Amazon (US) has just announced an "MP3 Clips Widget" (http://widgets.amazon.com/Amazon-MP3-Clips-Widget/):

Add music to your web site with the MP3 Clips widget. Search through Amazon's catalog of DRM-free MP3 music and addentire albums or select specific MP3 tracks to add to your widget. You can also showcase the latest Bestsellers from any musicgenre. If that isn't enough, your MP3 Clips widget can also automatically display the latest MP3 tracks you purchase onAmazon.com

How we'd like to us this

Once upon a time - and probably soon again - Onaswarm had an "Ads" widget in the sidebar which displayed (amongst otherthings) a list of recently played MP3 tracks, as shared with us via Last.fm. Clicking on the MP3 track would bring the readerto Amazon.com where they could play MP3 samples - and potentially purchase the track. A win-win-win for everyone involved.Unfortunately, because of the extra a steps involved plus an off-site navigation, this feature was somewhat underutilized.

How it works

• go to the Amazon MP3 Clips Widget page
• enter a search for music, by album or song title (or anything). You can also select Best Sellers or Recently Purchased.
• a list of matching items appear, which you can add to the widget

This is all AJAX-y, so you're just working on one page. When you've selected all the items you want to appear on thewidget:

• click Next Step
• a widget size selector and interactive preview appear; the widget starts with the album cover displayed, clicking on this brings you down to the individual track level

If you're happy with your widget:

• click "Add to my web page"
• a popin appears with the appropriate OBJECT embed code, plus explanations of how to add it to many different blogging services

The Good

It's pretty cool, easy to use and works exactly as advertised. I could see this driving lots of MP3 sales to Amazon.

The Bad

You can't dynamically select what the widget is going to display, that is, you have to construct a widget for each set ofmusic you want to share. This makes it somewhat - well, totally - useless for the purpose we're outlining above. This would bemarginally tolerable if there was an API or something, but alas that option isn't there either.

The Ugly

The widget constructor doesn't work on Safari 3. It doesn't complain, it doesn't pop up errors, it just doesn't work.

If you're not logged in, it forgets all state after you do. Come on guys.

Amazon.com won't sell MP3s to Canadians.

Summing up

Nice, but needs a few minor UI tweaks. Desperately needs a way of dynamically constructing a widget at render time.

Many enterprises - include most I would guess that are Microsoft-centric - use LDAP to establish user identity and profiles.In the Web 2.0 world, the emerging standard is OpenID. Is there a way to use OpenID to provide logins within the Enterprise buthave it backed by LDAP, the obvious benefit being one could install off-the-shelf intranet tools inside one's organization butnot have to LDAP-enable them or create a parallel account system

The OpenID-LDAP Project (http://www.openid-ldap.org/) offers such a tool.
We're testing this on a Macintosh, but there seems to be no reason this won't work on any UNIX-y system.

Installation

First, download an unpack the code into the web server directory.

$ cd ~/Sites
$ curl --location 'http://www.openid-ldap.org/releases/openid-ldap-0.8.5-noarc.tar.gz' >openid-ldap-0.8.5-noarc.tar.gz
$ tar zxvf openid-ldap-0.8.5-noarc.tar.gz

This extracts the code into a non-versioned subdirectory called ‘openid-ldap'. It would be much better form if the directorywas called ‘openid-0.8.5'.

Interlude: Enabling PHP on Mac OS X Leopard

Leopard has PHP but it has to be explicitly enabled by editing configuration files (if you haven't enabled Apache on yourMac, see the links below)

     $ su -
     # cd /etc/apache2
     # vi httpd.conf
     remove the hash sign on the ‘LoadModule php5_module' line
     # apachectl restart

Here are some helpful links if you need more information:

• http://blog.phpdoc.info/archives/83-php-5.2.5-on-Leopard.html
• http://www.phpmac.com/articles.php?view=225

Running to Stand Still

Without configuring anything, let's see what happens when we visit the page:

• http://localhost/~davidjanes/openid-ldap/

Note that URL is Leopard's way of referencing a user's (i.e. "davidjanes") local webpage.

