Second p0st

Blawgistan Times

Thu, 30 Jan 2003 11:00:01 GMT

Even lazier than the LazyWeb, the Blawgistan Times trawls the blogosphere for posts talking about it, and collects them all in one place.

Or does it? I haven't quite figured out how it works yet. It seems to involve a Topic Exchange channel somehow - presumably it syndicates that into the blog as well?

It's interesting to see how people are involving the Topic Exchange in their own projects. With a Topic Exchange channel, a Movable Type blog and my RSS to blog script, you can quite trivially build your own totally customisable LazyWeb-like site.

So, what's next?

Experimenting with Firebird

Wed, 29 Jan 2003 11:00:03 GMT

I'm looking at using the Firebird (previously InterBase) SQL database in a project, because it sounds quite good, works on Windows as well as Linux (unlike PostgreSQL) and can be distributed with commercial software without a licensing fee (unlike MySQL).

One scary thing about it is that it seems to have been built in the time before security was considered important (on Windows, that is). Databases are just files on the hard disk, except the database process runs as a privileged user and appears to be able to drop database files wherever it likes. I'm going to have to do something about that if I want to give this to anybody else. Adding a CVS-like "only allow this specific file to be accessed" command-line option should do the trick. Also restricting TCP connections to localhost would be a good plan.

Some bookmarks:

* Conceptual Architecture for InterBase/Firebird

* IBPhoenix Development

* High-level Description of the InterBase 6.0 Source Code

* A Cut Out and Keep Guide to the Firebird Source Code

* InterBase BLOB Fields: A Primer

* Comparing BLOB, CHAR and VARCHAR

Heh

Wed, 29 Jan 2003 11:00:02 GMT

Matt:

I'd rather not be a number.

I am a URI, damnit.

Well put.

More powerful blog editing via e-mail

Wed, 29 Jan 2003 11:00:01 GMT

David Brown announces a new Radio tool (download) that lets you edit (not just post) blog posts by e-mail. Very cool.

It looks like David Davies has been working in this area too.

Also (via Rogers): Radio now does previous and next day links.

bzero version 0.16 available

Tue, 28 Jan 2003 11:00:01 GMT

I just pushed the latest version of bzero up to the website. The main change is that all files are now sent as binary to the community server. This means if you have an HTML file with odd characters in the /extra directory, it'll be sent properly.

Interesting find

Sun, 26 Jan 2003 11:00:01 GMT

Installed Oracle last night (to see what it's got over MySQL) and found that, along with about 1.5 Gb of other stuff, it installed a perfectly functional copy of Apache/1.3.22 (Win32), with mod_perl, mod_ssl and mod_fastcgi, (along with mod_oprocmgr and mod_plsql, which presumably let you get at Oracle's internals a little better).

It's always interesting to see where Apache appears ...

Open Standards Architectures

Fri, 24 Jan 2003 11:00:01 GMT

Marc Canter: Open Standards Architectures.

Why Java?

Mon, 20 Jan 2003 11:00:04 GMT

I'm having a look at Java for web development right now, but have no idea why I want to use it rather than, say, Python (or Perl or PHP). It seems like you have to type rather a lot of code to get anything done. Can someone enlighten me? Point me at something to counterbalance stories like this?

I know there are one or two Java bloggers reading this; it would be cool if someone could tell me why Java is such a hit for web dev. Is it particularly well-suited to a certain situation? Integrated well into something?

Note to self

Mon, 20 Jan 2003 11:00:03 GMT

Integrate Sam Ruby's TrackBack + PingBack code into bzero.

PyDS now has built-in Topic Exchange support

Mon, 20 Jan 2003 11:00:02 GMT

Hot on the heels of Matt Mower (who is baking support for the Internet Topic Exchange into LiveTopics), Georg Bauer has updated his PyDS blogging tool to allow liveTopics-like post categorisation and Topic Exchange pinging.

It works really well. To enable it, you click a link on your desktop website home page and are presented with a list of available topics (everything from here). You check a few boxes and click 'Save', and from then on a set of checkboxes marked 'Topics' will appear under the 'Categories' line when you want to make a new post. Check a box and make a post, and it will automatically be syndicated up to the Topic Exchange. Great!

