Squio.blog » blog

Use your blog as shortened URL service

Joe — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 14:44:26 +0000

: Image by Duane Storey via Flickr

I just discovered and installed a very nice WordPress plugin, WordTwit. The main purpose of this plugin is to tweet your new blog posts on Twitter, together with a link to the new blog post.

So far nothing too shocking new, but the latest version (2.0.x) of the plugin adds the option to use your own blog as url shortening and redirecting service. Think tinyurl.com, is.gd or one of the gazillion alternatives out there.

Now that is really cool. Except it didn’t work for me.

Turns out that there was a little bug if your blog is not served off the root or your domain, but a sub directory instead (which is /blog in my case).

So, a patch (shortened link, noticed?) solved this and all should be set to go now.

Oh and this post is serving as a test post for the Twitter update…

Tweet This Delicious Reddit This Post Stumble This Post

Fun with Twitter Spammers

Joe — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 10:58:11 +0000

Actually, Twitter spammers aren’t funny at all. But sometimes they use such stupid names and avatars that you wonder who in their right mind would ever follow them.

A common way these spammers try to get your attention, hoping you will follow them, is just start following your twitter account “at random”. Now one day I found the following two low lifers, with apparently opposite intentions, in sequence in my followers queue:

These followed me in sequence, too stupid to be true?

Now I’m pondering which one to pick, the pathetic diet promoter or the fat cheesy one?

Seriously, advice to those who create such spammy accounts: don’t waste the effort, you make me laugh at very best if I don’t outright block you.

Conversely, if you’re a human being and like to follow my sometimes random tweets, you’re still more than welcome to follow me (@jlapoutre) on Twitter!

Twitter Honeypots (windley.com)
Maybe it should be social from the start? (scripting.com)
Twitter Marketing: Free Downloads for Your Tweets (mashable.com)
Evolving Twitter strategies. (socialmediatoday.com)
Twitter spam (brendan-mcnulty.com)
Twitter Spam Invades Trending Topics (mashable.com)
Twitter Decision Flowchart (sciencetext.com)

Tweet This Delicious Reddit This Post Stumble This Post

Thursday April 9th: CSS Naked Day 2009

Joe — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 10:08:28 +0000

CSS Naked Day 2009 April 9th

It’s already a tradition started in 2006 by Dustin Diaz: CSS Naked Day, on April 9th.

Many many blogs and sites will strip all CSS during 24 hours (effectively 48 hours for international compliance) and show the content “unstyled” as if no CSS existed.

A great opportunity to show off how your site structure stands if all styling is removed, from the official website:

The idea behind this event is to promote Web Standards. Plain and simple. This includes proper use of (x)html, semantic markup, a good hierarchy structure, and of course, a good ‘ol play on words. It’s time to show off your .

Are you using WordPress? Then join the movement by simply installing this CSS Naked Day plaugin for WordPress by Aja, activate it and you’re ready:

CSS Naked Day plugin for WordPress automatically strips off XML/HTML stylesheet references, embedded stylesheets and inline styles—all without editing your template! It also provides a function to determine whether it is the 9^th of April on the recommended worldwide 48-hour CSS Naked Day period or just your local 24-hour period if ever you want to automate a message telling viewers why your site is in the nude.

Then head over to the CSS Naked Day website to add you to the list of participating sites.

Follow CSS Naked Day on Twitter!

Tweet This Delicious Reddit This Post Stumble This Post

Howto: add news section to WordPress Content Site

Joe — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 09:37:40 +0000

It makes much sense to use WordPress for a simple content site, consisting of just a bunch of (static) pages which need to be updated once in a while. For example, I used this approach for the (Dutch) website of Kinderfysiotherapie Den Haag Centrum.

WordPress gives you a handy-dandy Content Management System (CMS) and there are lots of available templates to base your design on.

Compared to the default configuration, you need to put some effort in the setup to use pages for the site’s navigation rather than blog posts, but this can be done by setting some options and tweak the menu structure of the template, which is all documented fairly well elsewhere (Customising WordPress – twine).

Then comes the inevitable moment that you want to add a somewhat more dynamic news section to the site. It makes sense to use the excellent blog system, which WordPress essentially is, but then “inside out“, embedded in a news page rather than the primary site feature.

There are a few possibilities here, but I settled for the Inline Feed plugin. Once activated, this plugin displays a list of your posts in any content area, with a few configurale options like sorting order and length of title etc.

