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Where do blogs go when they “die”?

No 404For the last couple of days I have been investigating why I couldn’t make conditional feature installation work in a Microsoft Installer (MSI) package.

Google to the rescue, but it sent me in a lot of different directions, none to the point, but then I finally managed to formulate the correct search terms:

Google search: installshield conditionally install feature

And on page two this article showed up:

MSI Application Packaging: Conditionally Installing a Feature

Here I found the solution I was looking for: have each feature, conditionally, set the INSTALLLEVEL property “correctly”, the last bit was not as simple as I thought.

Oldie but goodie

But…WAIT…That article is from 2005, and the newest entry on the blog is from 2005! The author seems to have lost interest after a few months of activity.

It’s quite amazing that a blog, that has been “dead” for 12 yrs, could give me the solution.

This is why you might want to go for a “hosted” blog solution, like Blogspot, instead of hosting your blog yourself.

If you do, there’s a better chance that your content won’t get vandalised due to unpatched software, go to eternal bit fields because you stop paying, in short avoid the dreaded error 404s.

This page must get significant traffic, and a lot of people might have benefitted from this, still I was the first to leave a comment.

So you wanna live forever?

OTOH, does it really matter? “I”‘m on archive.org and so is MSI Application Packaging

And you might not be aware of this, but the Danish Royal Library is harvesting content from the entire Danish web: Netarkivet (The Net Archive) — Det Kgl. Bibliotek too.

The content is only available to researchers through Kulturarvsclusteret (The Cultural Heritage Cluster) – Big data møder dansk kulturarv — Det Kgl. Bibliotek.

So just make your site available for indexing, ie. crawling, and you’re gonna live “forever”.

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Søg og du skal finde…

…hvis du ellers er præcis nok og der er andre der hjælper med at løfte. Det eneste det kostede mig var en registrering på Stack Overflow så jeg kan vise respekt, når jeg selv er blevet respektabel

Google-søgning: divi Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property ‘model’ of undefined at builder.js

Første søgeresultat var dette Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property ‘model’ of undefined in builder.jsStack Overflow, og der fandt jeg løsningen på mit problem.

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New high-score

New high score

As far as I can see, this was my 40K, and I average just a little more than 19 Tweets/day.

The Full Monty


ps. Just for the record, I have wasted FAR more than 333 hours on Twitter on my 10 accounts.

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'i dag' (Danish) Blogs Bookmarks Computere og Internet Design Education/Undervisning Hackers Historier/Stories Kunst Photography Resources Technology Undervisning WordPress

website til min nieces kunst-portfolio

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Blogs Bookmarks Computere og Internet Kim Blog (English) Open Source Resources Technology Videnskab WordPress

Weaving an untangled web – The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project

FOAF Project LogoThe Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project

I really need to “get out more”, since I’ve only just now discovered the Friend of a Friend project (FOAF), and I LOVE it!

The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project is creating a Web of machine-readable pages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do.

Say what?

FOAF is an important part of the so-called semantic-web, and FOAF is just a so-called RDF specification of who you are. RDF (Resource Description Framework) is one of the basic technologies of the semantic web, and it’s nothing more (or should I say less) than an XML schema condoned by the W3C for describing resources.

Think of RDF as “the mother of all links”, RSS and Atom actually uses RDF.

The problem with links

So what is that RDF does better than the tradtional link?

When you create a link, you rarely remember to provide important information about what it is that you actually link to. At best you provide an ALT attribute (description) to an image tag. Google actively uses the ALT tag when indexing images, but if the link to an image contained more information, eg. semantics, Google could do a much better job.

Semantics means that you provide information about content and context, not just a link to it. You could call that metadata, abstracts or just “data”.

Many CMSes uses the URI of posts to provide some semantics, it’s often called SEO (search engine optimisation), the URI of this post has FOAF in it, meaning that a link to this article indeed contains some semantics.

A common standard for the WordPress CMS is that it uses year, month, day and the title of the post to generate the URI.

The problem is that this information should be provided in a structured, machine readable and – most importantly – open format, in order to make it possible to provide semantics.

I actually despise the concept of SEO, since it amounts to cheating, the only valid SEO is:
“provide interesting content”

A semantic “you”

A number of standards for providing semantics exists, one of the most interesting, especially in this day and age of social media, is the FOAF format.

FOAF is a format that describes you and your connections to provide semantics about people (you) and your connections (friends), in a standardised way, using RDF.

The FOAF file contains information about who you are, how to contact you, but most interestingly it contains links to your friends, and their FOAF files.

The beauty of FOAF is, that all you have to do, is:

  1. Create a FOAF file, for instance using FOAF-a-matic
  2. Put it on a server
  3. Provide the URI
  4. Make sure that it can be found by others (e.g. by posting a link on a page you know is indexed)

Chances are that the FOAF spiders will have a feast on your FOAF, sooner rather than later.

Create your FOAF file

It’s quite simple to create a FOAF file, all you need to do is go to FOAF-a-matic, fill in a number of fields, generate the FOAF file, copy it to a text-editor, publish it on your web-site.

Below is a screenshot of the FOAF-a-matic page.

FOAF-a-matic screenshot

Take back your profile, it’s…YOURS!

No need to register with social networking sites, your profile is YOURS.

