Category: Technology

Taking a hit today

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date April 5, 2005

The site is having problems due to a heightened number of trackback and comment spam (in conjunction with one of the weblogs associated with the Canadian Ad scandal being hosted by my hosting service — but I think today’s problems were purely spam related).

update

My host, Hosting Matters, has got the problem under control…and is moving my sites over to the non-Movable Type server tonight. Today’s problem really does look like an incredibly frenzied comment spam attack — I guess we’re all jumping the white shark of spammetry today. And we’re not jumping far enough.

If MT users would choose the dynamic page option (and why haven’t you?), and Six Apart provide a *PHP-based comment management system, the problems would go away and MT wouldn’t be any worse, or better, than any of the PHP-based tools…such as Wordform.

I don’t know how to say it any clearer than that.

*Or does it? What is mt-comments.php?

Technology

Testing formatting

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date April 4, 2005

One of the things I liked about movable type is that you could choose the formatting on a post by post basic. That doesn’t necessarily work well in a dynamic environment, but I did add an option in the post edit page to choose whether you want the content formatted (using default formatting as per WordPress/Wordform, or plugin), or if you’ll apply your own (X)HTML.

This is a test to see how it works

This is a test

update

Woo hoo. Worked first time, right out of the box. I’m so bad.

Technology Weblogging

Three big changes

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date April 4, 2005

In the last 24 hours, I managed to get three major components of Wordform finished. Go me.

The first was the external application-via-plugin dashboard that allows user-selected filler. With this you can use one or more plugins to provide whatever you want within the dashboard area. For instance, I currently have a list of updated posts through my Feed-on-Feed installation, as well as a list of updated posts from the Burningbird weblogs.

The second was getting the Meta option to work. If you access the individual posts or pages within the site, and there’s metadata defined for them, the RDF/XML is returned. I still have to finish the interface for adding the data, but it shouldn’t be complicated. You can see my test cases at http://weblog.burningbird.net/me/rdf/ and here. I’ll add code to create a link to the files in the header, and another option whereby if you pass in ‘meta’ rather than ‘rdf’, you’ll get an HTML table of the information, in human viewable format.

With this functionality, if anyone wants to provide metadata support for a specific vocabulary, such as Creative Commons or the Vegetarian schema (yes, true schema), all they have to do is create a plugin that provides the HTML for the form fields (to enable the user to fill in the blanks on the statements) and make some simple API calls to process the data. From the advanced editing page, an option listing all available schemas (as plugins) is provided and clicking on one opens up the form to grab the data and update the database. Once metadata has been created for a page or a post, attaching a ‘/rdf/’ or ‘/meta/’ to the permalink for either returns the formatted data.

No more worries about putting the data into comments in XHTML. No more worries about combining data from different schemas, since it’s all RDF/XML.

The final option I finished today was fulltext, which you can see in the last post.

Still lots of work to do, but these were the three big infrastructure items left. Onwards.

Tags Wordform

Technology

Focusing on code

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date April 2, 2005

I’m tired of splitting my focus between 3 or 4 projects and never quite finishing any of them. Instead, I’m going to focus on one–coding Wordform–so I can put the first release of the code out on the street for the daring of you to trip over. I have some writing to do, and the store and Tinfoil to finish, and I want to spend time in the Ozarks in the next couple of weeks finishing my photos of mills — but I’ll feel better doing all of these things if this one item is checked off.

What this means is this weblog and my others may be going through some interesting times in the next few days as I start modifying some of the core infrastructure elements. Expect things to break; copy your comments before posting; ignore the purple paint, broken glass, and hole in the floor.

Technology Weblogging

Update

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date March 25, 2005

Just a quick FYI in how this is going:

I need to integrate fulltext in the application. This allows people to view a single page in a multi-page posting.

I’m still trying to get the RDF meta-data component finished, using RAP (RDF API for PHP). Some troubles with data updates.

Still hunting down SQL statements that have been embedded in the process files, and isolating them in the backend.

Few other odds and ends. I had thought about not worrying about multi-blog support, but I think I will add this in, after all. I think all in all it would be easier to add it in from the beginning then to try and incorprate after the tool’s been used.

Lot’s of work. Most of it fun. Really like the metadata thing, and consider the discussion about datablogging timely, too. It’s not going to be that polished, though, because the metadata functionality will be an add on, whereby people provide a vocabulary and the functionality enables it for each post. But I agree with Danny: this is the perfect use for RDF/XML.

Tags Wordform