MyBlogLog
Just found out about MyBlogLog. Found it on the site of Clicky. Somehow they can show a list of who else is visiting my blog. Mmmm. Let' s check it out. I'll let you know if I think it's fit for my blog.
14 February 2007
Clicky
Just found a new Web Statistics tool: Clicky. Clicky not just gathers usage statistics, but also collects information about which individuals visit your blog, or at least their IP-addresses. I've added their Javascript Tracking code to the Stats-box to the right, and it works just fine.
11 February 2007
BlogPulse (2)
It costed some time, but it seems that step-by-step BlogPulse is recognizing my blogs. Just click the title of this posting.
7 February 2007
What is this GeoURL about?
To the left of this page, in the Varia box, one finds one more little icon or label:
What is this about?
GeoURL is a location service, which locates your website in Meatspace and associates sites near your site to it. Look eg at sites near my blog: http://geourl.org/near?p=http://ableijs.blogspot.com/.
How does it do that? Well just by looking at your metadata.
There are several ways to this. GeoURL uses 2 of them:
1. ICBM (Why ICBM? Old Usenet historical precedent.)
Add the following metatags to the -section of your XHTML-page:
<meta name="DC.title" content="THE NAME OF YOUR SITE" />
<meta name="ICBM" content="XXX.XXXXX, YYY.YYYYY" />
where XXX.XXXXX is the latitude (south is negative), YYY.YYYYY is the longitude (west of Greenwhich, UK is negative).
Also notice the use of Dublin Core to denote the title of the blog. See: Expressing Qualified Dublin Core in HTML/XHTML meta and link elements. This should be preceded by using the profile attribute in the <head>-tag:
<head profile='http://dublincore.org/documents/dcq-html/'>
denoting the use of Dublin Core Metadata, and by the line:
<link href='http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/' rel='schema.DC'/>
denoting the meaning of the prefix 'DC'.
2. Using GeoTags.
Add the following metatags to the <head>-section of your XHTML-page:
<meta name="DC.title" content="THE NAME OF YOUR SITE" />
<meta name="geo.position" content="XXX.XXXXX, YYY.YYYYY />
<meta name="geo.placename" content="Place Name, Country-or-State"/>
<meta name="geo.region" content="ISO 3166 Country code or ISO 3166-2 Country Subdivision code"/>
where again XXX.XXXXX is the latitude (south is negative), YYY.YYYYY is the longitude (west of Greenwhich, UK is negative).
The ISO 3166 Country code for the Netherlands = "NL", while the ISO 3166-2 Country Subdivision code for the Utrecht province is NL-UT.
Some other services, notably Syndic8, use geo.country instead:
<meta name="DC.title" content="THE NAME OF YOUR SITE" />
<meta name="geo.position" content="XXX.XXXXX, YYY.YYYYY />
<meta name="geo.placename" content="Place Name, Country-or-State"/>
<meta name="geo.country" content="ISO 3166 Country code"/>
Once again you need to tell what this 'geo.'-thing means.
This should be done by by using the profile attribute in the <head>-tag:
<head profile='http://dublincore.org/documents/dcq-html/'>
denoting the use of Dublin Core Metadata and alike profiles, and by the lines:
<link href='http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/' rel='schema.DC'/>
<link href='http://geotags.com/geo/' rel='schema.geo'/>
denoting the meaning of the prefixes 'DC' and 'geo'.
3. Syndic8 uses yet another method, not supported by GeoURL: The Getty Thesaurus of Names (TGN).
<meta name="tgn.id" content="id from the TGN database" />
<meta name="tgn.name" content="Place Name, Country-or-State" />
Also here you should tell what this 'tgn.'-thing means.
