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Implementing the hCard microformat

Bruce — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 11:12:23 +0000

hCard is a semantic web-friendly derivative of vCard (as used to import/ export from the Mac OS X Address Book). This post is a short "how to" describing a method for adding contact information to your blog posts in a cross-platform format that your readers can store without effort. The RSS client NetNewsWire now detects microformats—hCard/ vCard for contacts and hCalender for calendar events. I noticed that the odd site has started displaying the tell-tale icon indicating associated contact information: Adding hCard to your posts I wanted my hCard to be available from any page in my site, so I added the following code to my WordPress footer.php template: Bruce McKenzie is a General Practitioner based in Wellington, New Zealand. He blogs at bioneural.net (feed) and can be contacted (+12:00 UTC) as b.mckenzie on Skype. Notice that the paragraph containing my hCard data is styled out so that it doesn't display at the footer of my page: If CSS is disabled, however, the hCard information is revealed to the world and the use of "natural language" makes things human-readable: Tip: An easy way to encode a photo is to e-mail yourself a JPEG photo then select the message in Mail and choose View > Message > Raw source. Now copy the base64-encoded text block into the image scr, adding a "data:image/jpeg;base64," prefix. Accessing hCard via NetNewsWire At this point when readers use NetNewsWire to read one of your posts your hCard should be automatically detected, although it appears that not all of the specification is supported. They can ...

A meme of eight random things

Bruce — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 01:15:16 +0000

From bioneural.net:

Baby-brained Lynn—a reference to present uterine cf. cerebral capacity—has tagged me to propagate a blog meme. What is a meme? We all know that genes transmit biological inheritance from one generation to another. Darwinist Richard Dawkins termed the concept of transmitting units of cultural inheritance a "meme". A meme is transmitted (e.g. by imitation or teaching) from person-to-person or group-to-group, as a single (e.g The Lord's Prayer) or related set of ideas/ concepts/ factoids (a "memeplex" e.g. Christianity) and—like genes—may be subject to mutation (the basis of Darwinian evolution). You can read more on this subject here. The term "memetics" is used to denote the study of memes. Memes seem to spread fairly rapidly on the web, so I guess you could think of them as a sort of ideological contagion. Many of these "ideas" may be deemed to be of passing value, and this would certainly seem to be the case for the chain letter kind of meme propagated from one blogger to the next. Some blog-propagated memes have a specific focus ("What is your favourite...?") while others are more general ("10 random things about me"). In a social networking sense that later type is particularly interesting, because it highlights how little those in the blogosphere know about each other. As an exercise, try listing 10 things you know about each of the most frequent visitors to your blog. Hard isn't it? I even tried to start a creative writing meme once, but it failed. Evolution is like that sometimes. On with the ...

Manageable WordPress archive lists

Bruce — Fri, 01 Sep 2006 18:54:04 +0000

From bioneural.net:

If you've been blogging for a while, chances are your list of post archives by month is growing long in the tooth. Thankfully—once you know how—WordPress makes doing something about it pretty easy (a characteristic I've come to appreciate). I had tried to fumble my way to coding a drop-down menu for my archives but my initial efforts were unsuccessful. I then discovered that the solution was right in front of me all along. RTFM. What are we hoping to achieve? Let a picture tell the story: Code replacement My site is built on the K2 WP modification (r163), which lists archives by month in both page-archives.php and sidebar.php. The original code outputs a simple unordered list (above left) and looks like this: We can replace it with this (output as above, right): Please select a month: Please enable JavaScript for full functionality This solution does require JavaScript to be enabled and is modified from the example given in the WP Codex here (the code as listed currently is invalid XHTML and generates a PHP parsing error). It is valid XHTML and works with Safari, Firefox, and IE 6 and 7.