See also: my test post | the test posts on topicexchange/t/test

Update (in response to Seb's comment): PyDS is a blogging tool, an open-source clone of Radio. Anyone can use it, although if you're already happily using another blogging tool, you don't need to. If you want to have a go with its Topic Exchange support, feel free to create an account on my PyCS server (NB: PyCS != PyDS) to try it out.

You Know Me - tracking conversations

Mon, 20 Jan 2003 11:00:01 GMT

Dave Winer writes about a technique for tracking conversations on the web: The "You Know Me" Button.

The idea here is that, when you post a comment somewhere, you also authenticate (via the comment server) with an external identity server. From then on, the comment server informs the identity server of any replies to the comment.

As others have said, this is like Passport, except on a smaller scale. Which brings up the possibility of using the identity validation (implied by a successful login to an identity server) to 'sign' comments. Current comment systems tend to blindly trust you when you tell them who you are, making impersonation trivially easy. A verified identity could be shown on the comments page.

This might make things a bit tricky, however, as it would need some sort of crypto signature (signed hash of the comment), otherwise server admins would still be able to trivially impersonate others on their own sites. Hmm.

Dave points to SourceID, an implementation of the Libery Alliance protocol. This is interesting, although pretty complex. I don't think it's practical to expect all comment server coders / admins to support something like this. We need something simpler - something easy to implement like TrackBack or XML-RPC.

Comment tracking

Sun, 19 Jan 2003 11:00:05 GMT

Dave Winer: Every time I post a comment on a weblog I have to remember to go back and see if anyone followed up. We have to figure a way to automate this. Agree or disagree?

Agree. Now, how do we do it? Manila has the nice 'mail me any further conversation in this thread' option. That would be a worthy addition to radiocomments.userland.com, although that particular server is already pretty busy.

Python Community Server generates RSS feeds for comments; you can follow a particular comment thread or you can track all the comments for a site. When Dave posts to Workbench, he can use that.

What about Movable Type users? You can get a list of TrackBack pings on a page in RSS format ... how about comments? MT will also mail the blog owner when a comment appears, so it might not be that much extra effort to mail the people who've posted comments.

Organised topics

Sun, 19 Jan 2003 11:00:04 GMT

Hey - this is brilliant. Michael Fagan is organising the topics on the Topic Exchange, in a completely unintended but incredibly sensible use of the Wiki pages that are associated with every topic.

Links to explore later

Sun, 19 Jan 2003 11:00:03 GMT

diveintomark: New news aggregator for Windows

tima thinking outloud: TrackBack in motion

Oh, and did I mention that Aaron Cope did a Perl module to help you out when interfacing to the Topic Exchange?

Creative Commons explained

Sun, 19 Jan 2003 11:00:02 GMT

Sam Ruby: Truth in advertising

New on the Topic Exchange

Sun, 19 Jan 2003 11:00:01 GMT

Is directorio_blogs_hispanos (introduction) the first non-English topic on the Internet Topic Exchange?

Good to see it's not mangling the foreign characters. Not sure what to do when people try making topic names with accented characters though - I don't think they're valid in URLs. Or are they?

LazyWeb update

Wed, 15 Jan 2003 11:00:01 GMT

Just in from Ben Hammersley: the LazyWeb is using new code.

David Raynes's Post-It seems to be an addin for Movable Type to route TrackBack pings straight to a blog. This makes it very easy for MT users to build sites like LazyWeb.org. (... these are very much like channels on my Internet Topic Exchange but rather more configurable).

Here's a test. TrackBack being browser-friendly and all, I should be able to put an HTML form here and let you post to post-it.rayners.org ...

Once you've typed in your details and clicked 'Send TrackBack ping', you'll get a bit of XML showing up in your browser. If it says <error>0</error>, it worked fine and you can now visit Rayners's site and see what you just typed. Enjoy!

(This is exactly how the forms at the bottom of the Topic Exchange topic pages work, BTW).

Page design competition

Tue, 14 Jan 2003 11:00:02 GMT

Hmm. It doesn't sound like everyone likes the Topic Exchange stylesheet.

