Technical Ramblings

I’ve been doing some work with FOAFNaut, SVG, and other related technologies lately. For the most part, the changes in and of themselves are too small to track in a weblog format, but I did build myself a little tool to store recent updates to crschmidt.net last night, so I could share them. crschmidt.net site updates has an HTML view, as well as an RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 view, and is used to display information on the front page on what has changed recently.

Today, I spent a big chunk of my afternoon playing with julie alongside DanC. He asked if I planned on implementing SPARQL in the bot any time soon (which I do, as soon as a Redland release supporting the turtle format for SPARQL queries comes out). We also talked about GRDDL support, and some other related things. He offered some interesting files which I added to the database, teaching julie more about W3C proceedings and allowing for some more interesting queries in that respect. I need to start keeping track of my todolist for julie so that I can get organized in the freetime I have to do something about the state she’s in. I’m really starting to think another refactoring may be in order: although I received a pretty gigantic patch at one point, I still really haven’t “thrown one away” yet.

I also decided to install trac earlier today for some reason, something that was reinforced when I was asked to start a wiki foaf FOAFNaut internals as I was playing with it. You can check out the listing of projects I have here, which will grow as time continues, because I’m going to be moving more and more of my stuff into Subversion and more and more of what’s in Subversion to trac. It’s really nifty software, and I’m looking forward to playing with it. Who knows, it might shove a few more people into getting involved in my current projects. It’s got everything I need but have been too lazy to install in one place: wiki, bug tracking, source viewing, revision… quite nice, really.

Other than that, not much going on: Keep an eye on the site updates as I continue to do more little changes in and around crschmidt.net to my various projects.

So, a long time ago, I posted about how I planned to update the FOAF that LiveJournal spits out to become more friendly, since I really didn’t know anything about RDF at all when I was first creating the format. So, I wanted to do some updates, to match things that I had discussed with members of the FOAF community over time.

However, I got a real job, lost my free time, blah blah blah, these things happen. The patch has sat around in various incarnations for at least 6 months, probably longer. Recently, someone asked me what had happened to it, and I responded that I had gotten tired of pushing for changes to FOAF, and given up. He said he had time to spare on pushing people, so I cleaned up my patch, and posted about it – a detailed rundown of the changes the patch makes, for evaluation by the community.

Since the community involved is larger than LiveJournal, I’m here to encourage absolutely anyone who might have an interest or knowledge in the arena to read through the explanation or the patch, and let me know what they think. I really would love to see this happen, but like I said, I’m not going to fight for it anymore: it took a lot of hard work to get the previous FOAF patch accepted, and I just don’t have the energy or free time to do that again. So, this one is going to depend on community feedback and demonstration of interest. If you think that LiveJournal’s FOAF data might be suboptimal, say something about it. That entry is a great place to comment and discuss. Open a dialouge with developers about what you’d like to see, because if enough people want to see it, someone may actually push it in.

So, recently I’ve been watching a little bit of a FeedBurner problem arise between some friends on IRC, over at Mobtiopia. Seems that MobileTech uses Feedburner for his feed, via http://feeds.feedburner.com/Mobiletech.

However, Erik was having some problems, where every time the feed loaded, all items would look new. He dug into the problem a bit, and found what the root of the problem most likely is: Every 30 minutes or so, the “Last-Modified” header for Feedburner updates. It caches it per IP for about 30 minutes to an hour, it seems, but once you get past that, it just snaps back to the current time.

Now, I’m not one to criticize over small mistakes like this, but I feel bad for Feedburner: Their conditional get mechanism is completely broken by this difference. Rather than returning a 304 not modified, Feedburner is returning the full feed every hour someone asks for it. That’s got to be quite a hit on their bandwidth.

In this case, there were a couple other issues relating to the problem: Tarek’s feed was previously powered by RDF, which FeedBurner seemed to chew up and spit out in a quite ugly way in his case. However, I haven’t seen it happen the same way in other cases. In Tarek’s case, the feed was actually using what looked like uniquely generated local IDs for an rdf:about – which, although fine in RDF-parlance, is not allowed according to the RSS 1.0 specification, and doesn’t pass the feed validator. Most likely, Erik’s newsreader, newzcrawler, saw these funky looking IDs and didn’t treat them as permalinks, contributing to the problem.

