Copia

Micah brought up cow-tipping coincidentally just about the time I'd meant to muse about the authenticity of the supposed practice. While in Wisconsin (near Twin Lakes) Thanksgiving with the in-laws, Lori's mother surprised me by saying she had never even heard of cow-tipping. It occurred to me that although people always mentioned the supposed practice (usually as a joke about relieving boredom) I had never met anyone who claimed to have done so. To be fair, my impression is that cow-tipping is expected to require at least five or six participants, so that would meet Micah's strength estimates, but I still share Micah's skepticism. Suburban legend? Or should I expect anyone to come forward with video?

[Uche Ogbuji]

In all this Web feed hacking I've been working with my list originally exported from Lektora in OPML format. I wrote XSLT to convert from OPML to XBEL and XOXO. In the case of XOXO I really couldn't figure out any common conventions for Web feeds so I made up my own for now. The resulting XBEL looks a lot easier to work with, so I'm propose extensions for feed URL / site URL coupling in the renewal of XBEL. I figured my XSLT might be useful to others, so here are the links:

• opml2xbel.xsl
• opml2xoxo.xsl

Going from XBEL to OPML, I've been using Dan MacTough's XSLT. (He also has an XBEL to XHTML transform). I sometimes have to tweak the resulting attributes to deal with xmlUrl/url and title/text type OPML madness.

I've also posted my Web feed list in XBEL form. It uses old school XBEL 1.0, and not any of the metadata additions I'm hoping to see in 1.2. As such, it's only a list of Web feeds and doesn't include the corresponding Weblog home pages.

[Uche Ogbuji]

I'm always quick to big up Colorado, but boy if there is a downside, it's the wicked wind storms we get in early spring and late fall. This morning's Aeolian exertions blew apart almost one whole side of our fence (and you don't build dainty little white picket numbers in this state: you go for barracks quality). It also dragged our gas grill (complete with heavy tank) six feet across our upper level deck and crashing down the stairs to the ground below. We're also less a worrisome number of roof panels. No fun, especially the week before we have to leave the country. Elsewhere in the neighborhood there were light poles knocked down, sheds upended and debris everywhere. Not a safe time to be out of doors.

Oh well. Can't have it all.

[Uche Ogbuji]

XML Bookmark Exchange Language (XBEL)

The Python XML SIG has had some really great times in its history. One of the highlights is the development of XML Bookmark Exchange Language (XBEL). In September of 1998, just as I was joining the group, they were developing this bookmarks exchange language that's still used in more browsers and bookmark management projects than any other particular format. The XML-SIG has fallen on quiet times, and one of the side effects of this is that additional work on XBEL has been neglected.

Earlier this year we agreed on the SIG to give XBEL its own home on SourceForge, but no one stepped up to make it happen, until John L. Clark got to it last week (thanks, John).

XBEL's new home is http://sourceforge.net/projects/xbel/. The old home is still up, but I think we should move it to http://xbel.sourceforge.net/, with some updates and maybe a design update (maybe make the page XHTML). We'll be discussing such things on the new XBEL mailing list, so please come join us. The main goal is to add more features to XBEL needed for its original role in browser bookmarks exchange, but I'm also interested in making it a useful format for general Web resource lists such as feed lists (e.g. a superior alternative to OPML).

John wrote up a good summary of recent discussions of XBEL.

I'll have more on our efforts summarized here on Copia as we progress.

[Uche Ogbuji]

Python Guru Needed Fast!!!!

[Uche Ogbuji]

In an article I'm working on I refer to Norm Walsh's piece Embedded Markup Considered Harmful and his follow-up "Escaped Markup: What To Do Instead". I've always urged people to use type="xhtml" in Atom rather than type="html" and do the tidying to XHTML in the aggregation processing stage, and my arguments largely line up with Norm's.

From a comment by Dan Connolly I also found this older XML.com article with the same title as Norm's: "Embedded Markup Considered Harmful" by Theodor Holm Nelson. I can't make much sense of what Mr. Nelson is saying. Can you?

[Uche Ogbuji]

I was pretty well ROTFL after reading this Daily WTF (via XSLT Blog). OK, so that code isn't even really doing l10n. I'm not sure what the coder thinks it's doing. It's a complete exercise in useless cut and paste. But it's worth noting that you can do the task of competent l10n in a tenth of the tag load used in the WTF example (see Docbook XSL), and you can even do it using a tenth of the tag load used in Docbook, if you don't mind using an XSLT extension module.

[Uche Ogbuji]

I was pretty well ROTFL after reading this Daily WTF (via XSLT Blog). OK, so that code isn't even really doing l10n. I'm not sure what the coder thinks it's doing. It's a complete exercise in useless cut and paste. But it's worth noting that you can do the task of competent l10n in a tenth of the tag load used in the WTF example (see Docbook XSL), and you can even do it using a tenth of the tag load used in Docbook, if you don't mind using an XSLT extension module.

[Uche Ogbuji]

Of course chores lead to more chores. After last week's round of tweaks to Copia I got a suggestion from Aristotle to rearrange the entry-specific titles, and I've done so. I got a bit more info from Tom Passin about possible encoding problems that has only deepened my bafflement.

I also noticed there has been some confusion over last week's birth announcement. It came from Chimezie, not me (congrats, brother!). On Copia the authors is specified for each entry, but previously there wasn't any such useful distinction being made in the Atom 0.3 (I'll be working on an Atom 1.0 flavor for PyBlosxom soon) or RSS 1.0 feeds. I've fixed that, but I've done through in a way I'm not sure all feed sinks will process correctly. In the Atom feed there is a top-level

<author>
    <name>Uche and Chimezie Ogbuji</name>
    <url>http://copia.ogbuji.net/blog/</url>
    <email>uche@ogbuji.net</email>
  </author>

And then for each entry a more specific authors, for example:

<title>Chikaora Zion Credell Ogbuji</title>
    ...
    <author>
      <name>chimezie</name>
    </author>

I hope that helps. I made some other tweaks to the feeds, and this does seem to have had the unfortunate side-effect of pushing everything back onto the front page of Planet XML. My apologies to Planet XML readers (including me: I'd hoped to catch up after the holidays and found only Copia entries).

Copia already tells you the author of each entry, in the info line at the end of the entry.

[Uche Ogbuji]

Of course chores lead to more chores. After last week's round of tweaks to Copia I got a suggestion from Aristotle to rearrange the entry-specific titles, and I've done so. I got a bit more info from Tom Passin about possible encoding problems that has only deepened my bafflement.

I also noticed there has been some confusion over last week's birth announcement. It came from Chimezie, not me (congrats, brother!). On Copia the authors is specified for each entry, but previously there wasn't any such useful distinction being made in the Atom 0.3 (I'll be working on an Atom 1.0 flavor for PyBlosxom soon) or RSS 1.0 feeds. I've fixed that, but I've done through in a way I'm not sure all feed sinks will process correctly. In the Atom feed there is a top-level

<author>
    <name>Uche and Chimezie Ogbuji</name>
    <url>http://copia.ogbuji.net/blog/</url>
    <email>uche@ogbuji.net</email>
  </author>

And then for each entry a more specific authors, for example:

<title>Chikaora Zion Credell Ogbuji</title>
    ...
    <author>
      <name>chimezie</name>
    </author>

I hope that helps. I made some other tweaks to the feeds, and this does seem to have had the unfortunate side-effect of pushing everything back onto the front page of Planet XML. My apologies to Planet XML readers (including me: I'd hoped to catch up after the holidays and found only Copia entries).

Copia already tells you the author of each entry, in the info line at the end of the entry.

[Uche Ogbuji]