A webpage appears with a field for entering a username - but not a password. Entering a username - e.g. dpjanes - redirectsus to the 404 page:

• http://localhost/~davidjanes/openid-ldap/dpjanes

... which definitely wasn't expected.

Reading through their documentation, it looks like they're mainly doing this using SSL/HTTPS and to do that one has to addsome rewrite rules to the Apache configuration. Since we're not doing that - at least not yet - we're probably using aninfrequently used code path, thus hitting a bug. Perusing the code we should see the URL above should be internally rewrittento:

• http://localhost/~davidjanes/openid-ldap/index.php?user=dpjanes

To fix this we have modify the Apache configuration again. Changing ".htaccess" does not work because Apache on Leopard isconfigured "AllowOverride None" which means the rewrites will be ignored

$ su -
# cd /etc/apache2/users
# vi davidjanes.conf

And then we add the following:

     RewriteEngine On
     RewriteBase /~davidjanes/openid-ldap/
     RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/.*[/]([a-z][-a-z0-9_]*)$
     RewriteRule ([A-Za-z0-9]+)$  /~davidjanes/openid-ldap/index.php?user=$1 [P]

And then

     # apachectl restart

Note that these rules are predicated on that we're going to be logging in using OpenID's "uid" which will be lower caseletters, numbers, dash or underscore.

Configuring LDAP

This is obviously the part where we're going to part paths - everyone does LDAP their own way. We don't have an ActiveDirectory setup here, but we do have VMWare Fusion (http://www.vmware.com/products/fusion/) and a JumpBox for OpenLDAPappliance (http://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/1105) so it should be just a simple matter of figuring out the rightcombination of configuration settings.
The OpenID appliance has the following configuration:

• JumpBox Name: openldap 0.9
• Application Page: http://192.168.1.120/
• Management Page: https://192.168.1.120:3000/

I've already configured a few accounts on this, but for example we have a user:

• o=Directory
• ou=users
• cn=David Janes

In LDAP terms this gives us a "Distinguished Name" which is the really way LDAP (as I understand it) uniquely identifies arecord. In this particular case our Distinguished Name is "cn=David Janes,ou=users,o=Directory".
This user has the following configuration:

• cn: David Janes
• gidNumber: 1000
• givenName: David
• homeDirectory: /home/users/default/dpjanes
• objectClass:
• inetOrgPerson
• posixAccount
• top
• sn: Janes
• uid: dpjanes
• uidNumber: 1000

We're going to use "uid" as the login ID - note that this is by no means a universal choice nor is it universally availableon all LDAP servers. I've seen LDAP servers use "name" to provide a unique identifier and it's possible - maybe even probably -that many LDAP servers don't provide short unique names at all.

Note then how LDAP logins should probably work:

• one provides a part of the record we are looking for, for example "uid=dpjanes", where the user at login time provides the "dpjanes" part and the configured application prepends "uid="
• given a starting point - the "searchdn" in the configuration below - we look for a matching record
• when we have the matching record, we get the Distinguished Name which uniquely identifies a record and that we ask LDAP to validate it with a password

Note that OpenID-LDAP doesn't actually work quite this way; we'll explain this further down.

Configuring OpenID-LDAP to contact LDAP

Following, the instructions in openid-ldap/docs/README.txt, especially point (5) we get the key points of configuration -edit "ldap.php" and fill in the values.

The original connection settings look like this:

'primary'  => '10.0.0.111',
'fallback' => '10.0.0.222',
'protocol' => 3,
'binddn'   => 'cn=<name>,cn=users,dc=domain,dc=local',
'password' => '<pass>',
'searchdn' => 'cn=users,dc=domain,dc=local',
'filter'   => '(&(cn=%s)(mail=*))',
'testdn'   => 'cn=%s,cn=users,dc=domain,dc=local',
'nickname' => 'uid',
'email'    => 'mail',
'fullname' => array('givenName', 'sn'),
'country'  => 'c'

Our new connection settings look like this:

'primary'  => '192.168.1.120',
'fallback' => '',
'protocol' => 3,
'binddn'   => '',
'password' => '',
'searchdn' => 'ou=users,o=Directory',
'filter'   => 'uid=%s',
'testdn'   => 'uid=%s,ou=users,o=Directory',

