OpenGuides-Dev February 2007

openguides-dev@lists.openguides.org

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Google Sitemaps
by Markus Linke 03 Oct '07

03 Oct '07

Hi, is anyone using google sitemaps with openguides? Thanks, Markus

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[OpenGuides-Dev] OG performance
by Paul Makepeace 20 Jun '07

20 Jun '07

Hi, I don't follow OG development but as host operator a few things are coming up. The machine's load is gradually climbing over time and some of that is OG. Despite a relatively low hit rate on OG it is consuming quite a bit of resource. If OG started taking off it would take the machine down. First up: index.cgi requires 0.35s to perform a `perl -c` syntax check. Any thoughts on putting OG on a mod_perl server? I have mod_perl running here of course and we'd need to coordinate some apache.conf stuff. Second: the supersearch.cgi gulps down CPU, often for seconds at a time. It is a frequent resident of `top` output. This isn't really acceptable. I'm going to request this feature be turned off unless an effective optimisation plan or some other way to reduce its impact here is constructed pretty soon. Sorry about this but it's encroaching on others. Third: I wonder if there's some way to instruct robots not to spider parts of your wiki. This ought to speak for itself: $ grep crawl /var/log/apache/london.openguides.org-access.log | grep 'action=edit' | wc -l 8242 $ Finally: I posted about a DoS and was wondering what the status of a solution was. http://openguides.org/mail/openguides-dev/2004-October/000542.html Cheers, Paul (any overbearing tone unintentional ;-) -- Paul Makepeace .............................. http://paulm.com/inchoate/ "If my elbow was straight, then I'll show oyu mine!" -- http://paulm.com/toys/surrealism/

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A fix for the map links
by Kake L Pugh 20 Mar '07

20 Mar '07

Hello. I noticed that the "Link to this page" link on the map-style indexes doesn't keep track of all parameters; it doesn't remember the map type (satellite, hybrid, or normal), and if you've zoomed or scrolled the map at all then it forgets the category/locale that you were indexing. I attach a fix - there are patches to both OpenGuides.pm and templates/map_index.tt You'll end up with URLs looking something like: http://london.randomness.org.uk/wiki.cgi?action=index;format=map;long=-0.05… Kake

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A couple of recent hacks.
by Kake L Pugh 28 Feb '07

28 Feb '07

Here are a few things that people might be interested in. They all might require tweaking for your particular guide; don't run them unless you understand them. First of all, an importer thingy that reads data from a YAML file and uses WWW::Mechanize to add it to a guide. (It won't overwrite existing data; it checks first and warns you if you're attempting to create a page that already exists.) Because it's YAML, you can't use asterisks in the content or it gets confused. If you don't use streetmap x/y links and OS x/y coords then you'll need to change that part. You can include any fields in the YAML file that are present in the edit form. This is mainly useful for creating stub pages so a location search will find them. I've used it to add all London's Tube stations and Good Beer Guide pubs. rgl.pl is the importer and rgldata is an example datafile. Secondly, a search thingy that finds all things in category A within N metres of things in Category B. It's quite fast and efficient because it uses raw SQL rather than the abstraction layers. It may be Postgres-specific, and it's certainly OS X/Y specific, but it should be obvious how to change that to suit your own guide. An example (plan your own Circle Line pub crawl): http://london.randomness.org.uk/find.cgi?cat1=Circle+Line&distance=650&cat2… This is, unsurprisingly, find.cgi. Finally, a javascript snippet to find nearest Tube stations and show what lines they're on. Again, will need tweaking for non-London guides. show_tube_stations.html goes somewhere in node.tt and show_tube_stations.js goes in header.tt. nearest-tube.cgi lives in the same directory as wiki.cgi Hope these are of interest. Kake

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Database constraints
by IvorW 22 Feb '07

22 Feb '07

Answering a question on Perlmonks: http://perlmonks.org/?node_id=601407 has set me thinking about our geodata fields, in particular our lat + long. To be valid, these must be numeric; in fact the Google Maps code will b0rk if there's garbage in there. This made me wonder if the check could be done DB side, in the form of a constraint, or possibly as a trigger to calculate the X and Y. ... Which made me think about the wider issue of data validation. I know MySQL isn't brilliant in this area, but I'm no up to speed with Pg enough to know what's on offer. I am aware of how commercial databases like Oracle and Sybase do it; that's my bread and butter. If we had more validation checks in, either server side or DB side, we could probably block more spam, as the 'bots tend to put rubbish and URLs into many of our fields. <braindump />

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Weird characters in embedded RSS feeds
by Kake L Pugh 19 Feb '07

19 Feb '07

Hello. If you look at the OGL page for the West Indian Quay Cineworld, it has an embedded RSS feed of current showings, taken from the Time Out site: http://london.openguides.org/index.cgi?UGC_West_India_Quay_Cinema,_E14_4AL The problem is that there's some kind of encoding mismatch that leads to lots of "weird characters". Is there anything that can be done about this? I've tested it elsewhere; it's not a problem limited to OGL. Kake

