that's Mr. Grumpy Pants, to you.
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I’d experimented with the Structured Blogging plugin for WordPress almost 3 years ago. It’s a way to add structured, complex data to regular blog posts, and provides both human- and machine-readable versions of the content in order to support aggregation and syndication of the data by any service that supports it. The plugin adds a [...]
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One of the profs using UCalgaryBlogs.ca was asking if there was a way to show the “audit trail” for a blog posts. If she’s having students write stuff, and needs it in by a given date (say, an assignment deadline), she’d like a way to know if a post was saved before the deadline, or [...]
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One of the use-cases for UCalgaryBlogs.ca is for a class to integrate external resources such as OpenLearn courses, or potentially anything that has an RSS feed, to be ingested into the class blogsite. Currently, there are 2 scenarios possible for doing this, each with their own specific benefits, but neither quite matching what I think [...]
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I just disabled two separate blog stats packages, each for a different reason. This move was partially inspired by the upcoming “F*** Stats – Make Art!” session on the docket at Northern Voice.
First, I disabled the FeedBurner FeedSmith integration plugin. This is a handy way to automatically redirect requests for RSS feeds to the FeedBurner [...]
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The colophon, listing the various bits that get twiddled to run my blog, has been woefully out of date. I get periodic emails about the various plugins I use, especially the latest Podpress plugin, so I thought it’d be a good idea to automate the process of updating the list. Enter the bdp_setup plugin by Bryan Palmer at ozpolitics.info.
The colophon is now automatically generated, and guaranteed to stay up to date for as long as I’m using Wordpress to run my blog…
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I just saw the PodPress plugin mentioned in the WordPress dashboard feed, so checked it out quickly. What a kick-ass plugin! Totally manages podcast publishing, enclosures, web players, iTunes integration. Handles files uploaded to the blog, as well as remote files (absolute urls). Presents mp3, m4a, mov, mp4, pdf, etc… files. Very nice.
I’ve updated the most recent 2 entries in my podcast section, to see how it works. Pretty slick.
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Ultimate Tag Warrior provided a really handy way to tag posts in WordPress, by just entering tags into a text field ala del.icio.us or Flickr.
But, it uses its own tags database, meaning external tools like Flock, MarsEdit, Ecto, etc… are unable to tag new posts. And I get to do some funkery each time I update the K2 theme to match the latest and greatest beta.
So, I just spent a couple of hours this evening manually migrating UTW tags to be stored in stock WordPress Categories. I would have played around with some SQL to do it, but would rather do some mindless copy/pastery in front of the tube.
Dropping UTW seems to have shaved almost 100 database queries from the generation of the front page of this blog. That ain’t half bad.
And, by using a combination of the Cat2Tag v 2.0 and WordPress Heat Map plugins, I wind up with a better solution anyway.
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The “Performancing” folks just released a plugin for Firefox that provides a fully featured weblog editor, ala Flock. I’m trying it out now – it appears to talk to WordPress OK (well, if this made it to the blog, that is).
It appears to have a decent WYSIWYG editor, but the image embedding doodad doesn’t seem to have an upload utility – so I think you have to manually upload an image and then paste the URL into the image widget. Not fatal, but an “easy” improvement to the plugin. (I know, “easy” is oversimplifying it, since the plugin is aimed at being platform agnostic, so you’d have to have special cases for WP, MT, Blogger, etc…)
Update: Well, let’s see… the HTML it produces sucks badly. Editing a post appears to create a duplicate post (leaving the unedited original, and creating a new one with the edited version). Don’t think I’ll be using this one much…
Update 2: I was a little hard on the Performancing Firefox extension out of the gate. I wasn’t happy with the WYSIWYG HTML, but switching to “raw code” mode gives me essentially the stock WordPress text editor, which is what I’m used to. Also, I must have missed the “Publish as Edit” button – which is displayed right next to the “Publish to:” button – I don’t see how I could have missed that big button. Anyway, if this post was edited, then it works fine 
Yup. that worked. OK, so now I see it as one step more advanced than the stock WP bookmarklets – since it gives you access to the post history so you can easily edit older posts. But, in WordPress, once you’ve been logged on, all posts anywhere you see them on your blog have an “edit” link, so it’s so easy to edit older posts anyway…
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Year: 2005
Author: The Structured Blogging Folks
Platform: Other
Category: Utility
Publisher: structuredblogging.org
Price: Free!
I’ve been playing with the Structured Blogging plugin for Wordpress for a while now, and just noticed a new version – it’s almost up to the mythical “1.0 release”. They’ve added a bunch of new microcontent types with some great structured metadata appropriate to each type. I’m planning on using structured blogging a lot more in the future.
From the Structured Blogging project website:
Structured Blogging is a way to get more information on the web in a way that’s more usable. You can enter information in this form and it’ll get published on your blog like a normal entry, but it will also be published in a machine-readable format so that other services can read and understand it.
Think of structured blogging as RSS for your information. Now any kind of data – events, reviews, classified ads – can be represented in your blog.
Structured Blogging makes it easy to create, edit, and maintain different kinds of posts and is very similar to an edit form on a blog. The difference is that the structure will let users add specific styles to each type, and add links and pictures for reviews.
So, it’s an easy to use, flexible way of describing some standard types of things. People. Places. Events. Things. And the metadata is machine readable, enabling some of the early promise of the federated “repositories” by letting people search for stuff anywhere, and find relevant bits easily. The first bits of readily usable semantic web infrastructure.
Here’s a screenshot of the structured blogging microcontent authoring interface for Audio:
There is also a plugin available for MovableType users, if you happen to swing that way *cough*Brian*ahem*
What would be really cool is if a new microcontent type of “learning object” was defined – letting you enter some IEEE LOM-ish metadata about a resource that’s used as a learning object. There’s your learning object repository, thank you very much…
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