So, here's the deal - open to anyone. Grab your favourite channel (or this one if you don't have a favourite) and make me a better design. Put it on the web somewhere, and drop a link to it in the comments on this post. If I like it, I'll make it (or some derivative) the default style for the Topic Exchange for a while.

In return, you'll get a little link to your blog at the bottom of each page looking something like "Page template courtesy your name here".

Make sure you put a note somewhere to say that you don't mind it being used like this. I don't want to rip off anybody's design without permission.

In future, I might make it so you can select one of a number of templates for your channels.

RSS to blog

Tue, 14 Jan 2003 11:00:01 GMT

Just got a request for the code that powers the group-forming mailing list blog, so here it is.

It polls an RSS feed and sends all new items up to a blog using the metaWeblog API. You could make a primitive news aggregator out of it if you like -- install one copy per feed, and run them all in turn. They'll fetch the new posts and dump them all in a blog for you.

It should work with either Movable Type or Radio.

update.py - GPL-licensed (because it requires Mark Pilgrim's RSS parser).

New and improved

Mon, 13 Jan 2003 11:00:01 GMT

Thought I'd mention something new I've been hacking on for the last few evenings. It's not all done yet, but people are e-mailing me about it so here's a bit of an introduction:

The Internet Topic Exchange

It's the first (as far as I know) real-life implementation of Ridiculously Easy Group Forming. Basically, it lets you create sites like KMPings just by filling out a form.

Once you've created one, you can send TrackBack pings to it, and see them like so. There's also RSS for the aggregator junkies.

With any luck Matt Mower will be supporting it with his LiveTopics tool, so it'll be trivial to use from Radio as well.

Any suggestions / feature requests?

Python Desktop Server

Sun, 12 Jan 2003 11:00:01 GMT

Introducing the Python Desktop Server, by Georg Bauer.

It's a Radio-like blogging tool, in Python. it currently runs on Mac OS X, with Linux etc presumably coming soon. Interesting ...

(Here's a test blog, on PyCS).

RSS timezone issue when importing

Wed, 08 Jan 2003 11:00:02 GMT

I wonder how bzero should import blogs written in different timezones. bzero works like Radio - it stores the date of a post in the URL. However, that date is local time, not GMT or anyone else's time zone.

What that means is that when I make a post at 10am on 1 Jan 2003 local time (2003-01-01 10:00:00), the date part of its URL is /2003/1/1/, while the RSS pubDate is something like 2002-12-31 21:00:00 GMT. It messes up permalinks (and the flow of posts) if you import this somewhere else with a URL containing /2002/12/31/, but that's the best I can do without a hint as to the timezone of the original blogger.

The January backup for Second p0st shows exactly this problem (scroll down to the bottom).

Is there a standard tag (something from Dublin Core?) that I can use in my RSS <channel> section to specify the timezone of the creator? That would let me work out what the original permalinks should have been. Comments?

Notes:

Here is some mailing list discussion on the topic.

The RDF people refer to things specifically with timezone files (here are some more). That seems unnecessarily complex though.

bzero 0.15 available now

Wed, 08 Jan 2003 11:00:01 GMT

bzero 0.15 is now available.

The main change is that you can now specify post titles, etc, in a new way:

%title Foobar

rather than:

#title 'Foobar'

If you use the old way, everything after "#title" is evaluated as a Python expression. This means you can do some cool stuff. However, it makes writing with non-US characters rather hard. If you use the new '%title' syntax, you can put anything in there (anything encoded in UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1 should work).

If you want to add yourself to the GeoURL project, you can now do so by editing a file ~/.bzero/(blogname)/extraheaders.html and putting in the <meta name="ICBM" content="lat, long"> line. The default template now includes the other required meta (DC.title). Details for how to do it.

There have also been a few bug fixes (things now say '2003' instead of '2002', and the BlogGazer code that reads a backed-up Radio or bzero weblog is partly integrated. (Try 'bzero import blogname http://url/to/files.xml' - details in the readme). It has difficulty with non-GMT time zones (it puts some of my Dec 31 posts in January) right now so I don't recommend using it just yet.