Note the reasons for this:

• primary: as per the VMWare notes above
• fallback: we don't have a backup server
• binddn & password: it works without this; but we assume there's LDAP configurations that require you to login with a well-known Distinguished Name and password before you can do a search
• searchdn & filter: the ‘%s' is replaced with the user's login name (i.e. from the login form) and then these items are put together to search for the user's record
• testdn: when actually logging in, the ‘%s' is replaced as above; the page then tests the modified testdn with the password provided against the server

Note then the difference between OpenID-LDAP and our hypothetical login scenario in the previous section - OpenID-LDAPsearches for the login but after validating that it exists, ignores the Distinguished Name and just tries to log in using asimply constructed testdn and password. This works, but it strikes me that the search is either unnecessary or the loginprocedure is insufficient.

Failure

Alas, at this point we're going to have to stop, unless someone has a suggestion. When I attempt to log in with "dpjanes" weend up with OpenID-LDAP bridge trying to log in with "uid=dpjanes,ou=users,o=Directory", which simply doesn't work. Whetherthis is specific to my LDAP implementation or not is unknown.

If I alter the rules so that I'm logging in with "David Janes" / "cn=David Janes,ou=users,o=Directory" the (slightlymodified) Apache rewrite rules get confused because of the space. I could probably fix these but quite frankly I don't want tobecause I want "dpjanes" to be recognized as the login.

So, that's as far as I'm getting with this. If anyone has further suggestions, please let me know and I'll modify thisdocument and necessary.

Onaswarm is now provides a interface for finding out the social network connectivity of webpages. Connections are discovered using XFN, hCard, FOAF, optionally Google's SGN services and in some instances custom APIs if account information is available to Onaswarm.

URI

• http://onaswarm.com/admin/sgn-query/

Parameters

• uri - the URI of a page you'd like to discover social network details for
• wrapper - if "ajax", the results will be returned in JSON format
• json_pretty - boolean; the results will be pretty printed
• jsonp - if non-empty, the results will be placed in a JSONP wrapper
• reverse - boolean; the results will reflect links to this page, as opposed to outbound from this page
• google - boolean; add results from Google Social Graph API. In HTML mode, this defaults to True; in AJAX, False.
• appkey - coming soon

Example Queries

• http://onaswarm.com/admin/sgn-query/

form interface

• http://onaswarm.com/admin/sgn-query/?uri=http://twitter.com/bvl/

all links from Twitter user "bvl" in HTML, augmented with Google SGN results

• http://onaswarm.com/admin/sgn-query/?uri=http://twitter.com/bvl/&wrapper=ajax&json_pretty=1&reverse=0&google=0

all links outbound from Twitter user "bvl", without Google SGN results

• http://agwego.net/admin/sgn-query/?action=query&uri=http%3A%2F%2Fdanbri.org%2Ffoaf.rdf&wrapper=ajax&json_pretty=1

Dan Brickley's FOAF file

• http://agwego.net/admin/sgn-query/?action=query&uri=http://tantek.com/&wrapper=ajax&google=0&json_pretty=1

Notes

• if our server is experiencing unusual loads, this API will return 503 errors
• there's a lot more we could do with the FOAF files - tell us what
• if we did FOAF output, would you use it?
• we will be using appkeys to access to API in the near future, mainly to stop robots from crawling the web through our API!

We're migrating the data in Onaswarm to a high performance network attached disk ... we expect we'll be back by 8 AM EDT.

Onaswarm is pleased to announce that we’ve set up a “swarm” especially for the Metronauts / Transit Camp community. Your swarm – http://metronauts.onaswarm.com – will create a lifestream to capture and share all community posts, twits and photos about this community.

Signing up

If you don’t have an Onaswarm account, signing up is very easy:

• go to http://onaswarm.com/admin/create/
• enter the promotion code “metronauts”

You’ll then be lead through a set of simple steps to add your profile and social network information. You’ll automatically be added to the metronauts swarm.

