John August

Scrippets

Scrippets for Blogger

Geek Alert, Hive Mind, Scrippets

The Scrippets plug-in for WordPress seems to be working well for self-hosted blogs, but it’s no use to folks who use services like Blogger, Tumblr and the like. For people on these platforms, the cost of simplicity is customization — they’re easy to use and hard to modify.

But in an effort to share the scrippets love, Nima and I have hacked together a solution to let users on these platforms copy-and-paste scrippets. It’s not as elegant as a plug-in, but it works.

It’s a two-part process.

First, you need to install the scrippets CSS. I wrote up instructions on how to do it for Blogger, but the same basic theory should hold for any other blogging or forum system that lets you modify the CSS.

Second, write your scrippet. We have a new Scrippets Maker that will automatically generate the code to copy-and-paste into your post.

So if you’re feeling brave — or if you want to duplicate your entry in the Scene Challenge on your own blog — give it a shot. You can even add Scrippets Maker to your bookmarks bar. Just drag the following up to your bookmarks:

Scrippets Maker

Do you have a better solution?

Currently, Scrippet Maker is a page, but it would make a lot of sense as a bookmarklet. That’s in the works, but if you want to roll your own, by all means do it.

Coders out there might have a slicker overall solution for non-Wordpress users, and I’d love to hear it. Many systems (including Blogger) allow outside JavaScripts, so it may be possible to do text filtering much like the WP plug-in. The core scrippetize function is already available in JavaScript.

Meanwhile, there is the bigger issue of how to handle systems that don’t allow CSS modification at all — and forums that don’t want to deal with it. I’d love to find a way to let users link to a graphic version of a scrippet. (Essentially, click a button and the server converts the div into a jpg or png, and provides a link.)

As always, your brainstorms are welcome. And proof-of-concept links will be most graciously received.

Scene Challenge coming

Challenge, Scrippets

[Scene Challenge]With Scrippets now in place, we’re well set up for a new Scene Challenge. But I didn’t want to launch one late on a Friday, when many people may not be checking in to the site.

So look for a new one on Monday morning. (You’ll get at least 36 hours of turnaround.) This time, it will be more in the spirit of 24-hour film festivals, with a set of required elements that must be worked into the scene.

Scrippets 1.0

News, Scrippets

There’s now an official Scrippets plug-in for WordPress, available here.

It’s been working well in the test sites we’ve seeded it to, but if any issues come up in its wider release, plug-in creator Nima Yousefi will be able to send out one-click upgrades. 1 So if you’re running a WordPress blog, by all means check it out.

There’s also now an official site at Scrippets.org, with forums for reporting bugs and tracking progress on other incarnations of Scrippets. Nima’s already whipped up a plug-in for bbPress, and Matt2000 has a version for Drupal in development. If you’re a coder with experience in one of the other blogging/forum platforms, consider this your call to adventure.2

This site uses a Live Comment Preview plug-in that has been hacked to approximate the final scrippet formatting. We’re checking with the original plug-in author to get his okay to distribute a scrippet-friendly version. A similar JavaScript-based solution may be the best option for sites like Blogger that don’t allow traditional plug-ins. Stay tuned.

  1. WP’s ability to keep plug-ins current is an underheralded godsend. ↩
  2. You’ll definitely want to check out Nima’s scrippetize function, which does all the text transmogrifications through arcane-but-universal regular expressions. ↩

Scrippets are go

News, Scrippets

Thanks to the hard work of Nima Yousefi, Will Carlough and Andy Maloney, we have a Scrippets plugin that seems to be working pretty reliably. It’s installed at this site now, and we’ll be seeding it out to a few other screenwriting-oriented websites over the next few days to make sure it plays well with others.

Like most programming projects, getting to 90% was easy. Within hours after my original call to coders, there were three plugins that could get the job done.

That last 10% was tricky, however, because it meant looking for situations that would fail: different WordPress themes, competing plugins, and unexpected user input. For example, my original Ruby code couldn’t distinguish between an all-caps slugline and a character name, and the way I was doing it, it would have been very hard to add that capability.1

In terms of plugins, Markdown is the devil. Rarely have I loved and loathed something so thoroughly. Almost any time you’d see a scrippet break in the middle, it was because of Markdown.

While I think the plug-in is working well, I suspect there will be a few more iterations before we let it out into the wild. So test it out in the comments. As a reminder, the syntax is…

[scrippet]
EXT. HOUSE – DAY

Max is checking his mail when he spots neighbor FRANK crossing the street, heading his way.

Shaking his head…

MAX
I thought we talked about this, Frank.

FRANK
(drunk)
I was born naked and I’m not changing now.
[/scrippet]

which becomes…

EXT. HOUSE – DAY

Max is checking his mail when he spots neighbor FRANK crossing the street, heading his way.

Shaking his head...

MAX

I thought we talked about this, Frank.

FRANK

(drunk)

I was born naked and I’m not changing now.

  1. The final plugin by Nima Yousefi uses regular expressions. ↩