Regardless of other issues though, I’ve checked a few other feedburner feeds, and every single one of them has a Last-Modified header in the past hour. This is simply not a good plan for your bandwidth, or for RSS in general: you’re dealing with a lot more traffic than you need to. 304 Not Modified is your friend, either via Etags or If-Modified-Since. RSS readers are doing good at cleaning up their act and using these headers – if the servers don’t support them, that’s just going to discourage such use in the future, and contribute to the load problem that RSS has become for so many people.

I’m going to let Feedburner know about this in more detail, and this is really not a slight against them. Headers for HTTP/RSS are hard to get right, not something that just “works” out of the box typically. So, I understand the difficulties attached to them. Getting them wrong, however, has some major consequences on all parties, so I hope they can figure out what’s up and get it fixed, both for their sake and for the sake of people that use them.

One of the biggest things that “irks” me when I’m commenting on some other weblog that I seldom read is that I will most likely never see any response to what I write, even if one is directed at me. For this reason, I often write my own posts, expecting that with Trackback, the original author and subsequent commenters will be able to see my thoughts as well as reply to them.

However, occasionally I don’t want to write a full post, yet I still think that the discussion is worth having. For those times, I really wish that more weblog software packages would support notification of comments, preferably via email. LiveJournal has implemented this since long before I had an account, and the discussion I’ve seen, even on the most minor topics, are gigantic in comparison with the discussions you can find between commenters on most weblogs.

I understand that the cultures are different, and I understand that the goals of each are different, but this is one practice that I definitely miss from my old tools. For that reason, I have installed a wordpress plugin which allows you to ask for subsequent comments to entries to be mailed to you.

I hope that this will allow people, if they desire, to continue threads of conversation longer, and breed more communication between commenters to the site. I certainly know that to me, seeing more talking back and forth among people in comments has always been a great way for issues to be raised that might not seem “Deserving” of a fully thought out response in the form of a new post.

My major concern at this point is with spam: will people who comment find themselves innundated with spam? I hope that I can work with wordpress to keep spam to a minimum, thereby protecting those who receive those emails as well.

The next thing that I’m interested in is threaded comments. However, I’m pretty sure there’s not a “simple” plugin for those, and I do know that threading comments introduces a variety of issues, from display issues to conversion of a tree format to a SQL database. We’ll see. At the moment, I’d like to hear your thoughts on whether allowing people to receive notification of new comments is a good thing or bad thing. Also, since it is new, feel free to let me know how it works in your opinion. You don’t get copies of your own comments at the moment: something I still haven’t decided whether I’m going to change or not.

A number of people have expressed interest in my posting some of my more technical ramblings as a seperate resource to the oftentimes personal weblog I’ve used in the past, my LiveJournal. Because I’ve always been one to aim to please, I have decided that I will seperate my more personal postings from my technical ones, although not because I mind people reading my personal life, but more because I want to ensure that people can read what they want and not feel discouraged, as well as ensuring that I can post in specific places and have people read it only if they want to.

Of course, this entire problem could be alleviated if LiveJournal ever got a decent categories system in place, under which people could subscribe or filter to certain categories, however, I do not think that this is a very likely occurance.

LiveJournal has long been my “home” on the web. It offers a number of features that I don’t understand the lack of in other tools: for example, the emails for comments act much like any other mailing list which takes place through email, something that I’ve never seen another blogging system do. However, as the author of this weblog, this is less likely to be an issue: there will probably be few “threads” back and forth, and even if there are, I will receive information on all the comments being left.

Perhaps one thing to do with this new blog is to make communication be a bit more like a mailing list; email subscriptions to posts, so that when they’re updated or a comment is left, people can tell.

I’ve chosen a relatively odd permalink structure for this weblog. In part, this is to prove that it can be done: Many people do not realize that WordPress offers the ability to completely change what your permalink structure is like. In part, it’s simply to shorten post URIs: with only %postid% and %posttitle%, I’m keeping it simple, but still unique from both the %postid% perspective, and informative to the human who may be dereferencing the URL manually.

Expect me to add categories, links, plugins, and possibly change the style over the next few days. If anything I change is something that you feel makes this weblog less usable, please let me know.

The weblog that I was using previously will continue to be available, although I will no longer update it. From now on, posts go to LiveJournal or to here, depending on their nature.