If you already have an Onaswarm account:

• login
• go to http://metronauts.onaswarm.com
• click on the “Join Swarm” link in the About box

Posting

ou must use the “metronauts” tag when posting in order for your post to show up on the Metronauts group:

• on del.icio.us, Word Press and Flickr, add “metronauts” to the tag field
• on Twitter and Pownce, use the hash tag “#metronauts” in your twit – you can see examples of this on the Metronauts swarm

Generally your post/twit/photo will show up in Onaswarm about 15 – 30 minutes after posting, depending on load. Del.icio.us feeds are only checked every hour, due to terms of use restrictions so they may take a little bit longer to show up.

Widgets

If you’re interested in displaying the Metronauts swarm lifestream on your blog or webpage, try adding our widget:

• http://onaswarm.com/users/dpjanes/widget/

It’ll only take a few seconds.

I woke up this morning with the intention of writing a "best practices" guide to doing microformats only to find out that Glenn Jones had beaten me (handily) to the task. In my mind this should be converted into a wiki page.

Via the magic of Twitter, Twhirl and @dangerday, I’ve finally found myself in possession of a Fire Eagle (http://fireeagle.yahoo.net/) invite. Clicking through the link that was e-mailed to me, I logged in with my Yahoo ID and there I was – finally – in Fire Eagle. In case you’re not familiar with FE, here’s their brief description:

Fire Eagle is a service that helps users share their location online with their friends and with other sites and services. Find out more about the service by exploring below...

I.e. “twitter for location”, sorta.

he site itself is visually appealing, with large buttons and fairly obvious styled using YUI (http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/). And there’s a pretty background, in pseudo-Miami Vice colors.

You get to select how often they’ll check back with you to make sure I’m comfortable with sharing my location. A strange thing I’ll have to admit: if I stop sharing my location with FE, then I’m probably no longer interested in have you know where I am (or it’s Game Over man and I’m not worried about it). From other reviews I read I thought there was a way to fuzzy my location – i.e. just show what neighborhood, city, province or even country I’m in – but I can’t seem to find that option.

The first thing I tried in FE is “update your location”. Just for a laugh I entered “home”, but alas FE unsportingly offered a list of places called “Home” (and 奉免) no doubt populated by some very boring people. More seriously, it would be nice if I could enter “home”, “glenn’s office”, “doug’s house”, etc. as that more corresponds to my idea of location and is way more semantic. Perhaps this feature is coming.

Next I entered my (Canadian) postal code and bingo, there I am: a pin in a map. Then I entered “YYZ” to see if FE understands airports and yes it does. Then I tried to go back home, only to discover that it doesn’t seem to track previous locations. The INPUT field does respond to the down arrow, but it still shows “home” where I never was apparently and when I do select something, it doesn’t fill in the field. Sigh. Well, I know what it’s like to be in Beta (http://www.onaswarm.com).

Then I gave the “Application Gallery” a try. Alas, three applications (Fire Eagle Badge , Fire Eagle on Facebook and SMS Updates! [sic]) are listed, but none of them are there yet.

So where FE stands right now is it's a developer platform. If you're not a developer I wouldn't rush out of my way to get an invite. I’m going to play with this over the next few days and see how that works out. Here’s some brief notes:

• there doesn’t appear to be any option for providing a non-protected update stream. Really, I don’t mind providing this information, if I can fuzzy it up
• results are available in a custom XML format (boo) and in JSON. Why not GeoRSS or Atom?
• authentication is done using OAuth (http://oauth.net/). Is Yahoo all OAuth now? Something to check out. Probably not
• there’s an excellent selection API kits: Javascript, PHP, Perl, Python and Ruby. No Java? Well it’s official: Java is the new COBOL – you’re on your own!
• there’s an API for updating location so it seems that you, for example, have a Twitter client that updates your location on FE. Or something that looks at your Calendar or TripIt agenda (http://www.tripit.com) and makes the appropriate updates.

There's too major/minor issues we're trying to solve with Onaswarm right now:

• when new Swarms are created, users don't seem to be showing up in the results, at least for a while
• when new Feeds are added, they're not being prioritized properly. Ideally we'd like to see new feeds show up within seconds.

