Author: Shelley Powers

Categories
Web

Accessible web pages

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Jonathon Delacour is reviewing Joe Clark’s Building Accessible Web Sites. In addition, he interviewed Joe and will be posting results of the interview over the next few days. This promises to be excellent reading, and I do want to get the book when I can scrape the pennies together.

I used Mark Pilgrim’s Dive into Accessibility in the current re-design and re-organization of my web sites. Between the two — Mark’s online book and Joe’s hard copy book — I hope that I’ll be providing accessible and usable pages, in addition to meeting the CSS and XHTML 1.0 strict specification validation criteria.

Oh, and I’ll be using RDF as the primary data structure for the applications I’m integrating into the site. I am just as determined to make RDF as friendly and usable to all of you, as Mark, Joe, and Jonathon are determined to make web pages accessible to those who need this effort.

I will make even the most RDF-resistant among you into RDF appreciators, if not out-and-out RDF fans. It is my goal. I have a mission.

Categories
Legal, Laws, and Regs Weblogging Writing

Licensed to weblog

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I’ve added a Creative Commons License to the Burningbird Weblog. You’ll see it at the end of my blogroll.

The generated license code embedded in the page validates as XHTML 1.0 strict as long as you remove the ‘border=”0″‘ attribute from the image.

I’ve licensed myself as Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial 1.0:

Attribution: The licensor permits others to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work. In return, licensees must give the original author credit.

No Derivative Works: The licensor permits others to copy, distribute, display and perform only unaltered copies of the work — not derivative works based on it.

Noncommercial: The licensor permits others to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work. In return, licensees may not use the work for commercial purposes — unless they get the licensor’s permission.

Easy as 1-2-3 — fill in a couple of forms asking simple questions, mail the HTML to yourself, make the modification I recommended, paste it into your weblog template, and baby, you’ve just joined the Commons.

Update: I incorporated the CCL RDF into my PostCon RDF, as demonstrated in the example PostCon RDF file. This is a good fit because the PostCon RDF file is a description about the web resource, and this includes licensing information as well as format, validation, history, and so on. I’ll also add ability to add CCL to the PostCon generation tool, but not using the Common’s form — people will have to know the specific license type ahead of time. At least for the first release of PostCon.

Categories
RDF Writing

Practical RDF Book Cover

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Todd Mezzulo from O’Reilly, the person responsible for marketing the Practical RDF book sent me a copy of the cover, which I’ve embedded below. Now, the book isn’t going to be on the streets until Spring, so contain your excitement…a little.

(To be honest, I’m really excited about this book. Really, really.)

The bird pictured is a Secretary Bird, a predator bird originally from South Africa. The Secretary Bird is known for it’s prowess in killing snakes, having the nickname of “serpent eater”.

It grabs the snake with its strong toes and beats it to death on the ground, while protecting itself from bites with its large wings. Finally, it seizes its prey and hurls it into the air several times to stun it.

I found this particularly humorous because my last sole-author book for O’Reilly was Developing ASP Components, featuring none other than a serpent on the cover. I joked with Todd that the choice of critter for the Practical RDF book is especially appropriate because once I made the decision to go with RDF for my next subject, I never looked back at COM+ and ASP. RDF figuratively ‘killed’ ASP for me; I just didn’t pick it up by the tail and throw it around. Much.

But all this isn’t why the cover design folks at O’Reilly picked the Secretary Bird. I think they just liked the long tail.


Cover for Practical RDF book
Hey! Don’t mess with the Burningbird — Serpent Killer!

Categories
Weblogging

Black holes, two towers, and blogsprogs

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I don’t know why I get these little feverish blogging spurts on Friday afternoons. After all, Friday afternoon is the Weblogging Dead Zone — the black hole for weblog posts not read.

Still, someone has to keep weblogs.com rolling.

Speaking of rolling, the next Hobbit movie, Twin Towers opens next week. I know that Dorothea and David are looking forward to it. However, I’m not sure they match the anticipation of Ben and Tempe Vierck. Ben posted a link to a photo of Tempe in advanced stages of pregnancy, and in the comments to the posting at Tempe’s weblog, she wrote:

She is head down. You’ll have to talk to her about the dropping part. I would rather she hold off until after two towers. (Emphasis mine.)

That’s fan dedication. BTW, I was the first weblogger to correctly guess the sex of Ben and Tempe’s upcoming baby, based on a sly hint of Ben’s. But I’m not telling. Neener, neener.

Four weblogging couples expecting babies within the next month. Going to be exciting around here.

Categories
RDF Weblogging

When doors are open

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

It started with Ben Hammersley getting an idea:

So here’s what I’d like. Movable Type blogs now automatically create trackbacks when they can. These trackbacks contain RDF, denoting the category the MT blog has that category within. MT produces RDF indexes too (in the flavour of RSS 1.0). So, what I want is a little app that takes the trackback. Follows it back to the originating site, find the RDF snippet, takes the index.rdf, and gives back all the entries within the index.rdf that are on the same subject as the trackback one.

A little chit chat occurs among a few people, all of whom invited themselves into Ben’s conversation via comments, trackbacks, and through cross-posts (here, here, here to list a few).

Today, less two days later, Ben Trott posts a solution. I download it. I run it with my entry Elitist only need apply?. I get the following:

Examining http://www.irelan.net/becoming/archives/000745.html
Category: Technology
Found RSS http://www.irelan.net/becoming/index.rdf
Examining http://esigler.2nw.net/blog/archives/000032.html
Category: Play
Found RSS http://esigler.2nw.net/blog/index.rdf
Examining http://www.seabury.edu/MT/akma/000363.html
Examining http://WWW.onepotmeal.com/blog/archives/001070.html

More Like This From Others:
Young at Heart, Bitter in Mind
Technology
http://www.irelan.net/becoming/archives/000745.shtml

For the people, by the people
Technology
http://www.irelan.net/becoming/archives/000744.shtml

Permahome
Technology
http://www.irelan.net/becoming/archives/000736.shtml

Conferences…
Play
http://esigler.2nw.net/blog/archives/000032.html

Beatings will continue until grades improve…
Play
http://esigler.2nw.net/blog/archives/000031.html

A smattering of assorted thoughts.
Play
http://esigler.2nw.net/blog/archives/000027.html

Doh!
Play
http://esigler.2nw.net/blog/archives/000018.html

Want to know what the future holds for social software? You just saw it in action, boys and girls.