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Here are some pictures of the total lunar eclipse currently happening across Europe, Africa and the Middle East. I’ll be updating the pictures throughout the night.

Update 00:13 4th March: As usual the Irish weather has come along and is trying to ruin the spectacle! A bit of high cloud cover has moved in which is causing photography conditions to deteriorate.

Update 01:46 4th March: Well the moon has now left the Earth’s Umbra so it’s all pretty much over. The cloud tried to ruin things at the end but was high and thin enough not to block out everything. All in all it was a pretty good night. It’s times like this though that I wish I’d invested in a Cannon EOS 30D or 5D but my old Fuji S5600 still produced some good shots.

It appears that the 2.1.1 version of Wordpress available for download over the past few days ago contains malicious code. It seems that the one of the Wordpress servers was compromised and the download modified to include the malicious code. You can read more details on the issue over at wordpress.org but the best advice is to upgrade now.

I sat down earlier to have a play around with SimpleXML, the new PHP5 feature that allows easy access to data structures within an XML document. I had also been looking at the ma.gnolia API earlier to implement support for importing bookmarks from ma.gnolia to my bookmarking application urlmarkr. So I decided to write a sidebar widget to display bookmarks from ma.gnolia in the Wordpress sidebar.

Thanks to the power of SimpleXML, what would have taken possibly 10-20 lines of code before, simply took 4 or 5! I used the Snoopy PHP class to fetch the request from ma.gnolia. It’s then just a simple case of calling simplexmlloadstring. It’s then just a case of iterating through the XML data using a simple foreach statement just like it was a collection of arrays.

The end result is the ma.gnolia sidebar widget. More time was spent in writing this post than in writing the widget such is the power of SimpleXML. You can grab the download if your interested from here.

Download latest: magnolia-widget.zip magnolia-widget.gz This widget allows you to display your ma.gnolia links in your sidebar similar to the del.icio.us sidebar widget. This widget uses SimpleXML and as such requires PHP5. You simply need to enter your ma.gnolia username, your API key, the number of links you wish to display and any tag filters if required. This is a very simple and straight forward widget modeled after the del.icio.us widget. To install the widget, simply extract the file to your wp-content/plugins/widgets folder, activate the plugin and then drag it to your sidebar from the widget configuration page and set your options. If you have any problems let me know and I’ll do my best to help you out.