When I’m not working for other people, I often get carried away with side projects and experiments. This category will include all posts related to those projects. Most of them are technical or web-related, but once in a while I’ll even do things IRL!
Looks like the Blogger.com API is back online (now running on a cluster of servers, according to Ev, in this message on the bloggerDev mailing list. This means that AvantBlog is now running properly, and from what I have seen in my tests, it’s more stable and a bit more reliable. I had to clean up a few things to allow it to interface with the new server(s), so please let me know if there’s anything wrong with it 🙂
Thanks to changes in the Blogger.com API, AvantBlog appears to be failing to post on all blogs now. I plan on re-writing the Blogger API code that I have available for download which will be used to upgrade AvantBlog and hopefully bring it up to speed with the recent changes.
In the meantime, sign up to the mailing list to be the first to find out when it’s available and working properly again.
Thanks to those who have emailed me to let me know that it wasn’t working 🙂
I don’t know what the heck prompted me to actually start this project now, but I have started coding/planning on version 3.0 of webpad. The first release will be webpad 3.0 Personal Edition, which will only have a single user function, and will require manual modification of a configuration file for the username/password and other options. Following that, I will also release a separate, more powerful version, which for now I am calling webpad Pro 3.0. This version will include multi-user support, a complete administration and installation interface, and will be targetted towards power-users and businesses.
webpad Personal Edition will remain free for everyone to download and use, but webpad Pro will attract a small licensing fee which is yet to be finalised. I will also be slightly changing the balance of features in each version, so you will find that some features you would like to be available may only be in the Pro version, although I will keep as much as I can in the Personal Edition.
Was talking with Peter, the organizer of the AIfIA Translations Project and it looks like they are into beta mode. It’s a great project which aims to identify key texts in the IA field and translate them to as many languages as possible.
So far, there’s some;
which I think is pretty impressive. You can even get a large portion of the actual website in your preferred language once you go to the translations page (selection on the left).
Well, Fletcher has been flying away at the karma plugin we discussed and has got a version 0.3 going already. This one
has the following features;
You can download karma 0.3 and drop it in as a plugin immediately. It’s pretty self-explanatory if you understand the concept. To figure out the way that controvery and interest are calculated – have a look in the code for now, I’ll post the formulae when I get a chance 🙂
I emailed the blosxom mailing list and suggested a new plugin, which I am just calling “karma”. The idea was to allow people to click a + or – and indicate if they thought a post was good or not. This is similar to the system used on some other sites.
I got an email back from Fletcher Penney, who said that he’d develop it, and half an hour later we were chatting on MSN about the details. He’s already knocked out 2 draft versions and we are sorting out some great stats and uses for the information!
blosxom and its developer-community rules!
This is my first post to my new blosxom-powered web log using webpad. Hopefully this will work, and all will be well.
I think webpad offers a great way to manage a blosxom-powered blog remotely, since it offers a few easy-to-use HTML tools, while modifying the file directly on the server, which is just where blosxom wants them 😉
webpad was written quite a while ago now, and the new installations of PHP come by default with some settings which will mean that webpad doesn’t work straight away. The easiest way to get around this (on an Apache server) is to put an “.htaccess” file in your webpad installation directory which contains something like this;
php_flag register_globals on php_flag magic_quotes_gpc on
The next version of webpad will not require this, but for now it’s the easiest way around the problem.
If anyone knows of any other problems and/or fixes to problems with webpad, please email them in to me using the contact form or email here.
I wanted to get some information out here so that people could see what I am working on, and indeed what is running this site’s search facility. The icon to the right will take you to a PDF document (13.6Kb) which gives some more details about the approximate process flow of the search supplements, as well as a database schema of what’s running the best bets, variants and related terms.
I’ve had some initial interest from some of the other members of the searchloggers group in the work that I am doing with the search system on this site. The integration of a controlled vocabulary, best bets and a stand-aloone search engine backend appears to be of interest to others as well 🙂
My hope is that this can be developed into a stand-alone product that could be wrapped around nearly any search system, simply adding to the functionality of said search system. So far things are looking good, but only really for something written in PHP. I would need to add other options for systems written in Perl, C etc.
In the near future, I will be posting database schemas, some notes on implementation and other bits and pieces about how I am attacking the whole process. Keep an eye on things if you are interested 🙂