DJabberd Bookmarks

Fri 28 Dec 2007

Just started some serious playing with djabberd, Danga's pluggable XMPP/Jabber server.

At this stage it's almost more a toolkit than an out-of-the-box jabber server, but it's pretty fun. I'm running the subversion trunk version, running than the older version on CPAN.

Documentation is pretty sparse though, so thought I'd collate the resources I've found useful so far:

So far I've got an RPM for CentOS 5 of the svn trunk code, and am running it in test mode at a couple of places. I've got LDAP auth, rosters, and vcards working well, and am still working on offline storage, multi-user chat, and bot integration. I'll post the RPM and some example configs when I'm a little further along.

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Transient RSS Feeds

Thu 27 Dec 2007

As the use of RSS and Atom becomes increasingly widespread (we have people talking about Syndication-Oriented Architecture now), it seems to me that one of the use cases that isn't particularly well covered off is transient or short-term feeds.

In this category are things like short-term blogs (e.g. the feeds on the advent blogs I was reading this year: Catalyst 2007 and 24 Ways 2007), or comment feeds, for tracking the comments on a particular post.

Transient feeds require at least the ability to auto-expire a feed after some period of time (e.g. 30 days after the last entry) or after a certain date, and secondarily, the ability to add feeds almost trivially to your newsreader (I'm currently just using the thunderbird news reader, which is reasonable, but requires about 5 clicks to add a feed).

Anyone know of newsreaders that offer this functionality?

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Blosxom hcard plugin

Mon 03 Dec 2007

Building on my initial set of blosxom microformat plugins, the hcard plugin provides a global hcard variable for inclusion in your blosxom templates.

To use it, you simply define the set of hcard data to use in an 'hcard.yml' file in your blosxom data directory, and then include $hcard::hcard somewhere in your blosxom flavours/template. An example hcard.yml for me might be:

Name: Gavin Carr
Organisation: Open Fusion
Role: Chief Geek
Email: gavin@openfusion.com.au
URL: http://www.openfusion.net/
Suburb: Wahroonga
State: NSW
Postcode: 2076
Country: Australia
Latitude: -33.717718
Longitude: 151.117158
HCard-Class: nodisplay
HCard-Style: div-span

I'm using hcard here, so if you have microformat support in your browser (e.g. via the Operator plugin, if using firefox) you should be able to see my hcard on this page.

As usual, available in the blosxom sourceforge CVS repository.

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Blosxom Microformat Plugins

Sat 01 Dec 2007

I've been messing around recently with some ideas on adding some initial microformats support to blosxom.

Microformats are fragments of html marked up with some standardised html class names, providing a minimalist method of adding simple structured data to html pages, primarily for machine parsing (try out the firefox Operator plugin to see microformats in action). Some examples of currently defined microformats are contact details (hcard), events (hcalendar), links or bookmarks (xfolk), geolocation (geo), etc. See the main microformats website for more.

With blosxom, one simple approach is to allow microformat attributes to be defined within story metadata, and either autoappend the microformat to the story itself, or simply define the microformat in a variable for explicit inclusion in the story. So for example, if you wanted to geocode a particular story, you could just add:

Latitude: -33.717770
Longitude: 151.115886

or

meta-latitude: -33.717770
meta-longitude: 151.115886

to your story headers (depending on which metadata plugin you're using).

This is the initial approach I've taken, allowing you to attach microformats to stories with a minimum of fuss. So far, the following blosxom microformat plugins are available:

  • uf_adr_meta - adr support
  • uf_geo_meta - geo support
  • uf_hcalendar_meta - hcalendar support
  • uf_hcard_meta - hcard support
  • uf_xfolk_meta - xfolk support

Note that these are beta quality, and may well contain bugs. Feedback especially welcome from microformat gurus. There's also a lot of other ways we might like to handle or integrate microformats - this is just a useful first step.

All plugins are available in blosxom sourceforge CVS repository.

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