By Howard | Published November 1, 2005
Some time ago I wrote a script to query my tivo for status and display it on this page. It was presented as an iframe on this site which called an ASP page hosted on my home network on an IIS box. It was an inelegant solution and I always intended to rewrite it in PHP. I finally got round to it, and now I present it as a fully fledged WordPress plug-in. Take a look at it in the sidebar over there. Go on, go and look, I’ll wait.
Back? Good. I know it’s a niche thing, but I imagine there must be a few others WordPress users who have Tivo, and a home network and want to share their tivo status with the world. If you’re one of those people head on over here for a small download and installation instructions.
It works for me, but I’m a lazy coder and haven’t yet made sure it’ll work for every variation of the /info page on Tivoweb. If you rewrite bits of it (because it is ugly code) please send me a copy, thanks! Especially if you fix the screen-scraping parser to work more generically!
Oh, and can anyone explain why the hover text doesn’t hover in Firefox? It’s fine in IE! *grumble*
Update: Thanks to Garett (see comments) for pointing out my schoolboy error with the alt tag. Using the title tag has sorted it. Thanks!
Categories: Internet, Software, TV
“Oh, and can anyone explain why the hover text doesn’t hover in Firefox? It’s fine in IE! *grumble*”
It’s simple. The ALT attribute was designed for accessibility. If you have images turned off or are blind, the alt text is displayed instead of the image. In a tradition which Microsoft has pioneered, Internet Explorer is not Standard compliant and strangely displays the content of the ALT text as a tooltip (a very annoying habit IMO). More standards-compliant browsers do not do this.
The correct attribute for adding a tooltip is TITLE, which works with any element, not just images. And, more importantly, is cross-broswer compliant.
Hope this helps.
TIVO?!!!??!! Booo hisss…. I’m waiting moistly for Telewests ‘Sky Plus’ Box!!! :) Record 2 programs and watch a 3rd….. *pant*
Sean: I’m holding out for Murdoch to release his strangle hold on the Sky encryption so I can build a Media Centre box with multiple Sky cards. Unfortunately he’s fiercely protective of his digital streams. :( Until then I’ll stick with my infinitely expandable and hackable Tivo box!