This should be done by by using the profile attribute in the <head>-tag:
<head profile='http://dublincore.org/documents/dcq-html/'>
denoting the use of Dublin Core Metadata and alike profiles, and by the lines:
<link href='http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/' rel='schema.DC'/>
<link href='http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/vocabularies/tgn/' rel='schema.tgn'/>
4. Making full use of Dublin Core: Expressing Qualified Dublin Core in HTML/XHTML meta and link elements.
Start with the profile attribute of the <head>-element:
<head profile='http://dublincore.org/documents/dcq-html/'>
denoting the use of Dublin Core Metadata and alike profiles, and with the lines:
<link href='http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/' rel='schema.DC'/>
<link href='http://purl.org/dc/terms/' rel='schema.DCTERMS'/>
denoting the meaning of the prefixes 'DC' and 'DCTERMS'.
Then add the Dublin Core Metadata:
<meta name="DC.title" lang="en" content="THE NAME OF YOUR SITE" />
<meta name="DC.creator" content="YOUR NAME" />
<meta name="DCTERMS.spatial" scheme="DCTERMS.ISO3166" content="ISO 3166 Country code" />
<meta name="DCTERMS.spatial" scheme="DCTERMS.TGN" content="id from the TGN database" />
<meta name="DCTERMS.spatial" scheme="DCTERMS.Point" content="east=YYY.YYYYY; north=XXX.XXXXX; name=Place Name" />
where again XXX.XXXXX is the latitude (south is negative), YYY.YYYYY is the longitude (west of Greenwhich, UK is negative).
Syndic8 expects you to be more descriptive about the creator, following an obsolete version of the Dublin Core:
<meta name="DC.creator.e-mail" content="YOURNAME@yourdomain.com" />
<meta name="DC.creator.name" content="YOURNAME" />
5. You can put these al together:
Start with the profile attribute of the <head>-element:
<head profile='http://dublincore.org/documents/dcq-html/'>
denoting the use of Dublin Core Metadata and alike profiles, and with the lines:
<link href='http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/' rel='schema.DC'/>
<link href='http://purl.org/dc/terms/' rel='schema.DCTERMS'/>
<link href='http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/vocabularies/tgn/' rel='schema.tgn'/>
<link href='http://geotags.com/geo/' rel='schema.geo'/>
<link href='http://dmoz.org/rdf' rel='schema.dmoz'/>
denoting the meaning of the prefixes 'DC', 'DCTERMS', 'dmoz', 'geo' and 'tgn'.
Then add all the Metadata:
<meta name="DC.title" lang="en" content="THE NAME OF YOUR SITE" />
<meta name="DC.creator" content="YOUR NAME" />
<meta name="DC.creator.e-mail" content="YOURNAME@yourdomain.com" />
<meta name="DC.creator.name" content="YOURNAME" />
<meta name="DCTERMS.spatial" scheme="DCTERMS.ISO3166" content="ISO 3166 Country code" />
<meta name="DCTERMS.spatial" scheme="DCTERMS.TGN" content="id from the TGN database" />
<meta name="DCTERMS.spatial" scheme="DCTERMS.Point" content="east=YYY.YYYYY; north=XXX.XXXXX; name=Place Name" />
<meta name="tgn.id" content="id from the TGN database" />
<meta name="tgn.name" content="Place Name, Country-or-State" />
<meta name="geo.position" content="XXX.XXXXX, YYY.YYYYY />
<meta name="geo.placename" content="Place Name, Country-or-State"/>
<meta name="geo.country" content="ISO 3166 Country code"/>
<meta name="geo.region" content="ISO 3166 Country code or ISO 3166-2 Country Subdivision code"/>
<meta name="ICBM" content="XXX.XXXXX, YYY.YYYYY" />
<meta content='Top/OPEN DIRECTORY CATEGORY' name='dmoz.id'/>
Note that I added also the Open Directory category, to keep Syndic8 happy.
In this way almost every location service can understand where you are located in Meatspace.
So how can I use this with Blogger?
- Login.
- Choose Customise (from the top bar) or choose Layout from your Dashboard.
- Choose Edit HTML.