We're calling these major/minor problems because although they're affecting functionality in a nasty way, we expect the fixes to be rather small. And implemented ASAP...

I’ve been trying to use FOAF to get profile and friendship/contact information across social networks. I’ve done the “friend” part, I just need to fill in the profile information.
Now, getting this information out of FOAF is problematic at best. Using Python, the rdflib library, and SPARQL I’ve managed to coax data out one painful step at a time. For example, here’s my “friend-getter” code:

SELECT    ?bfoaf ?bname ?bnick ?bmbox_sha1sum ?bimage ?bweblog
WHERE {
?a foaf:knows ?b .
?b rdfs:seeAlso ?bfoaf .
OPTIONAL { ?b foaf:name ?bname } .
OPTIONAL { ?b foaf:nick ?bnick } .
OPTIONAL { ?b foaf:mbox_sha1sum ?bmbox_sha1sum } .
OPTIONAL { ?b foaf:image ?bimage } .
OPTIONAL { ?b foaf:weblog ?bweblog } .}

Clear enough, I guess. Unfortunately, I just can’t go look at bnick and stuff it into my results because bnick might be some sort of “resource” which then has to programmatically traversed also (see http://api.hi5.com/rest/profile/foaf/208329359). I admit that this might – maybe even probably – is a problem with me, maybe I don’t understand SPARQL well enough.

But that’s old business. The way I’ve been doing this is CURLing down the FOAF file, manually inspecting it, writing some Python/rdflib/SPARQL code and seeing what happens.

This morning I decided to try a new approach: look for a SPARQL and/or RDF browser and figure out the correct queries online, then just write the code once, correctly. In my mind, this way all very sweet: an INPUT field for the FOAF/RDF URI, a TEXTAREA for the SPARQL query, a TABLE for the SPARQL results, and a TABLE showing all the RDF triples, since it’s triples “all the way down”.

Here’s what I did find:

• Google rdf browser
• Check out Brown Sauce; have to install a local massive development environment – remember now, I’m trying to save time, not lose it
• Check out http://browserdf.org/: “Faceted Navigation for arbitrary Semantic Web data”. Very promising. Unfortunately, “arbitrary” seems to mean three different data sets
• Check out Stefano’s Linotype -- a high quality information source usually; find out about Welkin
• Try Welkin
• Find out Welkin doesn’t browse the web
• Download the FOAF file from http://kitschbitch.vox.com/profile/foaf.rdf into test.foaf.
• Discover that Welkin doesn’t like “*.foaf”
• Try again with “*.xml”
• Try again with “*.rdf”
• Success, except no results. Why? Oppps … I was downloading the wrong URI
• Try again with the correct URI
• Verify that it’s a FOAF file
• Stare at nothingness coming out Welkin
• Write a blog post about it; partially regret losing 50 minutes of my morning

The problem – a problem – with FOAF and RDF is quite simple. People don’t want formats that can do anything, they want formats that can do something. I got a Flickr API downloader going in about 30 minutes, taking my time. I’ve put hours into FOAF and still am unhappy.

Webdistortion has a review of 9 HTML rich text editors (via the YUI Blog).We’re happy with the new TinyMCE so far, but there may be something here thatstrikes your fancy if you’re looking for something smaller. Here’s the 9 plusmy brief notes:

• NiceEdit (http://nicedit.com/)– small; it would be really nice if they provided a way to cancel model dialog
• Kupu (http://kupu.oscom.org/download/) – CSS; no demo
• TinyMCE (http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/) – our notes
• Kevin Roth RTE (http://www.kevinroth.com/rte/)– old
• FCKEditor (http://www.fckeditor.net/) – “awesome” says the reviewer
• YUIEditor (http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/editor/) – our notes
• WebWiz RTE (http://www.webwizguide.com/webwizrichtexteditor/) – pay-for; doesn’twork on Safari!
• CodePlex RTE (http://www.codeplex.com/rte)– for .NET people
• XStandard (http://xstandard.com/) – no demo? looks like a Stalinist inspired  look & feel…

• FOAF following -- why aren't Buzznet FOAF results showing up in the social graph?
• sgn://mboxsha1 format inconsistency -- what's the system for these SGN:// things anyhoo?