Schedule a future post in WordPress

Bruce — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 09:34:57 +0000

From bioneural.net:

Since my blog will soon be unattended (by me anyway; it will be overseen by a human minder) for several weeks, I wanted to know how easy it would be to automate a once-weekly post for my image-of-the-week (IOTW) feature. It turns out this is easier done than said—requiring only a few mouse clicks, a calendar, and a single sip of coffee. Writing the post This post was published by my server before I got up. I wrote the post as normal using ecto, an excellent offline editor compatible with many blogging systems including WordPress. This time the only difference was that I chose to send the post to the server as a Draft, rather than Publish. Likewise, if you're not using an offline editor you can compose a post directly in WordPress and save it with Post Status set to Draft. Managing the post Login to the WordPress Admin panel and choose Manage then Posts. Your recently uploaded/ saved Draft should be visible there. Choose Edit to open the post and look for the Post Status and Post Timestamp controls. Note that you can still choose View to privately confirm the appearance of the post at this stage; the URL is "live" but the post doesn't yet show up on your site or in your web feed. A very useful facility! The Post Status control should initially reflect the draft status of your post, while the unedited timestamp will reflect the time of upload: We now need to make changes to each of these controls. First, ...

Making the switch from DreamHost to (mt)

Bruce — Sat, 05 Aug 2006 15:04:05 +0000

From bioneural.net:

Apologies to my fictitious regular visitors, who may have imagined that my WordPress-based site has been offline almost daily for the past month. DreamHost has been a down host, and I've made the switch to (mt) Media Temple. In fairness to DreamHost they haven't been the only hosting company affected by recent power cuts, but the power outages seem to be only the culmination of a string of longer-standing problems resulting in slow server response times or non-availability. One minute I'd be working on my site—editing a template for example—and he next I'd be unable to save it back to the server, or to check the result for the rest of the evening. I'd noticed and reported intermittent problems (e.g. it would take half a minute for my WordPress admin page to display) since I signed up. But the last 4 weeks have been simply horrendous, and my patience became exhausted by repeating Support suggestions that I and my fellow DreamHost customers be patient. The way I see it, I'm paying for service not patience and if I don't get reasonable service then it's time to move on. How do I know if my site is down? Aside from regularly visiting your own site and reviewing visitor statistics, there are a couple of free services that might be of use in monitoring your server. One of these is FeedBurner's which includes a FeedMedic feed that alerts you when you feed is not available. To be frank, it's a little hard to gauge ...

Web development vs. web design

Bruce — Sun, 16 Jul 2006 22:56:04 +0000

From bioneural.net:

Are you a web developer or a web designer? In the August 2006 edition of .net magazine, Andy Rutledge is quoted as saying: If you've got an excellent grasp of HTML and CSS, but don't understand design fundamentals you're a front-end developer or a coder, you're not a web designer... But design is not art... As a web designer, your job is to accurately translate your clients aims into a result that furthers his purpose... Design is an exercise in psychology. I found this helpful. I have tags for "webdev" (web development) and "webdesign" (web design) and have found myself unsure when to use one or the other when tagging a post. I'm not the only one for whom these terms are a little ambiguous. For example, I'm currently reading Web design in a nutshell which, according to the above, has absolutely nothing to do with "design"—although it refers in passing to design principles, it is primarily a detailed exposition of technical standards. So where does this leave bloggers? Are they developers of designers? Bloggers are far from homogeneous. Some have very little technical knowledge and will use an "as-is" platform such as WordPress.com or Blogger; they can't be designers either, because they can't do much to alter the provided templates. At the other extreme, bloggers will run their own servers or, at the very least, dabble with PHP, XHTML, CSS, and Apache .htaccess files. This is certainly development activity, but they will also think about accessibility, retaining readers, placement of featured content, clear ...

Nine Rules to blog by

Bruce — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 21:34:24 +0000

From bioneural.net:

