Browsing the updated Foursquare development documents I came across a real nice hidden gem: it appears that the Flickr folks have enabled so called machine tags to associate a photo with a Foursquare venue.
Now how cool would it be to display a little photo on my Foursquare Layar venue detail pages?
Remembering @codepo8‘s execellent talk at the Fronteers conference last week, I realized that this is where the really cool YQL engine comes in really handy.
Just save the REST command url, wrap it in a little PHP handler and we’re good to go (homework for next time: process the YQL response in XML format with js/e4x and skip the PHP part altogether).
So now you will see a little thumbnail picture for every venue which has a photo tagged on Flickr. There aren’t many yet, but hey, it’s a start!
As of today there is a Tweet Poll running with the question: Which PHP opensource framework do you mostly use?
An interesting question because the market of PHP frameworks appears pretty fragmented after 750+ votes are cast. Leading is Zend Framework (does this qualify as Open Source?), followed by Symfony, Cake PHP, CodeIgniter, all around 10%. There are also a few stray ones: I don’t consider PEAR a framework and the choice “my own” can be disputed as well.
For now there is no clear winner, something I already had that gut feeling about. Wonder where this is going to stabilize (and of course, how representative the twitter votes are anyway). See for yourself, the embedded graph below should stay up to date and you may cast your vote if you ike.
Since the early days of Sematic Web I have been expecting that this technology would become very important for Search Engine Optimization.
Until recently, however, the most important component for this to happen has been missing: the major search engines completely ignored RDF and other semantically enriched markup.
Since early beta release of Firefox 3.1 there is experimental support for the experimental W3C Geolocation API.
Now Doug Turner, one of the engineers who is behind the Geolocation support in Firefox, wrote a nice background story geolocation in Firefox 3.5 (hacks.mozilla.org). A very interesting read, and it turns out that geolocation is not only for mobile devices, but also available in regular Firefox versions, using wifi or IP address mapping.
Using Firefox 3.5 or another location aware browser? Give it a try by clicking the button below, a map with your current location will be loaded…
Note:
Firefox 3.5b4 has an annoying bug (#490046) which lets you get your location only once per run.
Privacy is an issue, Firefox asks for permission by showing a notification bar on top of the screen. Click “Tell them” to proceed…
Map your location…
What the script does…
// call native geolocation API:
navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(callback);
// callback initializes a google map with the geo data:
function callback(position) {
...
var point = new GLatLng(position.coords.latitude,
position.coords.longitude);
...
}
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…
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.
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.
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