philwilson.org

I really really wanted to go to @Media 2006 (15th-16th June, upcoming), having missed it last year, but I’ve been asked to talk at the Institutional Web Management Workshop 2006 (14th-16th June, upcoming).

With any luck, my proposed talks (one on wikis and one on microformats – despite everything I’ve said) will be rejected

After a mail from Rod Begbie I’ve finally decided to move to a free, open-source aggregator which actually has active development: Gregarius. Sorry FeedOnFeeds.

My FeedOnFeeds database contains around 30,000 posts – is it worth importing them into Gregarius? That’s a whole lot of content, some of which may disappear from the web in the future, and possibly available for some kind of analysis.

I’ll have a few FoF customisations to port to Gregarius plugins, but a lot of them are now core features in Gregarius or already available as plugins.

James Snell has posted a new Internet Draft for expanding the details of an atom:author called Atom Syndication Format Person Extensions. In it he gives examples of embedding details with hCard like so:

<pe:profile type="xhtml"
       scheme="http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard">
       <div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
         <div class="vcard">
           <a class="url fn" href="http://example.org/">
             John Doe
          </a>
           <div class="org">Example, Org</div>
         <div>
       </div>
     </pe:profile>

He also gives an example of how to link to a more detailed FOAF file:

<pe:profile type="application/rdf+xml"
       src="http://example.org/johndoe.foaf"
       scheme="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/" />

I’m not sure if this is really a good idea or not. I can see how it would be useful, but is it the right solution? The only alternative I can really think of is a <link> from an HTML page referenced in an alternate in the feed, but then this would only work for entries which do have an HTML alternative, and perhaps doesn’t deal with cases when you might also want to use one of his other Atom-related drafts such as Syndication Format Revision Tracking where a user might have made changes in the past, but their contribution isn’t available from an alternative HTML version.

It’s been brewing for a good twelve months, but all the Britpoppers can finally celebrate: the mid-1990s are back in force. Whilst walking around the shops the other day I heard Elastica, Oasis, Blur, James and the Boo Radleys.

It almost makes me want to cry. I’ll decide on the emotion later.

All next week, Jon Snow will be reporting from Iran.

According to Krishnan Guru-Murthy, “You’ll be able to check up on Jon’s progress by following his blog which you can see on our website at channel4.com/iran and he’ll also be posting podcasts”

At which point my girlfriend quipped “yeah, and then he’ll be setting up a wiki to document his experiences”.