I finally started posting the updated chapters for the Practical RDF book, over at the weblog. These have been edited, drastically, since the last release. The end is in sight for this book and I’m not sure who’s happier: me or my editor. This book has been a long time coming.
Thanks to my most recent announcement about the TOC, I was introduced to some new and very interesting uses of RDF/XML out there ‘in the world’; including a very sophisticated commercial application. These are all covered in the updated chapters.
Other work, though the effect is subtle: I’ve made some majors modifications here and there. For instance, the Recent Comments, Recent Trackbacks, and Recent Writing sections now cross all of my weblogs/web sites. I found that with the Practical RDF, weblog keeping it in isolation from Burningbird was not a good idea.
Now, no matter what main page you go to you’ll be able to see, at a glance, what’s happening elsewhere in the Burningbird Network. I used PHP/MySql to make these change, and once I test the code out a few days, I’ll post it online.
I didn’t use Movable Type plug-ins because by the time I’m finished with the Burningbird Network re-organization and my porting of all the BB Net pages to Moveable Type, I’ll have over twelve main weblog/web site pages. MT plug-ins would require a re-build of all these pages whenever a comment or trackback arrived or a new posting or edit was made.
There’s much less CPU involved just by accessing recent activity directly from the database. Since the amount of data is small and the queries are optimized, the data access should be lightweight. If anything, the PHP processing is what slows the page accesses with my current host, which tends to be a bit CPU and bandwidth bound, rather than I/O bound.
(In other words, with my current host, CPU resources are a bit strained, as is the available Internet bandwidth; however, internal file access, which is what happens with local database queries, does not seem to be strained at this time.)
Of course, all individual and category or secondary pages are static HTML. They’re only re-built when a change is made to the page that impacts them, only, so it was more efficient to use MT plug-ins with them. The only exception is the Backtrack PHP page, which is why it’s linked from the individual pages, instead of incorporating the processing directly into the page itself.
It’s coming together. It’s all finally starting to come together. Right now, over you.
(Apologies to the Beatles for taking their song title and messing with their words.)