Who owns the information about “who you are”? You do! Should that information be made available in an open format? You bet! RDF and FOAF is the way to go.

And don’t take my word for it, just take a look at the people who are promoting and developing RDF and FOAF…

So how did the chicken cross the road

I’ll provide you with the story about how I found FOAF, since it’s interesting to say the least.

My good buddy Sebastian Lund just recently set up his blog, Silence is deafening, and I’m looking forward to following it, he’s using a beautiful theme, the Dilectio Theme, developed by Design Disease.

Design Disease has a number of free WordPress themes available, and you can test them, when I tried that, their “Lorem Ipsum” turned out to be an article by no other that TBL, timbl, Tim Berners-Lee, Mr. Web himself, and he was writing about blogging and FOAF…

So:

What an untangled web we’re weawing.

Now I need to think of a good URI for my FOAF file, TBL suggests this:

A lot of people have published data about themselves without using a URI for themselves. This means I can’t refer to them in other data. So please take a minute to give yourself a URI. If you have a FOAF page, you may just have to add rdf:about=”” and voila you have a URI http://example.com/Alan/foaf.rdf#ABC. (I suggest you use your initials for the last bit). Check it works in the Tabulator.

Ready, steady FOAF

So what are you waiting for? Create your own FOAF file, and start sharing.

And now I’m moving on to explore Tabulator, more on that later…

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Blogs Kim Blog (English) Open Source Technology WordPress

Spammers beware: The Karmic laws will “haunt” you

I’ve hosted a wiki on my website (https://www.kimbach.org/wiki) for some time now, and in keeping with my ideals, that states that participation should be as easy as possible, it was totally open. Notice the past tense: this morning I decided to edit the configuration files, and I now require registration if you want to edit articles on the wiki.

“Low maintenance”

The old, and totally open, setup was partly inspired by the “Co-Creation Rules” session @ reboot 8. In the discussions I had “post-boot” with the hosts of the session, we discussed that “low maintenance” was key to running a successful, participatory, site.

Stop Hand“Low maintenance” means that you create as low barriers as possible to avoid turning users away, e.g. allowing updates and comments without requiring the user to register, or in any other way surrender personal information.

There’s a major problem with “low maintenance” however: Even an uninteresting wiki, like mine, received an increasing amount of vandalism and spam, so I had to spend more and more time reverting vandalism. That’s the reason I’ve decided to require that you register and login, before you can contribute to my wiki.

I’m quite sad about this, but it’s out of necessity – I just don’t have the time to keep it clean.

Spammers beware: The Karmic laws will “haunt” you

So “thank” you spammers and vandals – I don’t really care too much – since it’s your “karma” that will be taking a serious beating for your actions.

Yes to “Low maintenance”, but for me.

If I was running a corporate wiki, and had the resources to patrol the articles, I’d still recommend as low maintenance as possible for the users. However, for personal websites – like mine – it’s just too stressful.

Spam prevention tools should be in the MediaWiki core (and they might be in the latest and greatest versions – which I can’t use because my host doesn’t support PHP5 :-(), and it should work much like Akismet integration in WordPress, which quite simply, is amazing. Akismet is a webservice, that you can query and update to prevent spam comments on weblogs, and it really (understatement) works in WordPress.

Akismet of hope

Without Akismet I would seriously have considered closing my website, since I received something like 1 spam comment every minute – instantly that disappeared when I activated Akismet.

But for now my wiki will remain high-maintenance for users and low-maintenance for me.

You’re still more than welcome to participate in my public Projects through the wiki, but it does require registration now.

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JOSBLOG Live! » Gallery Manager at last.

JOSBLOG Live! » Gallery Manager at last.

Cool tip from my old friend Jose C. of Orange/Telia fame.

He’s using a plug-in, called CoppermineSC, to integrate WordPress and Coppermine.

I use WordPress, I use Coppermine, but I’m switching to Flickr for my public photos, and I will continue to use .Mac and iWeb for private photos.

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Blogs Kim Blog (English) Open Source Technology WordPress

Lussumo Documentation | vanilla:integration:wordpress

Lussumo Documentation | vanilla:integration:wordpress

It looks like it’s quite simple to integrate the Vanilla forum software with other tools, the link above is an example of how to integrate with WordPress.

I’m quite impressed by the user table mappings, I’ll investigate how to get it to work with MediaWiki.

Vanilla seems to be quite well engineered.

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Using XML-RPC to combine Drupal and WordPress on a site | drupal.org

Using XML-RPC to combine Drupal and WordPress on a site | drupal.org

This looks like a cool tip, using the Moveable Type XML-RPC API to integrate content from WordPress and Drupal.

I just love the XML-RPC blogging API, don’t migrate, integrate…Hmm does a Moveable Type XML-RPC API implementation exist for MediaWiki?

I think that using RSS for content integration, is the way to go under normal circumstances, but the flexibility the XML-RPC API offers is great.

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Nadsat – så meget mere end en café

Nadsat

Nadsat er GENIAL – Je veux dire: AMBITIØS.

Maden er tip-top
Musikken er tip-top
WiFien er tip-top
Pladebutikken er tip-top
Gæsterne er tip-top
Og ikke midst Betjeningen er tip-top

Men…Hvad med at få et website? WTF…Der står “Index” i title!