Now you can use the excellent native WordPress authoring and publishing system for posts for your news section, with all hidden gems like RSS feed generation, optional comments and all gazillion plugin powered extras.

18 WordPress Plugins for RSS Management and Tweaks (mashable.com)

Tweet This Delicious Reddit This Post Stumble This Post

Zemanta: semweb at work for your blog

Joe — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 08:39:28 +0000

: Image via CrunchBase

Since about three months ago, when I started using the Zemanta wordpress plugin, the uptake has been huge. Searching for “Related articles by Zemanta” on google gives now 110k+ hits.

To me, this is currently the most practical example where semantic web technology really does make a difference. Just like with Twine, the real benefit of this technology lies in the background, where associations are made and retrieved, “just in time”. All without bothering end-users with ontologies, RDF and SPARQL endpoints. Using Zemanta, all these bloggers are benefiting from the ever increasing web of linked data to enrich their blogs. And the benefit may well be mutual: by carefully selecting the auto-suggested related articles and imagery, you as a blogger tell implicitly what categories your post matches to, thus linking back to the very same pool of linked data.

Give it a try yourself, get the Zemanta plugin (many platforms are supported) and share your experiences!

Laying the Foundation of a Semantic Web Application (devx.com)
Zemanta: Collaborative Thought Through Borrowed Relevance (shareumentarian.wordpress.com)
Make Sense of This! (gauweiler.net)
Zemanta: Real-Time Semantic Discovery & Blogging Tool (andrewapeterson.com)
Zemanta (oblogn.com)
Zamanta – Automatically build backlinks (kiaso.wordpress.com)
Which is the best way to increase your blog’s traffic? (barnabasnagy.net)
Zemanta (grapes2dot0.blogspot.com)

Tweet This Delicious Reddit This Post Stumble This Post

Skittles turns website inside out

Joe — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 10:25:45 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

I just found out (not surprisingly, through Twitter) that Skittles turned their website inside out (so to say, in my words).

They replaced their content pages by what others are saying about them: their twitter stream (live search for #skittles), their entry at Wikipedia, their friends at Facebook and more (videos at Youtube, pictures at Flickr, you get the idea).

The own Skittles content is reduced to just one floating content banner, providing minimal information (as if it were a IAB banner box) and also functions as “glue” between all linked social sites.

The linked content seems not to be filtered, the Twitter feed at least displays profanity just as entered.

So what is this?

A stunt which will last just for a day or so
Crowd-sourcing at its most extreme
The end of internet marketing as we know it…

In other words, is this indeed a brave move or just plain stupid? The Twitter jury is still out…

By now they have removed the twitter stream as home backdrop, got a bit too hot maybe.
It appears that Modernista was far ahead with this concept: Modernista! letting others define its identity about a year ago.

The New Skittles Website Is A Twitter Search For “Skittles” (laughingsquid.com)
Skittles.com: Interweb the rainbow. Taste the Rainbow. (tsurch.com)
Is Skittles.com a glimpse of the business model for Twitter? (RexBlog.com)
Stop doing websites (sharemarketing.wordpress.com)
Skittles.com All Our Base are Belong to You (pistachioconsulting.com)
A funny thing happens when you take down your website (thisisherd.com)
Skittles Site Receives an Extreme Social Makeover (mashable.com)
Will you buy more Skittles today? (cmswatch.com)
Hey! Skittles! Get Off of My Cloud! (technologizer.com)
Skittles + social media = priceless (wisdump.com)
Skittles Goes Modernista! With A Distributed Experience (darmano.typepad.com)
Skittles Puts Twitter Comments on Homepage (shoppingblog.com)
Skittles.com is the worst thing to ever happen to social media branding (thisisgoingtobebig.com)
Skittles Maker Invents Perfect Depression Advertising [Recessionomics] (gawker.com)

Tweet This Delicious Reddit This Post Stumble This Post

Fix for error in WordPress rss feed module

Joe — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 15:14:19 +0000

Image by Eric M Martin via Flickr

Using WordPress 2.7.1, there is a problem with the Atom feed export.

In the apache error log are many occurrences of these two lines:

Bad arguments. in /var/www/.../wp-includes/rss.php on line 175,
The first argument, 'map_attrs', should be either NULL or a valid callback

The problem appears to be a simple coding error: the callback function should be called as array reference, array(object, user_func).