One thing we don’t like about HTML online editors is that they make some pretty lousy looking HTML pages. To deal with this, we’ve created HTML “scrubbers” to rewrite HTML coming from these widgets.

The first thing we always do is call TIDY () to normalize the HTML. We then run a list of regular expressions to remove things we don’t like, such as class names, ids, etc. and also things such as trailing empty paragraphs at the end of documents.

We just added another scrubber to convert double BRs within P paragraphs into paragraph splits – this makes the HTML more semantic, that is, to make it say what it means, not what it looks like.

This can’t be done with just a regular expression, of course. Here’s our algorithm:

• find all <p>…</p> paragraph blocks, always looking for the shortest matches
• reverse this list, so that we can rewrite the document without having to worry about adjusting search indices
• look at each match: if contains anything non-simple, leave it alone. Theoretically, since we’re coming out of TIDY this should be well formed and only contain markup like B, STRONG, ABBR, etc. but I never take chances
• if the match is simple, convert all BR BR sequences to “</p><p>”

With the BlogMatrix Platform editor, every time you save a post it scrubs it and sends it back to the editor.

I completed the upgrade to TinyMCE (http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/download.php) this afternoon, tossing away 95% of my old code. I’m very very happy – they’ve very much modernized the code to what we’d expect in a modern JS framework.

For example, this is how we create an editor now:

editor = new tinymce.Editor('id_editor', initd);
editor.render();

And here’s how we listen for events:

editor.onKeyPress.add(function(e) {
            … do stuff …
});

I haven’t tried to do stuff with the Toolbar yet, but given the apparent serious thought they’ve put into making a nice interface, I can’t imagine it’s going to be very difficult.

Well, I couldn’t believe how easy it was to make our new editor use TinyMCE – I just downloaded the new version (3.0.4.1 – http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/download.php), hooked it up to our code and it ran out of the box.

Since you may not have done this yourself, I’ll just run you through how we use TinyMCE:

• make a TEXTAREA that you plan to work with; there are some complications if you want or have multiple TEXTAREAs but this is not an issue for us
• include TinyMCE: <script type="text/javascript" src="=/jscripts/tiny_mce/tiny_mce.js"></script>
• call the initalizer function: tinyMCE.init(initd)

That’s it, you have an editor. “initd” is a dictionary that describes how to set up TinyMCE. This is our setup:

initd = {
    onchange_callback : "tinymce_onchange_callback",
    theme_advanced_buttons1 : "bullist,numlist,outdent,indent,separator,justifyleft,justifycenter,separator,link,unlink,image,separator,bold,italic,strikethrough,separator,sub,sup,forecolor,backcolor,separator,code",
    theme_advanced_buttons2 : "",
    theme_advanced_buttons3 : "",
    dialog_type : "modal",
    theme_advanced_resize_horizontal : false,
    entity_encoding : "numeric",
    force_p_newlines : true,
    force_br_newlines : false,
    convert_newlines_to_brs : false,
    relative_urls : false,
    remove_script_host : false,
    verify_html : false,
    auto_reset_designmode : true,
    remove_linebreaks : false,
    theme_advanced_resizing : true,
    mode : "textareas",
    theme : "advanced",
    theme_advanced_toolbar_location : "top",
    theme_advanced_toolbar_align : "left",
    theme_advanced_path_location : "bottom",
    plugins : "inlinepopups",
    content_css : "/:root/include/common/tinymce.css"
};

You’ll have to modify the location of the CSS file and the callback (so we know whether the document has been edited!) to something you prefer to use, but you get the idea.

Also note that you may have to do some magic to move the data between the TinyMCE window and the TEXTAREA:

• To move the data into the TEXTAREA, do: tinyMCE.triggerSave()
• To go the other way: tinyMCE.updateContent(idName), where idName is the DOM ID of the TEXTAREA; whoops -- in version 3.x use tinyMCE.activeEditor.load();

Version 2 of TinyMCE misbehaved if you tried to create an editor in a hidden DIV (i.e. with display: none); I’m not sure if this issue is gone or not but try to avoid doing it.