- Edit the template as follows:
<head profile='http://dublincore.org/documents/dcq-html/'>
<b:include data='blog' name='all-head-content'/>
<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
<link href='http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/' rel='schema.DC'/>
<link href='http://purl.org/dc/terms/' rel='schema.DCTERMS'/>
<link href='http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/vocabularies/tgn/' rel='schema.tgn'/>
<link href='http://geotags.com/geo/' rel='schema.geo'/>
<link href='http://dmoz.org/rdf' rel='schema.dmoz'/>
<meta name="DC.title" lang="en" content="THE NAME OF YOUR SITE" />
<meta name="DC.creator" content="YOUR NAME" />
<meta name="DC.creator.e-mail" content="YOURNAME@yourdomain.com" />
<meta name="DC.creator.name" content="YOURNAME" />
<meta name="DCTERMS.spatial" scheme="DCTERMS.ISO3166" content="ISO 3166 Country code" />
<meta name="DCTERMS.spatial" scheme="DCTERMS.TGN" content="id from the TGN database" />
<meta name="DCTERMS.spatial" scheme="DCTERMS.Point" content="east=YYY.YYYYY; north=XXX.XXXXX; name=Place Name" />
<meta name="tgn.id" content="id from the TGN database" />
<meta name="tgn.name" content="Place Name, Country-or-State" />
<meta name="geo.position" content="XXX.XXXXX, YYY.YYYYY />
<meta name="geo.placename" content="Place Name, Country-or-State"/>
<meta name="geo.country" content="ISO 3166 Country code"/>
<meta name="geo.region" content="ISO 3166 Country code or ISO 3166-2 Country Subdivision code"/>
<meta name="ICBM" content="XXX.XXXXX, YYY.YYYYY" />
<meta content='Top/OPEN DIRECTORY CATEGORY' name='dmoz.id'/>
Note that you have to alter the <head>-tag, have to keep the <b:include>- and <title>-lines, and have to add the <link rel="schema.*">- and <meta>-lines.
I've done this with my template, and added http://ableijs.blogspot.com/ to the GeoURL-database (http://geourl.org/add.html). So now everyone can look up my place in GeoURL (http://geourl.org/near/?p=http://ableijs.blogspot.com/), as well as lookup sites mear me in Meatspace. People also can lookup my town in Multimap or Mapquest.
5 February 2007
What about those RDF, RSS and Atom icons?
To the left of this page, in the Varia box, one finds three little icons or labels:
What are these for?
In fact they are links to a XML version of this blog. With this version it is possible that not only other persons, but also other programs can read this blog. Just like the links to the first 5 hid lines of my Live Space you find to the right. There are standards how to do that, not one, but a number.
My favourite is RDF/RSS 1.0. This one is based on the Resource Description Framework, which is a W3C Recommendation (http://www.w3.org/RDF/). This RDF is part of the W3C Semantic Web Activity, which tries to turn the world wide web into a web of data, which has meaning not only to humans, but also to machines. RDF is a generic framework, within which vocabularies can be for different goals. RSS 1.0 is such a vocabulary for Site Summaries (RDF Site Summary). del.icio.us uses RDF, and so does the Open Directory Project.
RSS 2.0 is not a successor, but a derivation or a fork, which is popular mainly (but not only) at Microsoft. RSS 2.0 does not obey the rules of the semantic web. More information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(file_format).
Atom is an attempt to leave al this confusion behind. It is an Internet Proposed Standard (RFC 4287), but unfortunately no longer part of the semantic web efforts. Atom is the favourite of Google, which bases its GData-protocol on it.
