Still not dead yet
If you’ve been wondering: No, I’m not dead. I just haven’t been able
to do much work on ZedneWeb lately, due to a variety of circumstances,
including:
- Temporary loss of phone service (the line to our house broke)
- Temporary loss of access to Eyrie.org
- Illness
- Getting a part-time seasonal job at the mall to pay my bills
- A few software projects related to the TDL effort which,
unfortunately, predate the recent
revision and so are unlikely to be posted for a while
As a result, I not only haven’t been updating ZedneWeb, I haven’t even
been doing my usual scouring of the web for interesting things to
mention here, like the working Mac SE/typewriter that
Mark Pilgrim pointed out
a while back.
I don’t know how much activity to expect around here in the near future.
I’ll do my best to make it “more than zero”, but I can’t make any promises
about things like—say—my stalled
fiction projects.
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TDL revised
The Thread
Description Language continues to evolve, and the
November revision incorporates
a considerable amount of new thinking over the past few months. (See the
list of changes
for some specifics.)
Many of the changes were prompted by actual implementation experience
on my part. Using Python and rdflib, I was able to make a simple spider
which reads pages following the (now outdated) web
threading profile and pulls out a great deal of information, mostly
relating to links made between weblog entries here at ZedneWeb. One lesson,
which does not surprise me, is that the graph of links between weblog
entries can get pretty damn complicated.
Also created was a simple mediator; a local web server which sits
between your browser and the internet. Whenever the page you request
conforms to the web threading profile, it inserts any backlinks it
knows about. This allows you to follow threads forward in time with
virtually no investment of effort on the part of anyone involved.
It’s really neat, and it makes me wish I had somewhere I could stick
it on-line so that people wouldn’t have to download all the software
and run it locally. (Not that they can anyway, since I haven’t posted
it and won’t until I’ve had time to revise it to match the current
specs.)
In related news, the Weblog Metadata Initiative
saw some activity recently, with the posting of an
experimental
method for embedding information about weblogs in web pages. At some point,
I hope to make another parser that can generate TDL from pages formatted
according to that spec. (You know, in my copious free time.)
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