AjaxyXML updated for Mephisto 0.8 (And, I’m back!)

For some reason, the last few months (no clue when this started, really), this blog has been running in a purely cached mode. Mephisto broke somehow and wasn’t even starting up anymore, so apache was just serving the static HTML pages. I just made the leap to 0.8 of Mephisto and cleaned everything up and I seem to be back up and running.. I had to update my AjaxyXML plugin for Mephisto to work with 0.8 so anyone who has been having problems getting it to work with the new version, it should work fine now. Nothing new was added, I just rearraged everything into the new plugin structure for Mephisto… So go grab that if your using Mephisto 0.8. If your still on 0.7, you’ll need an earlier revision.

Not my plugin’s fault!

So, originally, I had posted with little response asking if anyone knew of a weird caching mechanism that was preventing my mephisto_ajaxyxml plugin from updating twitter status right away. I swore I tested this before, but it was brought to my attention that the XML file itself (if you load it up on your browser) just doesn’t update. I’m not quite sure why this is and I’m going to see if I can find anything online about it, but at least I can rest a little easier about trying to fix that part of my plugin.

Besides that, I am going to be releasing a new version of mephisto_ajaxyxml in the near future though. I want to add support for other formats, like RSS, ATOM and possibly JSON. I’ll also be looking into what else I could add easily. If you have any suggestions for what you’d like to see in the ajaxyxml plugin, let me know.

A more real-time AjaxyXML

One of the reasons I created the AjaxyXML plugin for mephisto was to put more real-time data on your mephisto blog without killing your caches. AjaxyXML works pretty well, but it’s still not quite as ‘real time’ as I would like it. When I update my twitter status, it still takes a good amount of time to update on the blog even though it’s pulling in the XML file AFTER the entire page is loaded and just replacing the data in the div. I’m at a loss about why this happens and would love it if anyone wants to take a look at the source and give me any idea’s on how to fix this. I’m assuming there is some sort of caching that I’m not seeing that’s automatically caching the XML file, but I can’t seems to find this and am unsure how to fix it. If anyone has any ideas, please comment here. I would love to hear what you have to say. Thanks!

update for mephisto_ajaxyxml, now supports mootools!

I updated mephisto_ajaxyxml to support mootools for those of you who prefer to use the lighter weight mootools instead of prototype for your blog. As long as you have Ajax, XHR and Element support in your mootools download, you should be fine (If you select Ajax, it should automatically select a bunch of other stuff, the above included). To use mootools, just add the framework: ‘mootools’ option to the ajaxyxml tag.

{% ajaxyxml url: 'http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/swemoney.xml', element: 'twitter', quantity: '1', framework: 'mootools' %}

I updated the 0.1 ‘release’ of the plugin to support mootools as well but I did not change the tag name or version number. Just make sure you have revision 20 or above and you should have mootools support for non-edge mephisto.

Ajaxyxml is almost here!

I’ve been working on a plugin for mephisto that will fetch and parse an xml file through ajax so you can keep your mephisto cache in tact and still display dynamic content on your site. I’ve got almost everything ironed out and it should be ready for public consumption very shortly. The main problem I’ve been having is getting around the fact that Rails is not ‘Thread-Safe’, which means that I have a plugin that works pretty flawlessly under 1 mongrel instance, but if you have a cluster, things start to break down. I will figure it out shortly and I will release very soon so for the few people I’ve gotten interest from, just another day or two, I promise.