I spent a fair fraction of yesterday playing with Yahoo’s Rich Text Editor (http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/editor/), trying to integrate it into what we’re calling “V12” of the BlogMatrix Platform – the look and feel you’re seeing on Onaswarm (http://www.onaswarm.com) right now.

Currently, we’re using TinyMCE as a text editor. On the plus side, TinyMCE is standard and reliable; on the minus side, it’s difficult to work with, very difficult to extend, and fairly hefty. So as a background task I’ve been looking at various technologies and seeing what can be done. TinyMCE has recently revved from 2.x to 3.x (http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/punbb/viewtopic.php?id=9942), so we’ll be revisiting that soon.

One of problems with all browser based editors is that that they, well, make weird looking HTML. Especially on Safari (AKA webkit). We’ve partially solved this problem at BlogMatrix by running a number of “scrubbers” that look for well-known weirdnesses and transform them into something better. Generally this works as a pipeline from TIDY (http://tidy.sourceforge.net/), to a bunch of regular expressions, to TIDY again. The goal is to be able to process normal hand-entered input into good-looking HTML, but still preserve the formatting pasted in from another webpage or document. Believe it or not, we’ve had a lot of luck with this.

You’d think that all this could be done with a Flash component – this would nicely solve multiple browser problem, but alas I haven’t found a Flash editor that accepts pasted text and does something sane with it. If you’d like to look at this, I’ve posted notes here on del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/dpjanes/text_editor).

So, back to the YUI RTE – here’s my positives and negatives in no particular order. I’m aware that this is not a finished product, so expect to see the negatives to disappear.

• it’s super easy to configure, especially the toolbar
• there’s no HTML view; like WTF, I have to write this myself?
• block indent/undent is broken beyond repair
• I had no problems mixing and matching with MochiKit (http://www.mochikit.com/), our JS weapon of choice.
• The dialogs that pop up for editing links and images are worth a whole section to themselves:
• here we see the limitations of CSS styling – even the slightest change to text (from my CSS) breaks the dialogs. In this particular case boys and girls, perhaps even go back to table layout; it’s an app, not a webpage
• in fact, just isolate this altogether out of RTE. By the looks of it, this seems to be the plan.
• for proper styling, YUI components need to be descended from an element with CSS class “yui-skin-sam”. Unfortunately, dialogs attach themselves to the BODY element and we can’t mark that as “yui-skin-sam” because that, well, breaks all our stuff. So we ended up having to copy out all the CSS, remove “.yui-skin-sam”, adjust all the background images and so on and so forth.

I may experiment next with Ext’s editor (http://extjs.com/deploy/ext/examples/form/dynamic.html) but I’m thinking the best bang for our buck is still TinyMCE. If only I could figure out how to add my own buttons and functions….

For what it’s worth, I’m composing this using MS Word 2008 on a Mac, which doesn't play nicely with anything. Sigh

Microsoft is adding something to IE 8 called “webslices”. A webslice is a part of a webpage that updates and can be subscribed to – for example, a weather forecast.

A webslice is different that a syndication feed because:

1. it’s part of a webpage, rather than an independent feed (though it can have an independent feed also)
2. it’s a single thing that updates, as opposed to a pipe that new things (such as blog posts) are coming down one after the other

You can read the webslices spec on this page and brief commentary here.

Now, what makes this interesting to me is that it’s based on the hAtom microformat (which I authored and championed). It’s based but unfortunately it’s not the hAtom microformat, as they add their own top level concept, the “hslice”.

Now, I can understand to some degree why Microsoft did this:

• a webslice is the concept of a feed with a single item that’s continually being updated
• hAtom requires an “author” element
• hAtom requires an “updated” or “created” element
• people think that hAtom is about weblogs – but it’s not true.

These issues are addressable. hAtom 0.2 is going to drop the requirement for the “author” element – it will be assumed to be some value (what, we’re not sure yet) if it’s not physically present. hAtom isn’t about weblogs – it’s about semantically marking up microcontent – and so is entirely applicable to webslices.

