I really liked this story about the NPRbackstory twitter account. The panel at SxSW about newspaper APIs (which NPR was tagged onto) was one of the highlights, filled with promise, and it’s good to hear about a tangible (albeit experimental) use of one of those APIs to begin to contextualise breaking news.

All too often we lack the memory or the back-knowledge to appropriately interpret the stories that dominate the news (I was a little surprised and disappointed that the BBC stories about Khamnei’s comments on Britain didn’t note that “blame the British” is a common off-hand comment in Iran). News organisations often have vast resources that could help us develop some of that back-knowledge but they’re under-utilised. It’s rarely helpfully presented by web-based news outlets, but for a radio station it’s particularly hard to get that out. Twitter provides a nice way of passing on some tidbits and it’s great that NPR are using it for more than driving traffic to their very latest content.

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I didn’t write much (outside of twitter) about SxSW 2009. In part that was because life rushed off in other directions immediately afterwards, and in part there wasn’t much that really inspired me to write. There were numerous good sessions at the conference, but far too many “social media consultants” talking without real experience and far too much focus on “monetising.” Many of us with a longer view of the web and/or more of a technical bent expressed considerable frustration with such sessions and the voting process that had allowed them to dominate the programme.

One session I wish I had made it to was Merlin Mann and John Gruber’s. For months now I’ve had Gruber’s subsequent write-up open in my newsreader awaiting a link from this blog. In it he deftly sums up what so many of the panels seemed to miss, that the starting point for a successful blogging (and, I’d say, most any) venture has to be passion (obsession), and a next step has to be craft. The rest may follow, but it needs those starting points:

What’s so great, so amazing, about this racket is that it doesn’t have to be that way. You can obsess over your work, build an audience based on deep mutual respect, and eventually opportunities to earn money from it will present themselves. I don’t know how it works, I only know that it does.

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I’m working on a wordpress project at the moment, and pushing that blogging engine quite a bit further than I have before. We’re going to be using categories very extensively and one of the first tasks has been to allow category paths without any preceding /category/ or the like. By default, wordpress wants the category with a slug of ‘case-studies’ to live at:

/category/case-studies

but we want it to be simply:

/case-studies

So far, so straightforward. I installed the pathless-category-links plugin and all was well. Until I started using subcategories. All subcategory links started returning 404s. It seems I’m far from alone in that problem, but I’ve not yet seen a solution offered, so a little digging was required.

What was happening with subcategories (at least in my setup) was that the wordpress method that parses the query string was identifying the top-level category name as the category name and the subcategory name as the ‘name’ (ie. the post slug to look for). What was needed was a check to see whether that ‘name’ maps to a category slug and if so, correct wordpress’ assumption.

The code I’m using is:

if (! function_exists('jys_pathless_category_links_query_string')) {
  function jys_pathless_category_links_query_string($qs) {
    parse_str($qs, $query_vars);
    if (isset($query_vars['name']) && get_category_by_slug($query_vars['name'])) {
      $res = array('category_name' => $query_vars['category_name'] . "/" . $query_vars['name']);
      return http_build_query($res);
    }
    return $qs;
  }
}
 
add_filter('query_string', 'jys_pathless_category_links_query_string');

(NB: This will break if you have permalinks set up as recommended by the plugin author (’/%category%/%postname%’) and a post in your top-level category with the same slug as your subcategory. But hopefully that’s rare enough that we’ll be okay!)

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The past two weeks haven’t really left time to compile my selected links, though there have been many. A few days at SxSWi (on which more, later) followed by travelling with the family and the inevitable work backlog moved blogging way down the priority list. So here’s a mammoth selection to get me caught up. Particularly interesting has been the discussion around the future of newspapers (represented here by Clay Shirky, Steven Johnson and Russell Davies), which seem to have finally pushed beyond “how t ind a good business model for papers” to looking at where the real value for society lies and how we can preserve and extend that in a changing landscape.

• Making a jQuery Plugin Truly Customizable » Learning jQuery – Tips, Techniques, Tutorials

  Some nice tips for managing options, and a reminder to find _useful_ customisations not just load with customisation options without much thought about/consultation with other potential users

• iPhone Coding For Web Developers

  Presentation slides from the internet's Matt Biddulph

• Rack::Test released: Simply test any Rack-compatible app — Bryan Helmkamp

  There's a _lot_ to like about increased adoption of rack. "With Rack::Test, we hope to make it easy for frameworks to encourage their users to write tests by making it trivial to provide a testing environment. We’d like to foster compatibility between Ruby web app testing environments (especially important as ideas like multi-framework apps become more prominent). The philosophy is the library should stay small and extendable so frameworks can layer on additional functionality they want to offer without modifying Rack::Test’s core behavior or resorting to monkeypatching."

• Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable « Clay Shirky

  "That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen …. Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify." … and a a lot more

• russell davies: newspapers and all that

  "If we are going to create a new news ecosystem involving advertisers (and a lot of people would be grateful for that money) then we're going to have to do something about that institutional bifurcation between content and commerce. We're going to have to design the relationship between the two with the care of a good experience designer." – a response to Ben Hammersley asking if anyone talking about the future of newspapers had talked to anyone in advertising

• Streams, affordances, Facebook, and rounding errors – Laughing Meme

  "Simon Willison asked this week about best practice for architecting activity streams. And the answer is, “It depends.” Depends on the scope, scale, access patterns, and affordances you’re building — your contract with your users.

  Which is a long way of saying think hard about the promises you make to your users, implicitly or explicitly.

  And, Facebook, my friend, what the HELL are you thinking? You managed to negotiate the best deal in the business, talk about a racket, and you threw it away for a piece of Twitter’s pain? Are you stupid? Well, best of luck with that."

