created on Thu, 2008-04-10 09:50 Conferences, barcamps galore abound in this city, sign up quickly for the Open Web Vancouver conference, including:

2 jam packed days of technology talks

Tags:
• creative commons
• django
• facebook
• gears
• google
• merb
• microformats
• mozilla
• opensocial
• OpenSource
• openweb
• PHP
• Rails
• ria
• semantic
• ubuntu
• Web
• xml
• xul

created on Sat, 2005-12-10 22:31

Actually, the first issue I have is that it's called a weblog API....it's a CMS API, or maybe just a publish-editing API. We're stuck in this concept of "blog". With structured blogging (yep, that damn word again...but I guess that's what you get when all you have is one big text blob to shove data structures into*) just on the horizon, tools like ecto, Qumana, and MarsEdit are going to be pushed to work with the myriad number of web apps out there, and the different ways they've implemented some of the loose aspects of these APIs. Actually, this post was inspired by Gus Mueller's post on the MarsEdit 1.1 beta, where he mentions "the sorry state of weblog api implementations right now, and yes- that even includes you atom."

So...what to do? Well, this is one of the things that needs work both on the web app side and the client side. On the web application side, I'm hoping we'll have a special interest group focused on this at the Open Source CMS and Blogging Tools Summit here in Vancouver right before Northern Voice and MooseCamp.

*Why the rant about blogging and "big text blobs"? Well, I'm biased by my tool of choice, Drupal. We've got separate content types for structured information, like events or reviews, and so don't need to take a step back and find ways to mark up structured information inside text. Of course, we'll support structured blogging standards and formats as they arise (and yes, those funky XHTML level microformats, too). Canter's Law, and all that.

created on Thu, 2005-09-01 18:59

I had lunch with Tantek and Ryan of Technorati yesterday (Niall forgot, and ate early; photos of his gnat-eating plants forthcoming). We mainly discussed microformats, continuing a discussion we were having over on my personal site: Fussing about formats, Microformats love vCards -- more on this later, although I've done my bit and filed the hCalendar feature request already.

So, I'm over here thinking I should probably claim my Bryght blog: Technorati Profile

It's kind of a pain to claim weblogs in a multi-user system like Drupal. I haven't looked, but are group blogs handled in some way by Technorati? That's essentially what the blogs page here on Bryght.com is -- the combination of all our local posts. Well, like many other services (yes, like Flickr and del.icio.us -- we are doing this, DKR), I suppose a Technorati module is called for. Plugging in all of these external web services should work the same way: enter in the username and password of the remote service and voila! -- your remote "stuff" is integrated locally. In Technorati's case that would start by auto-claiming your blog, and perhaps allowing you to enable a block with your Technorati profile automatically.