To celebrate Firefox’s release, we released the first beta version of Welkin, a general purpose graphical and interactive RDF browser.

For those who follow my work, they will see this as “agora for RDF” and, in fact, it it

Enjoy!

we got slashdotted! (boy, average joe slashdot reader is really clueless, oh well) Analysis on the slashdot effect on the server load coming soon!

I’ve given this presentation at OSCON 2004 and the room was packed, the vibe nice and I received very nice comments afterwards. For those who missed it, you can read the slides.

Every few months, I will get annoyed enough with some of the bugs of my little blog software that I come down and fix them. So, here it is, the new version of Linotype, which features:

• HTTP action-based authentication. Basically, everybody can GET, but only I can POST. This allows you to take a sneak preview on how the system works in the back (just click on the linotype image to access the backend). This is now done directly by Apache so I also simplified the flowscript by getting rid of all the authentication-handing part.
• Selective creation time update.This allows me to go back to previous news and modify them (say to fix typos) but without changing the creation date (that was also screwing some news readers).

Things that still bug me enough to make me want to work on them:

• Repository. Right now it’s a file based repository and order is done thru last-modified-time (to avoid having to do aggregation of every file just to find out which one was done first), but it really sucks. What I need is a repository where metadata and data can be kept separate and accessed independently. There are three possible ones: WebDAV, JSR-170 and ReiserFS, but since this blog is running on Solaris that rules out ReiserFS. I might give JSR170 a try since there is a reference implementation on the Jakarta Slide CVS.
• Editor. The editor is a lot nicer than anything else I’ve seen and it’s tuned for my needs, but there are a few things that just don’t work well because it seems that my obsession with HTML paragraphs is not really matched by the Mozilla Composer folks (which like sequences of
  a lot more than). Here I have to understand if I want to spend my time on writing layers of javascript to fix it, or if I just let go the paragraphs altogether (or do that on the server side, after the submission).

There are some other things, but we’ll see how long it takes for them to bug me enough.