• SXSW Interactive Videos and Podcasts | SXSW.com

  Most of the sessions were recorded and this is the place to get hold of them.

• SXSWi: Location-based service is the trend at Austin, Texas |

  "Predictably, location-based services were a major feature this year, with launches that included Foursquare, a social, location-based game by the Dodgeball creator, Dennis Crowley, and a new Facebook application for the location management tool Fire Eagle. While early adopters such as the SXSWers have been exploring location-based services for some time, it is inevitable that more consumer and privacy-friendly versions will start to creep into the mainstream."

• stevenberlinjohnson.com: Old Growth Media And The Future Of News

  "I think it’s much more instructive to anticipate the future of investigative journalism by looking at the past of technology journalism. When ecologists go into the field to research natural ecosystems, they seek out the old-growth forests, the places where nature has had the longest amount of time to evolve and diversify and interconnect. They don’t study the Brazilian rain forest by looking at a field that was clear cut two years ago." … and …" Measured by pure audience interest, newspapers have never been more relevant. If they embrace this role as an authoritative guide to the entire ecosystem of news, if they stop paying for content that the web is already generating on its own, I suspect in the long run they will be as sustainable and as vital as they have ever been. The implied motto of every paper in the country should be: all the news that’s fit to link."

• On running a panel

  A mixup over bus times meant I didn't make it to Andrew's panel at SxSW, but I heard many good things. It's really great to see this kind of debriefing-in-public going on. Hopefully it'll make for a stronger set of talks and panels next year.

• Guardian API Maps – Home

  "This is a site that lets you search the Guardian's new API and add location information to articles. All the place data we collect is being made available to anyone who wants it."

• Foursquare, Hot New Phone App, Is Dodgeball on Steroids | The New York Observer

  Quite a few people seemed to be playing with Foursquare at SxSW but most of the Brits were excluded as we didn't want to use that much data and it wasn't available in the UK iTunes store. One to watch, though.

• A few notes on the Guardian Open Platform

  I saw Simon present the Guardian Platform at SxSW and it looks like a great achievement. Waiting to see what developers build on it, and how they roll some of the ideas back in

• Taking remote imagery offline to Nigeria :: High Earth Orbit

  Andrew's notes on trying to source good map data for use in Nigeria. It's a useful overview of a variety of services and ways to use them, though highlighting the absence of really accessible, high-quality data.

• Pulse Laser: The Utility of the Unfinished

  "One technique that S&W has been using recently to illustrate design work is placing sketches or wireframes in situ. Whilst wireframes themselves are incomplete artefacts, designed to be work in progress, they still suffer for being uniformly incomplete. Wireframes themselves can be almost too beautiful, and this means that it becomes all-too-easy to criticise them as only wireframes, rather than as part of a product that exists in the world. Contextualising the sketches into the photograph places the design into the world. This enables the design to be understood within the world, and also (importantly) to highlight the seams between the unfinished design and the finished world around it"

• Spike: a log file viewing & (if we’re being generous) analysis tool for Rails developers.

  Looks like a handy addition to the toolkit

• Generation Open | FactoryCity

  "Sharing and giving away all that you can are the best defenses against fear, obsolescence, growing old, and, even, wrinkles. It isn’t always easy, but it’s how we outlive the shackles of biology and transcend the physicality of gravity." – Perhaps an overly optimistic piece, but it connects together a number of current themes and we can hope…

• Testing Facebook with Cucumber | opensoul.org

  For those faced with the unpleasant task of writing facebook apps, some people are working on making sure they can be thoroughly tested.

• scraplab : instant sinatra deployment with heroku

  A lot of people seem to be excited about heroku lately, and it does look like a nice simple way to put up quick ruby apps. Must play soon.

• How to speed up gem installs 10x « The Budding Rubyist

  Handy little tip, particularly for server environments: turn off ri and rdoc generation in your .gemrc file, and speed things up considerably

• Facebook in 2010: no longer a walled garden – O'Reilly Radar

  A more positive spin on facebook's changes from David O'Recordon, who suspects they're going to pull down the walls around their garden and become a proper citizen of the open web.

• Facebook blinks, copies Twitter, still gets it wrong. – broadstuff

  Critical commentary on facebook's recent changes. I'm not sure I entirely agree with statements like "By 2009 it was clear no one gives a sh*t about the Social Graph" but facebook really do seem to be finding that their approach is overly complex and quickly trying to shift to a more twitter-like "web of flow" (to steal Stowe Boyd's phrase)

• Acquia Search goes public beta | Acquia

  Hosted solr for drupal: "Acquia Search can be installed as a module on any Drupal 6 site, and enhances a site's search experience with faceted search navigation, content recommendations, and configurable results weighting, all delivered through a redundant hosted service infrastructure.".

• Oauth using pecl/OAuth

  Looks like a nice simple way to interact with oauth from a PHP app

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Somewhere between Ruby on Rails versions 2.3.0 (RC1) and 2.3.2 (final) a change was made to the arguments required for one of the methods the theme_support plugin requires. I must confess I hadn’t spotted it, but github user knapo kindly sent me a message with a patch. That patch is now applied in the main repository, as are a few tweaks to the ActionMailer integration to better handle multipart emails. You can get the new version from github.

Perhaps more significant than those small patches is that I’ve now pushed up a new rails app for use in testing theme_support. The tests are a series of cucumber stories, and the app is very barebones designed entirely to test the various features. I could do with tightening up the way the test app and the main plugin repository are connected, but it’s a start and has been very helpful with the aforementioned patches. Any improvements to the test suite would be much appreciated. You can, of course, find it on github.

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