This has been reported as issue #9225, read on if you want to fix it for yourself right away…

This patch solves the problem (against trunk, rev. 10641):

Index: rss.php
===================================================================
--- rss.php	(revision 10641)
+++ rss.php	(working copy)
@@ -170,7 +170,7 @@
 		{
 			// if tags are inlined, then flatten
 			$attrs_str = join(' ',
-					array_map('map_attrs',
+					array_map(array($this, 'map_attrs'),
 					array_keys($attrs),
 					array_values($attrs) ) );

In plain English: open file wp-includes/rss.php, find the line containing ‘map_attrs‘ and replace this string by array($this, ‘map_attrs’).

That’s all folks!

Tweet This Delicious Reddit This Post Stumble This Post

Triplify your blog

Joe — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 22:08:12 +0000

Do you want to make your blog Semantic Web ready, but don’t know where to start?

Just download and install the Triplify script, a lightweight tool to translate SQL query results into RDF triples and return the result in N3 (Notation3) or as JSON.

The script itself is only capable of generating RDF, the actual matching between data and RDF output is specified in a configuration file. These configurations are available for many popular web applications, here is a Triplify configuration for WordPress 2.7.x.

Installing is almost as simple as dropping the triplify directory in your WordPress root directory and uploading the correct configuration file. No need to configure any specific values for your WordPress set-up, these are read from the top level wp-config.php file.

Now go to your blog and request the URL http://yourblog/triplify/ – this will return your blog’s content as RDF/N3 and at the same time register the feed at the Triplify Registration (well, if you leave the register switch at “true” in the config file).

Now you dan play with your RDF data in various sources on the web, or locally.

A good start for exploration is the SIMILE Welkin browser, also available as Java web start: run Welkin thru Java WebStart.

Continue for an example…

The following screen shot gives an impression how the top level RDF data looks for this blog.

Hurdles

In practice, I met some hurdles to overcome.

To start with, the config file is presented as nicely formatted and colored source code. Make sure you save this as plain (ascii) text, otherwise you will get strange error messages because of non-breaking spaces and other bad characters in the source.

Then, if you use the anti-spam plugin “bad-behavior” you will notice that some web resources don’t give any result or seem to hang forever. I found this with Simile (Exhibit, Potluck) and the Sindice search index engine.

Add the following IP addresses to bad-behavoir/whitelist.inc.php:

    $bb2_whitelist_ip_ranges = array(
        [...]
        "18.51.2.218",         // Simile.MIT.EDU 18.51.2.218
        "140.203.154.173",     // Sindice Fetcher
    );

Happy experimenting!

A nice paper about Triplify will be presented at the coming WWW conference: Triplify – Light-weight Linked Data Publication from Relational Databases

Tweet This Delicious Reddit This Post Stumble This Post

WordPress config & database charset

Joe — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 21:32:43 +0000

Image via CrunchBase

As part of upgrading to WordPress 2.7, the character encoding of some existing posts appeared suddenly broken.

Turns out that the charset specification from wp-config.php was not interpreted correctly any longer as UTF-8; changing the name from ‘utf8‘ (without dash) to ‘utf-8‘ did the trick.

Update Feb 24: my error log shows lots and lots of warnings like these:

WordPress database error Unknown character set: 'utf-8' for
  query SET NAMES 'utf-8' made by require, require_once,
  require_once, require_once, require_wp_db, require_once

The right solution seems to remove (comment) the line specifying the DB_CHARSET alltogether:

/** Database Charset to use in creating database tables. */
// define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');

Read more about editing wp-config (wordpress.org)…

Tweet This Delicious Reddit This Post Stumble This Post

What, no design…?

Joe — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 07:54:28 +0000

Yes, the third (if I’m not mistaken) CSS Naked Day has been moved to today, April 9th!

You can participate as well, if you’re using wordpress. Check out Lorelle on WordPress for an unstyled theme and an easy procedure to participate.

Tweet This Delicious Reddit This Post Stumble This Post

Squio.blog » blog

Use your blog as shortened URL service

Fun with Twitter Spammers

Related articles by Zemanta

Thursday April 9th: CSS Naked Day 2009

Howto: add news section to WordPress Content Site

Related articles by Zemanta

Zemanta: semweb at work for your blog

Related articles by Zemanta (just a small selection)

Skittles turns website inside out

Update:

Many more related articles by Zemanta…

Fix for error in WordPress rss feed module

Triplify your blog

Hurdles

WordPress config & database charset

What, no design…?