Perceive Designs has created an excellent Aggie stylesheet that incorporates stock quotes, local weather, tracking keywords hits in blog entries and more. Amazing what you can do with this xsl stuff. (Found via Bitworking.org.)
Author Archives: David
Linkback Referrers
I spotted Stephen Downes Referral System via www.davidwatson.org.
Very cool little script. I have added it to my templates here on high context. It will display the referrers to each individual page. So if you link to anything on this site your page will be listed on the sidebar as people follow the link.
One small bug I’ve discovered with Mozilla is that a local referral within the same site creates an unexpected value for document.location in the javascript code. No problems in IE so it must just be Mozilla.
Legislation XML
From the Windley’s Enterprise Computing Weblog:
US House of Representatives and XML
The US House of Representatives has made a significant effort in developing DTDs for describing bills. My authority as Utah CIO doesn’t extend to the Utah Legislature (you can tell from their URL), but I’d still love to see them adopt something like the House standards. They might be able to just use the House DTDs directly. A recent article in Government Computer News writes about the House XMl efforts.
This could be quite useful for tracking legislation for association government affairs programs. It will be very interesting to see how this is deployed. I’d love to be able to make an xml-rpc call to a government server to get the latest version of a particular bill in xml.
Adding MT css to Aggie
Have you ever hit one of those little technical challenges that keeps you up half the night until bleary-eyed and tired at 1 in the morning you have finally triumphed over it? And going to bed before figuring it out is not an option?
I had one of those last night. I’ve always wanted to customize the page that is generated by the Aggie newsfeed aggregator. I poked around in the install directory and noticed an Aggie.xsl file. Aha! I had read about transforming XML by using stylesheets but had never explored how it was done.
So what I ended up with several hours later was an xsl/css skin for Aggie that lets you apply any of the standard Movable Type styles (which are beautifully designed) to the output. I also added a sidebar blogroll list of all the blogs with entries displayed on the page. If a feed you subscribe to does not have a new entry then it will not appear in the blogroll since Aggie does not include it in the aggregate.xml output file that gets parsed to create the html page (unless you have checked off the show all entries box).
That blogroll is the piece that kept me up late. XSLT is hard.
Here are the files (right-click on the links to save the files to disk):
Just drop these files into your Aggie directory (back up the originals if you want to be able to revert the look and feel). To apply a different MT style simply open up Aggie.css and swap out all the code for that of the style you want to use.
This is Leadership
Found this via John Robb:
Windley’s Enterprise Computing Weblog
I believe that the 900 or so IT employees of the State of Utah would benefit from speaking and listening to each other more. I think we need groups of specialists inside various departments to communicate with others in their specialty and without. Consequently, I’d like to see more people writing blogs and communicating their ideas through an open forum like the one blogs engender. To that end, I’m willing to pay the licensing fee to Userland for the first 100 employees who start a blog. Here are the conditions:
1. Download the software and begin using on the 30-day free trial. I’d like to see you get a start before I pay the fee. Let me know when you’re up and running.
2. I’m biased toward IT employees, but other are welcome too, particularly if they’re interested in eGovernment.
3. You’re responsible for what you post. If you’re going to talk about things that shouldn’t be public on Userland and need to be kept behind the state firewall, let me know and we’ll set up a place inside the state network for that. We could even set up an authenticated area, if needed.
Leading by example. Leading by making resources available to follow the example.
Face Time
I’ll be at the Rockville Starbucks for the local blogger meet up tomorrow evening. Looks like 8 or so folks are planning on showing up.
In mid-August I’ll be at ASAE’s Convention in Denver.
User Error
Sysop error actually. In an effort to clean out the test page pings on KMpings test page I accidentally dropped all the pings for both the test page and the main page. That is what I get for manually tweaking the database without backing up the data. I have saved the last version of the RSS newsfeed from KMpings that has the old entries before the little database accident.
Sorry about that everyone. Please feel free to reping your entries if you want to get them back on the page.
Google Has KMpings Results Now
David Watson wrote about his irritation at Google autoforwarding when you get no search results for a particular word and google thinks you spelled it incorrectly. He used ‘kmping’ as an example. Google always wants to change kmping to camping.
At least now there are some entries in Google for it! No more auto-forward. The actual KMpings page is not yet in the results, oddly enough, but I suppose it will get in there eventually. I guess most people are linking to people talking about KMpings rather than linking to KMpings itself. Meta-popularity or something.
A TrackBack-enabled Thesaurus
The Shifted Librarian musings about TrackBack:
And could you build a master database of these things and organize them by category? Kind of make a Social Sciences Citation Index for your site? Something like that would be extremely useful within the Illinois libraries blogosphere I want to implement.
Absolutely! That is exactly what KMpings provides a proof-of-concept for.
For example, take a thesaurus or other controlled vocabulary and a fresh MovableType blog.
Add a category to the blog for each entry of the thesaurus. Enable TrackBack pings for each category as you create them. Create an index page for each category that displays the pings sent to it.
Other MovableType users may now set up their categories to ping specific terms in the thesaurus blog thus adding relevant posts to a list of recent entries on that topic.
So, the capability is there. However, most thesaurii have dozens to hundreds of terms which quickly becomes unmanagable with the current MT interfaces. A more robust management interface is needed to scale up to a full blown thesaurus categorization for blogs posts. Since MT supports MySQL databases now, a thesaurus management interface to MT can be developed separately.
Other software, such as Radio, have to implement the ability for Radio categories to TB ping other sites for this to work. We’ll get there.
Self-herding Cats
From Michael Helfrich’s weblog: Technology Confined Collaboration?
Collaboration is about people. Collaboration needs technology frameworks that support adaptive, ad hoc interactions. Adaptive from the sense of extending functionality on the fly and securely embracing new members on the fly. Simply put, it’s the swarming culture fused with adaptive technology.
Good article from a Groove VP. It reminds me of the famous commercial for a consulting firm that featured cowboys herding thousands of cats across the plains. The joke there is that cats are independent minded beings and are not very receptive to centralized herding control. The other joke is that the consulting firm claimed they could do the herding for you.
Decentralized collaborative software such as Groove and weblogs allow knowledge worker cats to do their own herding. They really won’t be herded any other way.
C. David Gammel, CAE 