OpenGuides-Dev

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701 discussions

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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Scripting for the Semantic Web Workshop (and Scripting Challenge) - Call for Papers
by Tom Heath 18 Jan '07

18 Jan '07

Hey folks, Some of you who are more into Semantic Web, Microformats, or Mashups might be interested in this workshop. Note that for those people not into writing academic papers, there is also a Scripting Challenge (with prize) that doesn't require attendance at the workshop and only requires a short paper for submission. Please pass on to anyone you think may be interested. Cheers :) Tom. ------------------------------------------------------- CALL FOR PAPERS ------------------------------------------------------- 3rd Workshop on Scripting for the Semantic Web http://www.semanticscripting.org/SFSW2007/ co-located with 4th European Semantic Web Conference June 6, 2007, Innsbruck, Austria ------------------------------------------------------- Scripting languages such as PHP, JavaScript, Ruby, Python, Perl, JSP and ActionScript are playing a central role in current development towards flexible, lightweight web applications following the AJAX and REST design paradigms. These languages are the tools of a generation of web programmers who use them to quickly create server and client-side web applications. Many deployed Semantic Web applications from the FOAF, RSS/ATOM, blog and wiki communities, as well as many innovative mashups from the Web 2.0 and Open Data movements are using scripting languages and it is likely that the process of RDF-izing existing database-backed websites, wikis, weblogs and CMS will largely rely on scripting languages. The workshop aims to bring together developers of the RDF base infrastructure for scripting languages with practitioners building applications using these languages. Last years Scripting for the Semantic Web workshop in Budva, Montenegro focused on giving an overview about the support for Semantic Web technologies within scripting languages. The special focus of this year's workshop is the role of scripting languages in the process of populating the Web with linked RDF data as well as to showcase innovative scripting applications that consume RDF data from the Web. The second focus of the workshop is to show how Web 2.0 applications and mashups can benefit from Semantic Web technologies. The workshop will include a scripting challenge (conducted for the 2nd time) which will award a prize to the most innovative scripting application. TOPICS OF INTEREST Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: Infrastructure * Semantic Web frameworks and APIs for scripting languages * RDF repositories and query languages implemented using scripting languages * Reasoning engines implemented using scripting languages * Semantic Web publishing and data syndication frameworks * Approaches to crawling Web data and querying distributed data on the Web Applications * Semantic Web applications using scripting languages * Approaches to RDF-izing existing applications, such as RDFa and GRDDL * Mashups that provide RDF views on Web 2.0 data sources such as Google, Yahoo, Amazon or eBay * Wikis, weblogs and data syndication systems using RDF * RDF/OWL editors and authoring environments * Scripting applications for visualizing Web data. * Semantic Web Mining and Social Network Analysis * Mashups that demonstrate the novel capabilities of Semantic Web technologies Conceptual * Rapid development techniques for the Semantic Web * Employment of scripting language characteristics for Semantic Web development * Scalability and benchmarks of Semantic Web scripting applications Scripting Challenge The workshop includes a scripting challenge which will award a prize (an Apple iPod Video or alternatively Euro 200 cash) to the most innovative small scripting application or mashup. The application must be implemented using a scripting language and Semantic Web technologies. It should access, visualize or combine information from different sources in new unforeseen ways. Authors of Scripting Challenge submissions are not required to attend the workshop personally. Please refer to Tom Heath for further information about the Scripting Challenge. IMPORTANT DATES Submission deadline: March 30, 2007 Notication of acceptance: April 28, 2007 Camera-ready paper submission: May 7, 2007 Workshop date: June 6, 2007 WORKSHOP CHAIRS * Chris Bizer, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany * Sören Auer, Universität Leipzig, Germany and University of Pennsylvania, USA * Gunnar Aastrand Grimnes, DFKI Knowledge Management Lab, Germany * Tom Heath, Knowledge Media Institute (KMi), United Kingdom SUBMISSIONS We seek three kinds of submissions: * Full papers - should not exceed ten pages in length. * Short papers - are expected up to 5 pages. * Scripting Challenge Submissions - 2 page description of the application, ideally accompanied with the source code and a link to an online demo. PROGRAM COMMITTEE * David Aumüller, Universität Leipzig, Germany * Danny Ayers, Independent Author, Italy * Dave Beckett, Yahoo!, USA * Uldis Bojars, DERI, Ireland * Dan Brickley, Semantic Web Vapourware, UK * Richard Cyganiak, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany * Stefan Decker, DERI, Ireland * Leigh Dodds, Ingenta, UK * Edd Dumbill, Useful Information Company, UK * Frank Fuchs-Kittowski, Frauenhofer Gesellschaft - ISST, Germany * Daniel Krech, University of Maryland, USA * Peter Mika, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands * Libby Miller, @Semantics, UK * Benjamin Nowack, appmosphere web applications, Germany * Alberto Reggiori, @Semantics, UK * Sebastian Schaffert, salzburg research, Austria * Vlad Tanasescu, KMi, The Open University, UK * Denny Vrandecic, AIFB, Universität Karlsruhe, Germany * Gregory Williams, University of Maryland, USA FURTHER INFORMATION Updated information about the workshop is found on the workshop website http://www.semanticscripting.org/SFSW2007/ For further information, please send email to sfsw(a)semanticscripting.org

