Interestingly Local News (“your worldwide local newspaper”, as it calls itself) has a “gossip” page powered by Localfeeds. Select your location, hit the “gossip” tab and you get what they call “News from local bloggers…”.

News? From bloggers? More like inane prattle. This may be taking the “blogging as journalism” meme a bit too seriously.

Interesting looking at Erik’s news today to see several Java bulletin-board type things covered.

In a totally unrelated, but nevertheless coincidental move, I rewrote some of the Xurble frontpage over the weekend, and hope to get a clean version up over the next few days.

Unlike the ones Erik links to (which seem to be well-planned out, carefully architected etc.), lots of the Xurble code grew organically, and, FWIW, works very nicely thankyouverymuch. Not to mention that it supports just about anything you can think of. 😉

Oh, and Xurble is now years old. 🙂

Some links I picked up when doing some cursory research for Jabber Reminders (not all necessarily so related!):

JAlbum is what I used to make my online gallery of the photos I took when in Rome, and it uses JSP-based skins to generate the index and individual pages. This means, of course, that with a simple RDF-skin you can provide an XML description of your gallery. Below is the skin I used to generate mine (I’ve not finished writing all the comments yet!) – for it to work well it requires you to do two things: 1) add a comment (which will get stored in the JPEG header) to each image in the “edit” tab as shown in this screenshot (click to enlarge)

2) add some custom variables as shown below with these names in the “advanced” tab (click to enlarge)

Do a publish and voila! Not only will you have an online gallery, but an RSS 1.0 file describing it, and each photo in it! All that’s missing is somewhere to stick FOAF codepiction data, and whilst JAlbum is closed source, it has a documented API so it should be easy enough to knock up a simple GUI along the lines of KimDaBa which lets you add people, locations and keywords to images (KimDaBa looks like an excellent app in its own right, btw, and definitely one to check out if you’re in Linux!)

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>

<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
            xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
            xmlns="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/">

<channel rdf:about="$location">
<title>$title</title>
<link>$location</link>
<description>$description</description>
<dc:creator>$creator</dc:creator>

<items>
  <rdf:Seq>
    <ja:rowiterator>
      <ja:coliterator>
        <rdf:li rdf:resource="$location$fileName" />
      </ja:coliterator>
    </ja:rowiterator>
  </rdf:Seq>
</items>

</channel>

<ja:rowiterator>
  <ja:coliterator>
    <item rdf:about="$location$fileName">
      <title>$label</title>
      <ja:if exists="comment">
        <description>$comment</description>
      </ja:if>
      <link>$location$fileName</link>
    </item>
  </ja:coliterator>
</ja:rowiterator>

</rdf:RDF>

Link to the index.rdf file now fixed!


Modification to template to only display <description> element when there’s content to display

My girlfriend’s just received some SMS spam (this one in fact), and came to show it to me not because she was going to call it, but because the “sent” date is approximately five hours in the future.

Of course, a quick google of the contents retrieved the page on Grumbletext I linked to above, which tells of people who even called the number and were charged £11 for the privilege. Honestly, it’s almost as bad as this woman.

Anyway, for all those receiving SMS spam in the UK, here’s what the GrumbleText guys recommend:

Our advice: 1) report it to ICSITS on 0800 500212 and 2) delete it – you should only consider attempting to ‘unsusbscibe’ if you start getting loads of the same text – services tend to send out in batches over a period of a few days so be patient and see if they die off.. Oh, and the last main way that we know they use to get hold of your number is: if you call one of these so called 090-type ‘prize’ numbers, you will often be asked – in order to be able to ‘claim’ your ‘prize’- to input using the phone keypad a friend’s mobile number. If you make one up, as many people must do, well, it may turn out its yours, and that’s why you started suddenly getting a stream of junk!

In addition, despite our harsh spam filters at work, I’ve just started getting a couple of spam mails a week arriving in my Inbox which is pretty surprising seeing as it’s not given out to anyone outside the company ever. I suppose it must have just popped up on the brute force “possibly valid email”-ometer.