Blog posts

In looking for some contact details, I spotted that the State of Michigan have added RSS feeds for a whole host of state news. That’s a nice simple step that will allow those of us interested in state level politics to much more easily keep track. They’ve also added a blog for the state web team, which looks like it’s mainly aimed at supporting government employees in their use of the web, and one document on the site states that their new content management tools include podcasting support. Hopefully those blogs will become an opportunity to see what’s going on and hopefully input into the future direction of the state’s online services. ...

This blog will be back in action very soon. I have lots of notes from this weekend’s Fair Trade Futures conference to write up and they may see the light of day this week. In the meantime, check out Justin Zoradi’s blog. Justin worked as an intern at Calvin last year and is now spending a year working with Steve Stockman in Northern Ireland. He’s doing a great job of communicating all he’s learning about sectarianism, the peace process, and the people he’s meeting in that country.

Last night I initiated the Call For Votes on XML_Feed_Parser’s inclusion in PEAR. The package isn’t quite where I want it to be, but after several months’ work, the core functionality is all in place and the first round of unit tests are all passed successfully. So if you’re a PEAR developer… please go and vote! (feedback is still welcome from those who aren’t)

The highly anticipated last.fm/audioscrobbler web services are now live (in beta). For now they seem to consist of XML serializations of a variety of user, artist, tag, group, and forum data, but with far more data than they’ve provided in this form before. As I discuss a couple of music-related projects with friends, I’m sure these’ll come in useful. I’m a little surprised not to see FOAF profiles listed within that page (instead there’s a less standard XML offering), especially since FOAF is available, but it may be that they’re holding off because RDF is to come soon. ...

A review also posted at amazon.com of Eric Jacobsen’s Sidewalks In The Kingdom: The urban sprawl that blights the USian landscape has had more impact than merely the growth of ugly landscapes. It has broken apart communities, led to less healthy lifestyles, and increased ghettoization. Jacobsen’s book sets out to introduce Christian groups into the new urbanist agenda, calling for walkable neighborhoods, more community-focussed building practices, and support of local business where real relationships can be borne. While this may well be a good primer, anyone who has read any other new urbanist material or who is looking for a thorough theological account may be disappointed. ...

We’ve been away for the past week and time on planes and trains allowed me to focus on some simple unit tests for XML_Feed_Parser. I based the tests on the sample feeds provided in each format’s specification and was able to fix numerous bugs that arose during the testing process, with the only one remaining being some problems handling XML entities. The tests also allowed me to do some refactoring, identifying a few methods that could be eliminated or merged into the parent class since they were the same across all feed types. ...

I’ve bumped the version number for the latest version of XML_Feed_Parser to 0.2.0 to mark a couple of major updates. Firstly, I’ve changed the internal DOM models to public variables. While thinking through the possibilities for improving the extensibility of the package it occurred to me that almost any extension someone wanted to provide would revolve around some use of the DOM, so opening up the internal DOM model would make that nice and easy. Not only can you extend the classes in your own code, you can also do something like: ...

There’s another development version of XML_Feed_Parser up on the dev server. I’ve added support for atom:source and revised atom:author to work with that as per the spec, included the last few parts of core RSS2 support, added full support to the RSS1 module for the syndication and content modules, and partial support for the Dublin Core module. I have yet to see any examples of RSS1 feeds using dc:type, dc:format, dc:identifier, dc:source, dc:language, dc:relation, or dc:coverage. If there’s sufficient demand I’ll add native support for them, but they’re not a critical concern at present. ...

There’s a new version of XML_Feed_Parser up on the development site. 0.1.1devel adds support for enclosures in Atom and RSS2, and for getElementById for RSS1.0. Next on the list are RSS modules, which will allow me to extend enclosures support to RSS1 as well as make the whole thing more flexible.

I wanted to get a few thoughts on this written up, and thought this as good a place as any to post it… Once the code is a little more stable, I’ll probably post it somewhere for others to use. The first phase of the " Collage" experiment has been very successful. Less than a week after the festival it had indexed around 1400 postings, largely made up of over 1100 flickr photos. It’s helped us get a good overview of online discussion of Greenbelt and provided a great supplement to the photographs and reviews already gathered on the festival website. On top of that, it required very little attention over the festival weekend, which is a benefit not to be underestimated. And ‘greenbelt2005’ rose as high as #3 in the top tags of its given week on flickr. ...