Category Archives: Blogging

WordPress and i18n

WordPress

While WordPress gives you choices for translating the names of the weekdays for use with the post calendar, it’s not possible by configuration to choose which day a week starts with. Being used to starting the week on a monday – there’s a reason saturday and sunday are referred to as weekend, I just had to tweak the PHP code to generate output suitable for non-US bloggers.

The template function responsible for the calendar output is called get_calendar, and is located in the file /wp-includes/template-functions-general.php. The code that generates the actual output is located near the end of that function, and starts with a comment: // See how much we should pad in the beginning.

On the line following the comment is a calculation of the padding to be performed before the first day of the month. This should be changed by substracting 1 from the existing result:

$pad = intval(date('w', $unixmonth)) - 1;

Following the initial padding is the loop that outputs each of the cells containing a day of the month. At the end of the loop it is decided whether to skip to the next row, originally done after outputting saturdays, now changed to skipping after sunday (weekday zero):

if (60 == date('w', mktime(0, 0 , 0, $thismonth, $day, $thisyear)))
    $newrow = true;

Then, after the loop is finished, the padding after the last day of the month is determined. Just as the padding before the first day was decreased by one, the padding after the last day should be increased by one:

$pad = 78 - date('w', mktime(0, 0 , 0, $thismonth, $day, $thisyear));

The last thing to fix is the ordering of the labels in the calendar, and fortunately this is much easier. In the file wp-includes/locale.php, simply move the line assigning value to $weekday[0] (sunday) to the end of the list, after assignment to $weekday[6] (saturday):

$weekday[6] = __('Saturday');
$weekday[0] = __('Sunday');

The calendar should now display each week starting with monday.

Improving RSS output from WordPress

FOAF, WordPress

The default syndication output from WordPress is okay, but does leave room for improvement – even though it “defaults” to RSS 2.0, there’s RSS 1.0 hidden behind the scenes.

The first order of action is to fix the default page template to point to the RDF/XML output instead of RSS 2.0. In the file /index.php there are link elements in the head section of the HTML output, switching to RSS 1.0 is quite easy, simply change the RSS 2.0 line to the following (and remove the link to the 0.92 version):

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rdf+xml" title="RSS 1.0" href="<?php bloginfo('rdf_url'); ?>" />

In the meta section there is also a couple of links, one for RSS 2.0 that will be replaced by a link to RSS 1.0, and one for comments that is just dropped (an RDF/XML version may be added at a later date):

<li><a href="<?php bloginfo('rdf_url'); ?>" title="<?php _e('Syndicate this site using RSS'); ?>"><?php _e('<abbr title="RDF Site Summary">RSS</abbr> 1.0'); ?></a></li>

Now to the actual content of the RSS file: The default template includes, for each post, a dc:creator property that looks like this:

<dc:creator>mortenf (mailto:mort&#101;n&#64;&#119;as&#97;b.dk)</dc:creator>

That’s not terribly helpful for the Semantic Web, so I’ve hacked the template wp-rdf.php to include the following FOAF structure instead:

<foaf:maker>
  <foaf:Person>
    <foaf:name><?php the_author_firstname(); print ' '; the_author_lastname() ?></foaf:name>
    <foaf:nick><?php the_author_login() ?></foaf:nick>
    <foaf:mbox_sha1sum><?php print(bin2hex(mhash(MHASH_SHA1,'mailto:'.$authordata->user_email))) ?></foaf:mbox_sha1sum>
    <foaf:weblog rdf:resource="<?php bloginfo_rss('url') ?>"/>
  </foaf:Person>
</foaf:maker>

In addition to this improvement, the indication of categories could also use a little tune-up. The default output shows categories through the use of dc:subject, which is quite allright but somewhat too vague – how could anyone know that my category SemWeb/FOAF is essentially the same as Danny Ayers‘ Knowledge/FOAF category? To make up for this, it is possible to use the Description field in WordPress’ category system to assign a URI to each (or some) of the categories, and then generate appropriate statements by adding two lines to the the_category_rss template function in /wp-includes/template-functions-category.php:

if(preg_match('|^w+:.+/|',$category->category_description))
    $the_list .= '<foaf:topic rdf:parseType="Resource"><dc:title>'.$category->cat_name.'</dc:title><foaf:page rdf:resource="'.$category->category_description.'"/></foaf:topic>';

The results of these tweakings should show up nicely in the RSS feed – check it out here.

Yet another semweb blogger

Blogging, SemWeb

In the words of Mark Nottingham:

Everybody seems to have one, so here’s mine.

I’ve been biding my time, mostly because I’m still not sure that blogs provide an advantage over other means of community communication such as mailing lists and wikis, but also because I, like a lot of other people, want to roll my own tool. Time does not come cheap, and progress in that area is slow, so here it is – powered by WordPress…

The first posts will likely be on exactly that subject, WordPress, trying to make it fit my needs better, but as the title – Binary Relations – of my new weblog suggests, the writing here will focus on the Semantic Web with it’s social and technical implications. Subjects in that area will be Redland, FOAF, names in FOAF and image description, tying together my digital photos with the currently upcoming SWAD-Europe Image Description Workshop.

This will likely not be a link blog, as people like Danny Ayers and the collective efforts by the #rdfig community do a good job in that area. My vision for this blog is more along the lines of the work by Matt Biddulph and Mark Pilgrim – longish posts trying to generate forward motion in an interesting area.

We’ll see…