Link to dutch version of this posting: http://ableijs.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!A5676E446DB7316!152.entry
17 December 2006
Blogger 3.0 getting out of beta too soon
On december 11nth the Blogger team announced that they expect the new Blogger to be out of beta soon. I quote "Known issues on the new Blogger are few and getting fewer". Unfortunately I don't agree with them. If I take a look at the Blogger Help group (http://groups.google.com/group/blogger-help) I notice that there are a lot of people having problems with templates. I also had them, or at least my wife, who designed the wonderful layout for my blog. It was very hard to force the new very advanced and powerful template engine of Blogger to do what you really want, especially when you want your layout to be useful in both IE and Firefox (what about standards, huh?). Big problem was the fact that we couldn't validate the CSS through the W3C CSS validator (http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=http://ableijs.blogspot.com), because it complains that the document is not valid XML. Note that the same holds for the Blogger blog (http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=http://buzz.blogspot.com/), and the Known Issues for Blogger in Beta (http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=http://knownissues.blogspot.com/). When I try to validate my blog through the W3C Markup validator (http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://ableijs.blogspot.com) I find a discouraging number of 874 errors. When I analyze them, I find the following structural errors, which come from the Blogger template engine:
- Use of invalid xml namespaces (using a DOCTYPE statement restricts the use of namespaces)
- The template engine should remove them during the transform to XHTML. I can't remove them in the template because Beta Blogger stubbornly keeps adding them.
- Unencoded & in uris, should be &amp;amp;amp;amp;
- Encloses blogposts in blocklevel elements without checking if the blogposts themselves contain blocklevel elements (like <p>, <ul>)
- <style>-sections not enclosed in <!--[CDATA[ ... ]]-->, at least not after the transform. I already solved part of the the problem by enclosing the <style>-section in comments <!-- -->, which of course means that when the blog is served as application/xhtml+xml it will ignore all of the <style>-definitions. So this is not a real solution.
- Widget scripts not enclosed in <\!--[CDATA[ ... ]]-->>. I couldn't solve the <script>-problem the same way, because the widget-scripts are included during transform.
Note that the same holds for the Blogger blog (http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://buzz.blogspot.com) and the Known Issues for Blogger in Beta (http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://knownissues.blogspot.com).
When I search the Blogger Help group for 'xhtml valid blogger beta' (http://groups.google.com/group/blogger-help/search?group=blogger-help&q=xhtml+valid+blogger+beta) I notice that I'm not the only one with these kind of problems. And as I stated xhtml-conformance is a prerequisite for validating CSS, which is necessary to be able to use the new Blogger template engine to its full extent. That's why I don't think the new Blogger is ready to go out of beta.
30 November 2006
BlogPulse
I found BlogPulse, which has some interesting tools for analysis of the Blogosphere.
I quote "What is BlogPulse?
BlogPulse is an automated trend discovery system for blogs. Blogs, a term that is short for weblogs, represent the fastest-growing medium of personal publishing and the newest method of individual expression and opinion on the Internet. BlogPulse applies machine-learning and natural-language processing techniques to discover trends in the highly dynamic world of blogs. BlogPulse is brought to you by Nielsen BuzzMetrics. "
25 November 2006
Technorati
Technorati considers itself to be the recognized authority on what's happening on the World Live Web, right now. The Live Web is - in their words - the dynamic and always-updating portion of the Web. We search, surface, and organize blogs and the other forms of independent, user-generated content (photos, videos, voting, etc.) increasingly referred to as “citizen media.”
As they say, on the World Live Web, bloggers frequently link to and comment on other blogs, creating the type of immediate connection one would have in a conversation. Technorati tracks these links, and thus the relative relevance of blogs, photos, videos etc. Technorati rapidly indexes tens of thousands of updates every hour, and so they monitor these live communities and the conversations they foster.
On Technorati you can search blogs based on tags, on the blog text or on the Technorati directory. Also you can search on authority, which is determined by the number of links to a certain blog. And also you can find out who is referring to your blog.
I think Technorati is an important example of how the social web is evolving.
I've claimed my blog on Technorati too. Look here for my Technorati Profile.
Website traffic analysis services
When I started this blog I thought it would be useful to be able to monitor the traffic to this blog. Doing so certainly fits into the theme of this blog. So for starters I installed a few services (WebStats4U, OneStat and of course Google Analystics) to investigate which one serves me best. I also made up a list of (partially) free website traffic analysis services:
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