WP: Venus

Release, Web, WordPress

Planet SF has been running WordPress with the FeedWordPress plugin for a while now, but it just didn’t work very well — posts were duplicated, and multiauthor blogs weren’t handled well.

Instead of fixing it, I decided to go with Planet Planet instead. Well, sort of.

Sam Ruby has put a lot of work into a refactoring of the Planet Planet code, the result being Planet Venus. Among the most significant changes is the use of a cache directory containing Atom entries as individual files. This makes it easy to slurp the posts into WordPress, which has the advantage of giving easy access to historic posts, categories and users etc.

Prompted by a question on the planet development list I finally got around to putting together a plugin that would power a WordPress installation through the use of Planet Venus.

Installation and use of the WordPress Venus plugin (svn) is straight forward — dump it in the wp-content/plugins folder, activate it from the plugins option screen, and go to the Venus option screen to configure its options: Path to Planet Venus cache directory, update interval and whether to link from posts back to their source.

Update: This plugin now lives in the WordPress Plugin Repository.

Married

Travelling, Video Description

I’ve been married for a month now.

It’s great — I have a lovely wife, I’m happy, and the future looks just fine from here.

The party with family and friends was great, and our honeymoon in France was great too.

We shot a bit of video while we were there, sending it back to Denmark via Google:

ObSemWeb: Of course, I now have to look into semantic descriptions for video. I know there’s already stuff out there, but as it’s quite different from describing photos, pointers are more than welcome…

Computing Cloud

Databases, Hardware, SemWeb

Amazon is launching another Limited Beta, which seems to be the only way to launch anything these days.

This time they build on the S3 success, and add the next obvious component to the equation: Computing on demand, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

As with S3, you get what you pay for and vice versa, no signup fees. S3 is used (and paid for separately) to store the computing images, and the EC2 additional pricing seems at first glance to be quite reasonable:

  • $0.10 per instance-hour consumed (or part of an hour consumed).
  • $0.20 per GB of data transferred outside of Amazon (i.e., Internet traffic).

The bandwidth cost might be an issue, but depending on what you want to compute, it might not a problem.

I could envision running some serious reasoning on a thing like this…

Public Geo Data

GPS/Geo

The nice people of Public Geo Data have started a petition and a campaign for letters to be sent to ministers for the environment.

This is a quite important issue, especially in the these times of mash-ups everywhere. If the data — that has already been payed for by taxpayers — must be bought once more by every user, development in this area will be stuffed, and we won’t get to see the advantages that these types of information can bring.

I have already written to the Danish Minister for the Environment, the relevant member of the Danish parliament, and of course my member of the European Parliament.

I think you should too: Contact Your Minister.

[via Mapping Hacks.]

New and Old

Hardware, Humour

It’s quite entertaining being back in a real anti-MS camp for a while. Haven’t really been there since my OS/2 days.

Reading Mac-news is simply plain fun:

Leopard’s top-secret secrets:

When I get a new Microsoft product in the mail it’s often like that moment when you’ve got both feet on the brakes but you know that the car can’t possibly stop in time. You don’t know what’s going to happen. You just hope it won’t hurt too much.