Blog posts

Tony Bowden writes to lament inept attempts to make Belfast City Council meeting minutes available online. It certainly seems like a lot of e-government services are designed with the issue-focussed user in mind rather than those who simply want to keep informed or educate themselves. That’s not such a surprise given that most of the pressure for these services is coming from interest groups, but it would seem that with something so simple as meeting minutes it would be harder not to provide a browsing interface than to develop one and then provide for more complex uses on top of that. ...

Cleaning out a few tabs that have been open for too long… Josh Tauberer (of govtrack.us fame) has launched aboutrdf.net with the hope of turning it into a first destination for those looking for primers on RDF. It’s a resource that’s been needed for a long time and hopefully will help demystify RDF. And on a related note, Danny Ayers has started a Microformats FAQ for RDF developers. It’s a useful resource for those looking to understand how microformats can fit into the Semantic Web agenda and will hopefully raise the level of discussion between the two communities.

For anyone looking for an update following Tuesday’s election, Right To Life West Michigan’s nuisance calls didn’t achieve their intended purpose and Rosalynn Bliss won 52% of the vote to become the new Grand Rapids 2nd Ward City Comissioner.

Inspired by Sam Ruby’s work on applying the Universal Feed Parser tests to the Ruby FeedTools, I’ve spent a little time this afternoon working on testing XML_Feed_Parser with that same test suite. There’s a lot of work to do! UFP’s tests consist of a series of feed files, some well-formed, and some illformed, with a description and test condition defined at the top of the file. eg. Example description So far all I’ve done is run a script through all the tests for well-formed feeds, testing whether XML_Feed_Parser throws an exception when I try and interpret them. When run against the current CVS, 1181 of the 1273 feeds parsed successfully and 92 failed. 68 of those failures were due to encoding problems (which I’ll try and work around, but won’t be able to cleanly fix until PHP has full unicode support), and another 17 were a result of not supporting CDF, leaving another seven I need to get fixed asap. ...

Some may remember a blog entry a few months ago about a phone call from West Michigan Right To Life. Those with particularly good memories may remember that the call ended with me asking to be removed from their contact list. Seems their memories aren’t quite so good. I just sent the following letter to the Grand Rapids Press. Sir, I was disappointed this evening to receive a telephone call from a rather under-informed caller, seeking my vote for Shaula Johnston for City Commissioner this coming week. The caller was from Right To Life West Michigan PAC and was calling to inform me that Ms. Johnston is “the right to life candidate.” ...

I’ve been wondering for a while why I’d developed such a blogging inertia. One clear reason seems to be a desire not to spend all my time taking cheap shots at administrations on both sides of the Atlantic that seem to be doing a fine job of destroying themselves. Like many, I had feared that with Harriet Miers out of the way, the Bush administration would go for an extreme ideologue for their next Supreme Court nominee. What I had not counted on was the linguistic pragmatism of so many of the commentators. Listening to NPR yesterday was a sad experience as politicians from the right fell over one another in describing the nomination of Samuel Alito as a gift “to conservatives.” ...

Spending a weekend in Chicago last month and looking for a non-starbucks coffee shop in the loop, I was frustrated to find that the otherwise very handy delocator.net didn’t have an option to limit a search to a radius of less than 5 miles or to plot a group of results on a map. We eventually gave up and went to one of the many Starbucks highly visible in our immediate vicinity. ...

There’s a new version (0.2.5alpha) of XML_Feed_Parser in the wild. I’ve cleaned up the handling of xml:base considerably, finally switching over to using PHP DOM’s baseURI attribute and checking the bases for all links returned, whether from link constructs or in text constructs with the type ‘xhtml’. That coincides with reworking the getText() and getContent() methods for atom so they now properly recognise the different types that the atom spec allows. There’s a little more work to do to properly allow non text/html mime types in atom:content, since I don’t want to return less common mime types without a way for the user to check the type beforehand. That should come in the next version. ...

On Monday morning I received noticed that XML_Feed_Parser had been accepted into PEAR. The voting process brought a few useful comments, and the latest version cleans up a few of those issues, including adding a custom Exception class. You can now find the package’s homepage on the PEAR site and it is also stored in the PEAR CVS repository for those who want to get the latest development version or check the source before downloading. PEAR users can get the latest version with: ...

Rob and I have been working on a proposal/quote over the past week and rather than set up a wiki or add clutter to an existing installation, decided to make use of writeboard. So far it’s been a great help, simple to use, easy to invite friends to (for those times when we need a little extra feedback), and good at keeping track of our updates. As Drew and others have noted, it would be good to have a way of merging updates, but for a simple document like this that’s not something we’ve often needed. ...