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WaSP Street Team “WaSP Street Team: getting the message out everywhere, together.” (tags: wasp webstandards) knowee - ESW Wiki “knowee is a distributed, web-based contact organizer. It would be largely bootstrapped via the XFN and hCard microformats, but uses SPARQL (or maybe just a simple RDF lib) for application functionality and RDF for information integration.” (tags: hcard microformats rdf semanticweb sparql) Improve your forms using HTML5! - Opera Developer Community Example of what the WhatWG Web Forms 2 bring to the table. The examples are a little confusing because so many attribute values aren’t enclosed in quotes ...

E-Commerce Version 3 (For Drupal 4.7 and 5) | drupal.org New version now available. Looks like some changes to the email handling which may require me to update my ecommerce modules (tags: drupal ecommerce) ufJSParser Intended to be a “A generic cross browser microformat parser in JavaScript”. From the developer of Operator (tags: javascript microformats parsing) Revolution On Rails: [PLUGIN RELEASE] Enhanced Rails Migrations v1.1.0 Managing migrations in a large development team (tags: migrations plugins rubyonrails) Blog - Democracy: A Name Change ...

There’s quite a bit of overlap between GeoKit and acts_as_geocodable/graticule, as the latter pair were based on GeoKit. But it provides at least one feature (IP-based location lookup) that they don’t, so I decided to give it a whirl. Since my main geographically related projects are both now based on plugins that I’m pretty happy with and which suit them well, I decided to resuscitate an old sample piece. A few months back I wrote about scraping the Grand Rapids bus routes site and put up a toy application utilising the resource features in then-edge Rails. I’ve been meaning to return to that project to test out some features in ActiveResource, but in the meantime it seemed like it might be useful to be able to search for the nearest bus stop. ...

Observations on film art: Movies still matter “In other words, traditional media like the cinema aren’t dying out. No art form that has been devised across the history of humanity has disappeared. Movies didn’t kill theater, and TV didn’t kill movies.” (tags: film) The house that Herman built “For the past five years, artist Jackie Sumell has been helping Herman Wallace, who has been in solitary confinement at the Louisiana State Penitentiary for the last 34 years, design his dream house, a house that will probably never be built.” ...

E-Advocacy, the Digital Divide and GIS: An Interview with Arnold Chandler of PolicyLink Interesting interview about e-advocacy, GIS, and other use of technology by non-profit groups. Also interesting commentary on the digital divide and internet use amongst North American ethnic minorities (tags: advocacy campaigning digitaldivide forblog gis housing) Bill Eisenhauer » GeoKit: Going International? Bill is exploring adding UK addresses to the GeoKit geocoders (tags: geocoding geokit rubyonrails)

After writing my review of acts_as_geocodable/graticule earlier in the week, I decided to go searching for geocoding services that might offer data for addresses outside of North America. One that I came across is at Local Search Maps. There’s an introductory blog entry here. The API is a little different in that it returns its data as javascript strings, but otherwise it’s simple enough to send a GET for a given address and get back the data. To see how easy it is, I decided to code up an extra geocoder for graticule that would use this service. ...

ryan lott {a.k.a. son lux}: Cool Cleveland Interview Been really enjoying the son lux record. Looking forward to seeing him/them in a few weeks’ time (tags: ffm2007 music sonlux) Daytrotter review of Neon Bible “Win Butler ain’t mad at God, just his PR team.” (tags: arcadefire music reviews) E-Advocacy, the Digital Divide and GIS: An Interview with Arnold Chandler of PolicyLink Interesting interview about e-advocacy, GIS, and other use of technology by non-profit groups. Also interesting commentary on the digital divide and internet use amongst North American ethnic minorities ...

Back around the 2004 Presidential Elections, I read an article published in what I think was The Atlantic reporting on a roundtable discussion between a number of key political thinkers. They were exploring the state of the two-party system in US politics and the possibility for a third party. To my surprise (coming from a point of view where both major parties in the USA seem to be of the right) they were arguing for a third party to appear in the middle of the US spectrum. But as I thought about it more, and have come back to it over the past few years, that makes a lot of sense. A serious third party in the middle would force the Democrats and Republicans to refocus. It could suck away those on the central fringes of each party who drag the others to more moderate positions, and it would be taken seriously in a way that no third party has been here for a long time. ...

Clarification from Metaweb re. centralisation Danny provides some follow-up to all the chatter around Metaweb/Freebase (tags: semanticweb) ImageScience “ImageScience is a clean and happy Ruby library that generates thumbnails – and kicks the living crap out of RMagick. Oh, and it doesn’t leak memory like a sieve.” (tags: image imagemanipulation rmagick ruby thumbnailing) O’Reilly Radar > My “Outdated View” of the Semantic Web Tim O’Reilly responds to the comments about freebase: “In short, it sounds like the bottom-up approach to Web 2.0 and the current thinking on the Semantic Web are growing closer together every day.” ...

I’ve used Rick Olson’s excellent acts_as_attachment on a number of projects and it’s saved me a huge amount of time that would have been spent worrying about how best to resize images, how to make sure uploaded files are properly written to storage, and other such boring details. So I’ve been noticing with interest increasing references to his new attachment_fu plugin, which is a complete rewrite of acts_as_attachment. That interest was piqued as I skimmed this nice how-to on file attachment from Mike Clark (if you’re just looking for how to get started, go read that). It seems attachment_fu is almost entirely backwards compatible with acts_as_attachment (you just need to change your models to rename the ‘acts_as_attachment’ declaration ‘has_attachment’), but with a number of enhancements. ...