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Re: [OGDev] Fun SEO tricks wanted
by Tom Heath 09 Jan '07

09 Jan '07

Good idea Ivor. > > 4. Working the Metatags even further. At the moment the contents of > > our (as in the OGMK) description tags is pretty sparse, and wholly > > dependent on the contents of the "Description of this node" field. > > Pumping the first 150 chars of the article content into the > > description metatag after whatever the "description of this node" > > field contains, would give search engines more to go on. > > This is what the page summary is for, no? Indeed. However loads of ours are blank, or too short to make really good description metatag content. Something like: If the page summary is less than X chars long, then making it up to 150 chars using page content and with a ... at the end to signify truncation" would be a bonus I'm sure. Cheers. Tom.

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Re: [OGDev] Fun SEO tricks wanted
by IvorW 09 Jan '07

09 Jan '07

Thanks for the suggestions. I think we should, where possible, raise trac tickets and enhance svn with changes, so everyone will benefit. See my comments below > -----Original Message----- > From: openguides-dev-bounces(a)lists.openguides.org > [mailto:openguides-dev-bounces@lists.openguides.org]On Behalf Of Tom > Heath > Sent: 09 January 2007 13:11 > To: OpenGuides software developers' list > Subject: Re: [OGDev] Fun SEO tricks wanted > > > Hi folks, > > Agreed that some URL writing amazon style would be worthwhile, ditto > inward linking from other sites with high page-rank. Some other > suggestions from me would be: > > 1. Page order matters. In the standard templates the actual page > content doesn't start until halfway through the source code. The rest > of the stuff above that is just the standard navigation that appears > on the right in many Guides, such as Recent Changes. This ordering > should ideally be swapped in the templates, with page content first, > following by any generic stuff. Obviously the actual positioning of > the elements visually can be done with CSS. At the moment we have the > worst of both worlds(*): content positioned on the left, but actually > further down in the code than the stuff that's positioned on the > right. > * actually London has this sorted - credit where credits due ;) Raised ticket #170: http://dev.openguides.org/ticket/170 > > 2. Titles Attributes on Links. Especially for things like Categories > and Locales. This should be a 1minute hack, and can't do any harm. Raised ticket #171: http://dev.openguides.org/ticket/171 > 3. Inter-guide Linking. Not even anything fancy like wiki-links across > guides, but maybe even just links in footers to other guides nearby. > We all have good pagerank, so lets use it. This is ticket #76: http://dev.openguides.org/ticket/76 > > 4. Working the Metatags even further. At the moment the contents of > our (as in the OGMK) description tags is pretty sparse, and wholly > dependent on the contents of the "Description of this node" field. > Pumping the first 150 chars of the article content into the > description metatag after whatever the "description of this node" > field contains, would give search engines more to go on. This is what the page summary is for, no? > 5. More site-wide navigation. I like what OGL has done with the > category-style navigation on the Node List pages. Something like this > on every page would be great from a SEO and usability perspective. This is probably guide specific. However, if someone could think of a generalised way of doing it, we could ship a suitable navbar template.

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Fun SEO tricks wanted
by Earle Martin 09 Jan '07

09 Jan '07

What can we do for Super Happy Google Powers? Better titles certainly made a difference for London's ranking. Better URLs would, too - and I've just noticed this little trick they're using over at BITE: http://www.beerintheevening.com/pubs/s/15/155/Montagu_Pyke/Charing_Cross_Ro… Strip off the last bit of the URL and you'll see the link still works, so it's obviously just extra search-engine-enticement, akin to what they do at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Death-Life-Great-American-Cities/dp/067974195X/ Ideas anyone? -- Earle Martin http://downlode.org/ http://purl.org/net/earlemartin/

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Saint Paul patches
by Chris Prather 24 Dec '06

24 Dec '06

Hi, I'd done some patching to St. Paul and wanted to feed hte changes back. Tickets #154 and #155 in the Trac (http://dev.openguides.org) are both from work I'd done previously with St. Paul's guide. #154 provides basic JSON support for nodes and indexes. The Wiki::Toolkit::Plugin::JSON uses either JSON.pm or JSON::Syck to produce the output. #155 provides a 404 script for when things go away. St. Paul had some problems with incosistant URLs in the past and I noticed that 404s were very large because of this, so I wrote a little CGI to try to help you can see it in action by going to http://saintpaul.openguides.org/Pino's_Pizza ... it will suggest the right URL for the guide, or possibly a Search. I've cleaned up the script so that it does everything in a generic fashion and should integreate cleaner with other people's templates etc. (Originally I was just dumping HTML but I went and made a template now.) I hope people find these useful. :) -Chris

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