Three Rounds for the First-lings who touched the sky, Seven hundred Hopefuls in Round Four alone, Nine Rules proffered for them to blog by, One button to [Submit] before the world prone In this Cyberspace where the Virtuous vie. One Site to list them all, One Site to find them, One Site to syndicate them all and to the Readers bind them In this Cyberspace where the Virtuous vie. Update 30.03.08: bioneural.net withdrew from 9rules Membership on 30 March 2008. I thought a small poem was in order to celebrate the offer of bioneural.net joining 9rules.com—someone thinks bioneural.net is OK. Not having seen or agreed to the Membership agreement (as of this writing), this is merely a preliminary offer. I'm not part of the Community yet. So while we're in limbo, what's this all about then? What is 9rules? The 9rules Network is a community of the best weblogs in the world on a variety of topics... Anyone can join 9rules—you don't have to be well-known, networked, rich, successful, or beautiful—but you do have to have a fiery passion for the medium. You can only join during a 24-hour submission round. Round 4 initially selected 111 sites to join the network from 700 evaluated submissions. To my genuine amazement, bioneural.net was offered inclusion in The 700 Club. Member sites are allocated to a Community, ranging from Apple to Writing as representing the primary focus of the member site. As you can see from my tag cloud, the primary focus of bioneural.net is the Mac—but no word yet as to which Community I've ...

Step-by-step iBlog to WordPress

Bruce — Mon, 29 May 2006 10:57:22 +0000

From bioneural.net:

I talked about doing it, and even tried out the some of the theory. Eleven months later I did it. This is a reconstruction of the process I went through in migrating from iBlog to WordPress. In the best tradition of reconstructions it is put togther partly from hand-written plus typed notes, old screen captures, lots of coffee, and reliance on memory. Apologies if it seems a bit dis-jointed. I should have gotten to it sooner, but you know how it is... Alternative post title: "Crossing to the Server Side" WordPress.com or WordPress.org? Having decided on WordPress, the next step is to decide if you want hand-holding (.com) or wish to bring the warp core online and experience the full power of a DIY install (.org). In a nut shell, with a WordPress.com hosted account you get: Blog stats (but you can add this functionality to a DIY installation); Askimet plug-in activated (but you can activate it for DIY using a free API key. More important is what you don't get relative to a DIY installation: The ability to import your posts from previous blogging systems; The ability to use plug-ins of your choice; The ability to edit (and create new) custom themes. The choice is yours. Sometimes being constrained is a good thing (i.e. you have better things to do than tweak code 'till the early hours); other times it is a bind. If you chose the .com option you're done reading here. Otherwise, if you dare, read on... (A) Create a WordPress development environment Download and install the MAMP local ...

Canvas for Wordpress

Bruce — Sat, 27 May 2006 19:58:54 +0000

From bioneural.net:

Canvas for Wordpress: With Canvas and Ink for Wordpress, you can easily rearrange, reconfigure, and colorize your entire blog without ever touching a line of code.

Welcome to WordPress

Bruce — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 03:30:31 +0000

From bioneural.net:

Beware: As at March 16 2006 this site is potentially unstable. Lots of things are broke. If you are using Internet Explorer 6 or older please consider upgrading to a browser with better standards support, such as Firefox, Safari, or Opera. bioneural.net has migrated from iBlog to WordPress. How to migrate from iBlog Coming... sometime. Update 29.05.06: A step-by-step migration guide is now online, here. Things to fix Weather Icon: WARNING: You forgot to make the cache directory writable. Please chmod 777 this folder. Should show icon + temp only; why is other data displaying? iStockPhoto feed is not displayed. Why? Warning: fopen(): URL file-access is disabled in the server configuration in /home/.ashea/bioneural/bioneural.net/wp-content/plugins/latestistockimages.php on line 50 Warning: fopen(http://www.istockphoto.com/istock_myfiles_rss.php?ID=430123): failed to open stream: no suitable wrapper could be found in /home/.ashea/bioneural/bioneural.net/wp-content/plugins/latestistockimages.php on line 50 Dreamhost Support say: We've purposely disabled URL access to php system functions (such as copy() open() etc.) because of security and performance problems. We have replaced it with CURL: http://wiki.dreamhost.com/index.php/CURL Unfortunately, it's beyond the scope of our support as how to port your script to use CURL instead of the system calls, but we can definately say it would do the job. You may want to talk to the maker of the plug-in about converting in, since frankly no good PHP is written using fopen these days. Solution may be SimplePie or reverting to JavaScript via Feed2JS? I tried hacking the plug-in based on some CURL examples but this took the site down! SimplePie is not so simple; temporary reversion to Feed2JS completed solution currently in testing implemented (with help from ...