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Getting OpenGuide info in RDF
by Dean Allemang 15 Feb '07

15 Feb '07

I am impressed by the RDF backend of OpenGuides, and the goal of making the information reusable on the Semantic Web. I am giving a talk next month at AjaxWorld about Semantic Mashups using RDF (which, for full disclosure, will feature my company's product, TopBraid Composer). Part of the story will be, "but where will you find all that data in RDF?" OpenGuides is a very good answer to that question. I want to use some RDF data from OpenGuides in my demo (with attribution, of course). But I am having trouble coaxing RDF data from the OpenGuide website in a useful way. Here's what I would like to do. I see that in the OpenGuide Boston, there is geocode information for all the MBTA train stations. For instance, a page like http://boston.openguides.org/?id=Northeastern_Station;format=rdf gives me the geocode location for the Northeastern University stop. I would like to find a page that has, say, all the Green Line stations, with their geocodes, all in one file (URL). Similarly for Redline, etc. I can make a pretty interesting mashup page from such information. I can do the same with all the single-station pages, but that will seem awfully tedious when I show it as part of a demo. Is there a way to get the RDF exported in this way? Is this something that the OpenGuides folks would be interested in allowing me to do? Thanks, Dean Allemang Chief Technology Consultant TopQuadrant Inc.

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A better install
by Earle Martin 13 Feb '07

13 Feb '07

I just had the occasion to install Ikonboard (http://www.ikonboard.com/) a piece of message board software written in Perl. It was an enlightening experience, and one I'd like to share. There's been some discussion previously about the problem with installing OpenGuides being that the build process installs both the modules and the site. I think the Ikonboard guys have hit the nail on the head with their install process, so here's a breakdown of how it works. * You untar the install package and move the contents of the cgi-bin directory to wherever your CGIs live. There's a perl_test.cgi and an installer.cgi which you chmod +x. * Running perl_test.cgi from your browser checks whether you have prerequisite modules (CGI, DBI_File at least, or optimally various DBI drivers) installed, and prints out both a bunch of $ENV and the contents of your @INC for you to keep around for debugging purposes should you need it. * If you have everything, next you run installer.cgi from your browser. You're presented with a screen that lists various files (such as the ikonboard.conf file) and directories and whether they have their permissions set correctly for the install to proceed. If they're not, you set them appropriately and re-run the script. Presuming everything is correct, it presents you with a button to proceed. * Next you get a screen with various fields where you set paths to the various directories - skins, static HTML, uploads, and so on. * The next screen checks permissions on all these places as being writable. * Next, the installer untars a bunch of tarballs that were included in the installation directory, and moves their contents to the directories you specified. One screen appears per untar; if successful, it reloads the script with an incremented CGI argument to move on to the next file. Very smooth to watch. Presumably if anything fails it presents an error screen. (Note: this whole step is optional; you can choose to skip it if you've already manually placed various files in their destinations.) * Next you get a screen to choose your admin user name and password, set the name of the site and board to be displayed, and so on, and asks you what kind of DB you want. * The next step sets up the database and displays a confirmation of the stuff that just happened. * Finally, it redirects you to the board login screen - but the board script refuses to run until you've gotten rid of installer.cgi, as that would be a security hole. After you've ditched it, you can log in. Overall, it's an excellent install experience. Hopefully you can see how well it maps onto the site-related part of our own install mechanism. I can see our existing Build.PL being hacked into two parts - the first part, which remains Build.PL, installs the libraries. The second part would become our installer.cgi. I see their reason for keeping perl_test.cgi separate, as well: if a user is having problems, they can run it to produce an instant system report to diagnose issues. As a minor note, I think having the various templates and so on as tar files within the tar file may be slight overkill - copying from one dir to another works for me. If people like the sound of this (perhaps even try downloading and running the thing yourself; it only takes a moment and you can throw away the result), would you be interested in me having a go at producing something like it for us? My only slight reservation about this is that I don't know how Dom's packaging for Debian works, and if this would be completely incompatible with it. Dom? Cheers, Earle. -- Earle Martin http://downlode.org/ http://purl.org/net/earlemartin/

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paralanguage Guides
by Jo Walsh 05 Feb '07

05 Feb '07

dear all, i've been visiting Berlin a lot and would like to start a Guide so i can write about the funny and useful places that i find or am shown. but i don't speak any German and i want to keep it that way - it's an awful language. ( http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/awfgrmlg.html ) i thought about asking for best practise / prior art on multilingual Guides. the thing is i am not worried about having translations, and i would sort of rather have any language that people feel like writing in, squashed onto one page, than separate stuff out, in a way which might make different language communities feel unwelcome or lapse into local minima. i could do quite a lot with silly icons, and categories can have names in any language, that's fine, and i'm not worried about knowing what language category names are in - people will understand or not understand - and one day we can do some magic with http://omegawiki.org if we like. how is the OG collective hosting situation? it would rock my world if i could park this somewhere i would not be subsequently responsible for breaking and upgrading ;) love, jo

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OpenGuides-Dev February 2007