The “updated/created” issue is a little tougher. Allow me to suggest that if not present, these default to now, and leave it up to parsers to figure out if things have changed. This will together with the time-to-live (ttl) element MS is proposing in the spec.

I humbly suggest then that MS change the webslice spec so that instead of looking like this:

<div class="hslice" id="1">
 <p class="entry-title">Item - $66.00</p>
 <div class="entry-content">high bidder: buyer1
 …
</div>
</div>

they make it look like this

<div class="hfeed hentry" id="1">
 <p class="entry-title">Item - $66.00</p>
 <div class="entry-content">high bidder: buyer1
 …
</div>
</div>

That is, change “hslice” to “hfeed hentry”. The beauty of this is that there’ll be no reason now why all the tools MS develops for working with webslices will also work with any page that contains hAtom.

If they’re interest in only seeing items that narrowly conform to the webslices spec (i.e. single item feeds), they can just look for single item feeds with no created/updated/author fields. But I think they should go all out and recognize all hAtom items and incidentally help put together the semantic web.

We're getting closer and closer to a new official version. We've just finishing coding in the XFN bits...

Brian Suda has an article on Dev.Opera about XFN - XFN encoding, extraction, and visualizations. It's a great place to start reading about XFN:

XFN stands for XHTML Friends Network[...]. It grew out of the common publishing trend of linking to other sites you enjoyed reading. On your blog, this is called a blogroll - it is common to think of people by their web sites. Their URL is a representation of that person; part of their online identity. XFN is an attempt to codify these relationships using standard HTML.

I was going to nitpick about Brian's point about tool support for XFN, but I shall get into that in upcoming posts about the social graph.

After attending SGFooCamp (photos), I've been meaning to playwith Google'snew Social Graph API a little more.

The SGAPI is a fairly simple and powerful tool:

• it looks for data captured on the web by the Google crawler, namely:
  • XFN links (normal webpage links with rel="something" markers),
  • FOAF information, which I won't go into
• this data defines a graph, with nodes being webpages (which are URLs, and URLs are people) and edges being relationships
• it's not a proprietary Google data store
• there's one RESTful GET call in the API that returns the graph given a starting URL

That sounds kind of abstract, but it's really quite simple. For example, consider all the web services you use:your blogger.com account, your flickr account, your del.icio.us account, your twitter account, and your home page. They're all"you"and should have additional information to indicate that they belong to the same person. XFN defines this asthe rel="me" relationship.

Let's look at a specific example: Mark Kuznicki'saccount. Usingthe magic of thedemo application, we can see that Mark has a number of accounts that are claiming that they're him:

Why? Because Mark entered the URL of his home page and these applications added a link marked with rel="me" on the appropriate A tag. (If you don't believe, follow thelinks and look at the source).

Now, why does it (currently -- 2008-02-20) call these "possible" connections? Simple: because Mark hasn't linked back to these sites on his home page with A linksmarked rel="me".

Why should Mark do this? Simple:

• because if he does this he can have identity consolidation on all his public social networks, that is, by giving only his home page URL we can definitely know all the social networks that Mark belongs to (and not just claim that Mark is a member of)
• and by knowing this, we can start exploring other (web) relationships that mark is involved in, such as rel="friend"
• and if he starts doing this, pretty soon we have a solution to the YANS problem: when Mark joins a site, he need merely specify his home page and his friends are automatically found -- and without having to screw around with the password anti-pattern or manually re-entering all friends.

If the Onaswarm widget isn’t suitable for your needs, youcan now customize it using your own CSS commands.

First, here’s the URL to get the “raw” widget code:

http://dpjanes.onaswarm.com/index.widget

Obviously you’ll want to change “dpjanes” to whatever youraccount is. If you open that page using “View Source” you’ll be able to see theCSS commands were currently use. You’ll probably want to use that as the basisfor your CSS.

To add your CSS, just add ‘?:css=<css-url>’ to the URLand it will remove our CSS and add a pointer to yours.

There are several other options too:

• add ‘:raw=1’ to remove the HTML HEAD and BODY stuff
• add ‘:jsonp=<function>’ to covert the HTML to a jsonp function call

Note: this will be in tomorrow’s update (14 January 2008)