Spent a lot of time this weekend fooling around with Perl programming. I can’t write Perl code from scratch (except very simple stuff, like print “Hello world!”;) without constantly referring to reference material. However, I am amazed at how easy it is to do stuff using Perl modules you can install from CPAN.
Anyway, I worked on a few things that I wanted to do with blogging and that there didn’t appear to be a Movable Type plugin for. The results of my labors:
1. CrossBlog. This is a plugin that allows one MT blog to post an entry to another MT blog — even on a different system. So, for example, you can post an excerpt of your entry to another blog, with a link back to the full entry. (It uses the Net::Blogger module, which i also used in my POP-mail-to-blog script.)
2. HighWater. In order to make CrossBlog only cross-post an entry once, rather than every time the blog entry is rebuilt, I needed a way to determine whether an entry was brand new or just being rebuilt. The HighWater plugin was the result.
3. I’ve tried to install Image::Magick on my server, and have run into problems. However, I got the Perl module Imager to work, so I created a script that would allow me to upload an image to the server, automatically thumbnail it, and put the necessary IMG tags into a Movable Type new-entry form. This one is built for my system, but with a little work I can probably make it generic enough for others to use.
Fortunately, I’m pretty close to running out of ideas for scripts I want, so I’ll have no excuse for not working on my novel.