Category Archives: Blogging

Uncle Squared

FOAF, General, WordPress

Things haven’t been less hectic since my last progress report — I’m now officially entitled to the title “Uncle”, as my sister yesterday finally gave birth to Silke, her lovely daughter and my wonderful niece:

Silke, Gry og Hans

To top it off, (Aunt) Katrine’s brother and his wife came home from China tonight, bringing with them their new daughter Isabel, just as lovely and wonderful:

Isabel

In other news, Katrine and I entered the bubbly housing market — we bought a house on Lellinge Allé, just outside central Copenhagen. We will be moving after October 1st, after which you’ll all be more than welcome to stop by! :-)

Elsewhere, Katrina is in the news and photo streams, and Tim Bray’s retrospect about Nawlins reminded me of when I was there, specifically of when I was walking down Basin Street and got “hustled” by a guy who claimed to be able to tell “where I got my shoes” for $10. Since I brought them from Denmark, I figured I’d be safe accepting the challenge, but he simply replied “On your feet”. Laughing hard, I just had to fork it over.

ObSemWeb: Prompted by Danny Ayers, I finally got around to releasing a new version of the FOAF Output plugin. It’s now at 1.17, with a few fixes and tweaks added since the last release (but still not tested with WP 1.5 and later).

Reboot

Blogging, SemWeb, Travelling

It’s now been more than a week since reboot 7.0, and I’m once again able to think somewhat straight.

‘Twas a great couple of days, with a lot of inspirational talks, chatter, and laughs, and even a beer thrown in here and there. Marc Canter wasn’t there this time, so nobody sang — at least as far as I know.

image-12

The Semantic Web didn’t get that much mention, but at least David Weinberger (depicted above) pointed out that knowledge isn’t tree-structured — hopefully that’ll take root (hah) with some XML folks!

It’s a good thing I’m too busy these days with projects at work and house-hunting the rest of the time, otherwise I wouldn’t know where to begin sorting out what to do next…

Reboot and paradigms

Blogging, SemWeb, Travelling

The first day of reboot 7.0 had a surprise up its sleeve for those of us that stayed throughout the day: Not only did we get to see the planned showing of Doug Engelbart‘s 1968 demonstration of the NLS system featuring among other novelties a mouse, hypertext, and a keyword-ranking search engine — he joined us via a/v link, and stayed for a conversation after the show:

image-3

A very enlightening experience, even if those of us born after the demonstration took place might not fully appreciate its significance. Engelbart later emphasized paradigms, and how the process towards fullfilment of the goals of his research will be evolutionary rather than revolutionary, a view I’m sure Tim Berners-Lee agrees on with regard to the SemWeb aspect (even if some might say that linking to individual objects sounds more like XLink).

Earlier in the day we heard about blogging, Wikipedia, 37signals’ development process, and Ruby on Rails (must… make… time… for… check…) — Jesper Balslev has notes and pointers.

All in all a day above average that started out slow, but picked up at the end — I’m looking forward to day 2, featuring always enjoyable Ben Hammersley.

WordPress Plugin: Weighted Interests

Release, WordPress

I recently ran into Matt Kingstons’s Weighted Categories plugin. It was inspired by flickr’s tag list, showing tag usage with a font size for each tag proportional to the number of photos tagged.

I decided to clean it up a bit and make it work on pages that didn’t include all posts, and then turned it into an example of how to extend the FOAF Output Plugin profile page (example, download, source).

The current version is 1.1 (released 2005-01-02).

Changes since 1.0:
  • Fixed problems when no interests were found.

This plugin requires the FOAF Output Plugin. Note that only categories that are classified as interests by the FOAF Output Plugin (that is, the ones that have a URI in their description) are included in the list. If you wish to show all categories, simply change the line that gets the list of interests:

$cats=get_foaf_output_interests(falsetrue);

In case you are interested, here’s the CSS I added to my global stylesheet to make it look like it does:

.profile dl dd.weighted-interests { 
  text-align: center; 
  padding: 0.5em; }
.profile dd.weighted-interests li { 
  list-style: none; 
  display: inline; 
  margin: 0.2em; }
.profile dd.weighted-interests a { 
  text-decoration: none; }