Advogato blog for LotR

25 Oct 2002

Fri, 25 Oct 2002 16:21:59 GMT

Matt Webb writes about syndication:

I want to grab XML from all over the web and use it on my pages. I'd like all the information on my pages to be the latest possible, otherwise it's not really very useful. However, I can't do that: Every single time I grab that lovely RSS I'm hitting somebody else's server. That's not good, and why the policy both at weblogs.com and blogger.com is that you should only grab their XML data once per hour.

He then goes on proposing we need a system like NNTP to distribute the RSS, but dismisses NNTP itself.

His article made me wonder if NNTP would really be such a bad idea to do syndication. Matt focusses on a replacement for (the distribution of) RSS feeds, but why not syndicate your entire content instead?

The biggest advantage of this is that the reader can easily read the entire thread that was sparked by the initial blog entry, either because he's using a newsreader, or because you were able to easily include replies on the web version of your blog.

Another advantage of content syndication is that you can easily create custom views. For example, have a script to display the latest entries from blogs you are interested in, like advogato's recentlog, or a blog of entries that talk about a certain subject.

13 Jul 2002

Sat, 13 Jul 2002 18:37:19 GMT

I really wonder why wikis are so popular. Why would you want to make your readers think YourSpaceBarIsBroken, or that YouHaveParkinson so YourPinkyKeepsHittingThatDamnShiftKeyByAccident?

Yes, I've heard the stories about it making creating content super-easy. But is that really worth making your readers suffer when reading your material? People have enough problems reading properly anyway.

And wouldn't a slightly more restrictive way of creating content make you pay more attention to what you're doing, and so hopefully help with its quality?

On a slightly related note, I ran the advogato main page through the HTML Validation Service, and it came up with the following error, proving that input validation is A Good Thing(tm):

    * Line 85, column 52:

 
   It is now <a href=http://www.opencm.org/>released</a> and usable!
                                                       ^
Error: end tag for element "A" which is not open; try removing
the end tag or check for improper nesting of elements

29 Jun 2002

Sat, 29 Jun 2002 15:40:27 GMT

fxn: actually, I don't think the diary ratings will be more accurate (accuracy from my point of view of course), since the confidence you have in other people's ratings is based on the already (highly) inaccurate certification system. For it to really have a chance to be accurate, there'd need to be an accompanying rating system to rate how well you think other people are at certifying/rating people.

The good news (IMHO) is that this rating system at least allows you to filter out the trolls that don't get caught by the certification trust metric

28 Jun 2002

Fri, 28 Jun 2002 00:32:52 GMT

Malx: My local mod_virgule lets you give diary entries a topic. If this topic matches a project name, the entry gets added to the project page in recentlog style. I'm biased of course, but I think this is a much nicer way of getting the functionality you want than the way you suggested.

My patch isn't completely ready yet though, which is why I haven't submitted it to virgule-dev yet. The biggest problem is how to let people specify the topic unobtrusively. For now it is a seperate text entry on the diary entry form, but this means you get only one topic per diary entry. But people seem to be aggregating several topics in one entry (which is very understandable, since you only get one entry in the recentlog).

16 Jun 2002

Sun, 16 Jun 2002 19:19:52 GMT

bagder, your statistics and the comments you base on them certainly prove to me that you can use statistics to back up any point you like :)

In that one year, there are suddenly 746 extra people with a journeyer status, while at the start there were only 313 apprentices. It could be that lots of experienced people hadn't bothered yet to join Advogato, but if you look at the recent joins list, this seems highly unlikely.

So yes, I do believe there is cert-inflation (also because I've become a master, a status I certainly haven't earned). Still, I'm not sure if it is really a bad thing. We certainly shouldn't attach much real value to these certifications, and the inflation certainly helps everyones ego :)

That ego thing is a good reason not to start with negative certifications I think. It might be interesting to have the status a person receives be based on a weighed average of the certs instead of on the higest one he gets from someone who is capable of actually giving that type of certification. Maybe raph will start experimenting with that if the diary certification is a success

14 Jun 2002

Fri, 14 Jun 2002 17:21:29 GMT

Bah, lilo's diary is almost as bad as bytesplit's. We need a diary-writing trust metric!

8 Jun 2002

Sat, 8 Jun 2002 15:45:05 GMT

So, I polished up my diary.xsl stylesheet a bit, and thought I'd share it with the world. (with accompanying xml file for month names)

if you add the following to the top of your downloaded xml advogato diary, you can get mozilla to present it to you as html.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="diary.xsl"?>

(and thanks to kirillov for reminding me I had a diary.xsl :)

21 May 2002

Tue, 21 May 2002 10:50:05 GMT

ianmacd seems to think Ruby's missing_method is a unique feature. I think it's more likely it was borrowed from Perl:

#!/usr/bin/perl

 sub main::AUTOLOAD {
  my ($method, $data, %attrs) = ($AUTOLOAD, @_);
  my ($tag) = $method =~ /.*::(\w+)/g;
  my $attr_str;
  foreach my $key (keys %attrs) {
    $attr_str .= sprintf (" %s='%s'", $attrs{$key});
  }
  return sprintf ("<%s%s>%s</%s>",
                    $tag, $attr_str, $data, $tag);
}

 print &a ('Google', href => 'http://www.google.com'), "\n";
print &ul(&li('item1') . &li('item2') . &li('item3')), "\n";

Of course, TMTOWTDI, and ianmacd already mentions CGI.pm, which does the same thing, only more robustly.

Another module is quite useful if you want to edit your html tree at some point after creating it, HTML::Element. An example of how to create a tree with it, and print it:

use HTML::Element;

 my $foo = HTML::Element->new_from_lol (
   ['p', 
      ['a', {href => 'http://www.google.com'},
	 'Google'
      ],
      ['ul',
	 map ['li', $_], qw(item1 item2 item3)
      ],
   ],
);

 print $foo->as_HTML;

10 Apr 2002

Wed, 10 Apr 2002 11:07:55 GMT

Posted through the XML-RPC interface from Perl

23 Sep 2001

Sun, 23 Sep 2001 13:33:23 GMT

grr. I *HATE* stupid bugs caused by mindless copy-n-paste "coding"