Posts

The Silence of the Asilomarians

After joining the AIfIA (and paying the membership fee), I have been somewhat disappointed with the response I received from the CELIA idea.

I signed up for the IA Library project with AIfIA, and have suggested that perhaps CELIA could be done as a part of that project, but have received no response. Zero. Nada. Zip.

I think Karl and I are going to start planning it out a little, hopefully I will be able to knock together a simple-ish system which can handle the stuff we would be working with, and that would allow us to get started. I think it’s a really valuable thing, and something that perhaps isn’t as important is the US, because IA is more established, but it sure is important here, where I have met all of about 3 people who even took a punt on what Information Architecture is!

Oversight

When I thought I had “finished” the mainline code for RESTxom, I forgot that I hadn’t thoroughly tested the RSS code (allowing you to request rss.xml from any topic and get a correct feed from that point ‘down’). Turns out it doesn’t work properly… double-slashing problems and whatnot, shouldn’t be too hard to fix hopefully, but darned annoying in the meantime.

So off I go to fix the RSS code, then have to fix it in the archives as well (which are working now!)

Putting blosxom to REST

The plan with these helper scripts that I am writing is that blosxom will be able to operate in a “REST-like” environment. This means that directing a browser to a URL like /blogging/blogger.com/ should load the blog entries in that directory (if it is within a defined blog-tree).

It’s working so far, and I have added in the option of linking to ‘rss.xml’ within any directory in the blog-tree to get an RSS feed of that level/category/sub-blog. Sweeeet. Next up is to eliminate the permalinks needing to use the blosxom.pl script in the URL (i.e. so that archives don’t have to link to blosxom.pl at all).

More Projects To Come

The main 2 sections of the site to be completed are the projects (still have some micro-sites to put together here) and the search system. I will also need to bring across the copyright info from the old site, but that will largely be copy/paste. The search system will be the most interesting part to develop, and I have some nice plans for it as well – We’ll see what I can do as far as combining 2 XML documents and an XSLT together (server-side using PHP of course!) to create the results.

The projects really could use a little work, but I just don’t have time to work on them right now. Once the site is live, I will be working on RESTments again to get that going, and then when that is up, the projects will all receive a make-over to ensure that they work with PHP’s register_globals off and magic_quotes_gpc off as well. I will also eventually get to working on new versions of webpad (which I have some great plans for) and AvantBlog (want to make a few versions, so that there is one for each major type if possible.

So now, with no other external contracts to take up my time, it is just a matter of not falling asleep and then all I have to do is my website, should mean that it’s up within a week or 2.