...

Oh wow, that's awesome. I think I'll wait for that. In the meantime, I think I can add an image map to the image without any hackery, since I just want to divide it into weeks: just section it into 4 quarters, create an image map template and get MT to fill in the links on a month by monthe basis. I'll tell you how it goes.

43. Kairos said...

I've installed the Blogtimes plugin but It doesn't work I only see a little withe box (the plug in doesn't create a blogtimes.png image) I don't know how?

Is there someone the want to help me?

Thank you

44. Andrew said...

I've intermittently created a PHP solution to the problems people are having with this plugin in MT 3.14. You can get it here.

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