Image by miss604 via Flickr

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.

The almost hidden quote from the Flickr Developer blog:

This is the part where I casually mention that we’ve also added machine tags extra love for Four Square venues IDs. I’m just saying…

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.

And indeed, the following query does it all:

select * from flickr.photos.search
    where machine_tags="foursquare:venue=132009"
    limit 1

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!

See it in action in the Foursquare Layar app on your phone (iPhone, Android) or read my announcement for more background information about the foursquare layar app.

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• Small pieces, loosely joined by machine tags (adactio.com)
• Zee.: Noticings is Foursquare for photo sharers (thenextweb.com)
• Noticings: Geotagging Photo Game Powered by Flickr API (readwriteweb.com)

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Image via Wikipedia

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.

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• PHP Frameworks Comparison – Part 1 (completeopensource.blogspot.com)
• PHP frameworks square off (infoworld.com)
• Discussing PHP Frameworks: What, When, Why and Which? (noupe.com)
• Exploring PHP Frameworks: CodeIgniter (woorkup.com)
• Top Best PHP Frameworks to build quickly complex web applications (woorkup.com)

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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.

This as changed now finally Yahoo and, more recently, Google announced to analyze and index rich mark up like microformats and RDFa.

Just today I stumbled upon a nice article by the E-business and Web Science Research Group of the Universität der Bundeswehr München titled GoodRelations and Yahoo SearchMonkey with five very practical examples how to enhance your web pages for better relevance in the Yahoo search index.
They make use of RDFa and the GoodRelations Web Ontology.

This is all very exciting and I expect way more to come!

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• Organic Seo For Small Businesses Part Ii (slideshare.net)
• Google supports RDFa – SEOs work changes forever (ithoughts.de)
• Google and Future of the Semantic Web (mehmetalierturk.com)
• Yahoo adds tools to bolster search results (macworld.com)
• Rich Snippets: Tipping point for the semantic web (mikeaxelrod.com)
• Make Your Blog Easy To Find Thru Web Directories (raketscience.com)

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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…

  

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);
    ...
}

Google provides a similar Geolocation API implementation through Gears.

Got another browser where the API works? Please leave a comment!

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• Google Location Services now in Mozilla Firefox (google-code-updates.blogspot.com)
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• Opera, Now With Geolocation (mashable.com)
• Firefox 3.5 Gets Geolocation, Powered by Google (lifehacker.com)
• Google and Mozilla team up to pinpoint your location (venturebeat.com)
• Location awareness spreads to Opera browser (arstechnica.com)

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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…

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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.

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

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Steven PembertonImage via Wikipedia

“XForms and Declarative Applications” – Steven Pemberton

HTML Forms are a great success, the basis of the e-commerce revolution etc. but unanticipated at the time.

After more than a decade of experience time to move on, move away from the misconception of HTML as a presentation language. More abstraction is needed for advanced purposes. Compare presentational HTML to the Zen Garden approach of basic HTML and rich CSS.

Principles:

• Ease of authoring
• Good user experience
• Ease of changing
• Device independence (mobile platforms anyone?)
• Accessibility
• i18n
• Validation

The essence of XForms

Complete separation of Date from Content: Instances and Controls

The instance specifies the values being collected. Datatypes specify client side validation and constraints for values entered, even more complex logic like state is only required if county equals USA. Submission actions define the target for the data and what should be done with the result. Together this forms the model, the datasheet.

Abstract or intent-based controls. These are bound to the data (values). Syntax is simply binding an input control to a data item, by which the input knows what data type should be expected and the correct control is chosen. E.g. input for birthdate, whre birthdata is of type date, renders a calendar input popup.

The default XForms give you a toolbox which is very similar to a spreadsheet, no programming needed for common use cases. The actual XForms definition consist of standard XML and the data / values are transferred as XML as well.

Any XML data can be bound to a control, so there’s nothing which prevents editing a xhtml document (as instance) by using XForms syntax. Any page element can be bound by using XPath. Only restrictions: the page must be well-formed xhtml and the server must accept PUT or POST in order to update the page.

Other nice features include:

• i18n for all form elemens, including labels.
• auto-complete on form fields (demoed with live google translate per word, as you type.
• live search: flickr images
• geo-location as pair of lat/long or a map, bound to the same resource and so updating each other on change.

Implementations vary from plugins (for msie) and native (mozilla). Big vendors use XForms as part of their CMS and Application servers already. Most of this is not user visible, you just experience a rich user interface in the browser.

As a proof of concept, someone built a google-maps like application entirely in XForms which needed 25k of XForms data, compared to over 200k Javascript for Google Maps. Experience learns that one order of magnitude more code takes 34 times as much of effort (time, costs, bugs).

Current browser support is still limited, but the ubiquity-xforms library aims at extending existing Ajax libraries to add XForms support for a broad range of browsers.

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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!

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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)…

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So… a search on addons.mozilla.org brought up open-profilefolder which was almost what I wanted, except it has not been updated for Firefox 3.0.

So here my version with the following changes:

• installs in Firefox 2.0.x and 3.0.x
• shows the name of the current profile folder in the Tools menu

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