Enjoy!

bzero 0.14 available

Mon, 06 Jan 2003 11:00:01 GMT

bzero now does unicode. It should now correctly read both UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1 text files, and convert everything to valid HTML (in { format) when upstreaming.

What this means is that on Windows you can use notepad to edit your blog posts, write something in the language of your choice, save as UTF-8 (not "Unicode" - that means something else in notepad), and have everything upstream and display properly. かっこいい！

Note that currently it only works for the contents of posts, not the titles or your blogroll. That will come in release 0.15. (Along with a way to edit posts without having to know Python syntax :)

Enjoy! (Download here: bzero)

Unnoticed RSS error

Sun, 05 Jan 2003 11:00:02 GMT

Interesting - it looks like the RSS feeds generated by Blogger are missing the RSS 1.0 namespace. Funny that nobody has noticed this - I guess most RSS parsers just munge namespaces altogether and assume that RSS (even 1.0) tags are valid in the default namespace.

Here's the <rdf:RDF> element from a Movable Type-generated RSS 1.0 feed (Phil Ringnalda):

<rdf:RDF
        xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
        xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
        xmlns:sy="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/"
        xmlns:admin="http://webns.net/mvcb/"
        xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/"
        xmlns="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/"
        xmlns:rss091="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/rss091#">

Here's evhead's one:

<rdf:RDF
        xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
        xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
        xmlns:sy="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/"
        xmlns:admin="http://webns.net/mvcb/"
        xmlns:l="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/link/"
        xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/">

Oddly enough, it validates as RSS. Isn't the namespace mandatory in RSS 1.0? Mark?

New in Python 2.3

Sun, 05 Jan 2003 11:00:01 GMT

Hey, this is cool: Extended Slices.

Python 2.3 will let you say things like a[1:10:2] to mean elements 1, 3, 5, 7 and 9 of a. a[::2] gives you all the even elements of a. Nice!

Thanks to Mark Pilgrim for the link.

New rdflib release

Fri, 03 Jan 2003 11:00:01 GMT

rdflib 1.2.0 is now the latest stable release of Daniel 'eikeon' Krech's Python RDF parser/generator.

Do check it out if you're working with RDF. It takes much of the guesswork out of it, and makes it very easy to generate valid, meaningful RDF.

nForce2 under Linux

Thu, 02 Jan 2003 11:00:01 GMT

Bought a new box a few days ago, running Linux (Debian GNU/Linux), so I can do Linux development without having to wait around for my old Linux box to compile stuff. Finally found the nForce2 Linux drivers today, so I can get my networking going (and return the network card to the Windows box I pillaged it from).

Note to self

Wed, 01 Jan 2003 11:00:01 GMT

For bzero 0.14: auto-convert characters to HTML entities so nothing 8-bit even tries to go to the community server. (see number5 for why this is necessary).

Presenting ... bzero 0.13!

Tue, 31 Dec 2002 11:00:02 GMT

If you're planning on blogging with bzero this year, you'll want to download version 0.13 now. It fixes a couple of bugs that were screwing up the new year rollover.

If you have already posted this year, update now, and create a file called ~/.bzero/blogname/2003/1/#newMonth.txt (replacing blogname by your blog name, and ~ by your home directory if on Windows), then run bzero send blogname to fix everything.

Enjoy!

Eclipse

Tue, 31 Dec 2002 11:00:01 GMT

OK, where is the 'Eclipse on Debian' HOWTO ...

Title
URL
Excerpt

Second p0st

Blawgistan Times

Experimenting with Firebird

Heh

More powerful blog editing via e-mail

bzero version 0.16 available

Interesting find

Open Standards Architectures

Why Java?

Note to self

PyDS now has built-in Topic Exchange support

You Know Me - tracking conversations

Comment tracking

Organised topics

Links to explore later

Creative Commons explained

New on the Topic Exchange

More on topicexchange.com

LazyWeb update

Page design competition

RSS to blog

New and improved

Python Desktop Server

RSS timezone issue when importing

bzero 0.15 available now

bzero 0.14 available

Unnoticed RSS error

New in Python 2.3

New rdflib release

nForce2 under Linux

Note to self

Presenting ... bzero 0.13!

Eclipse