phil ringnalda

Anybody got a spark?

Sorry to inflict what’s arguably not the very best Springsteen song on you, but it’s been stuck in my head ever since my too long between posts alarm went off this morning. I’m just having a hard time getting excited about anything blog or web related.

Project report:

PHP TrackBack for Blogger: fiddled with the code for a while, but it will require posting through the Blogger API so that you can get your post’s permalink to include in your ping, which anymore means that half the time and for half the blogs it won’t work at all, and for Pro it will be a no-titles pain until the promised (in the “jam tomorrow” promise sense) upgrade in the Pro API. So, I dumped the idea for now.

phpComments: some code for a drop-in replacement for dotcomments I’ve been playing with for what seems like forever. There are some cool things, like preview and comment editing, that are worth doing, and some more, like a seamless transfer to mySQL, that are cool but I don’t much want to support, but the main things that people ask for are banning by IP, which is a nearly useless feature (unless you just want to ban all AOL users, or anyone with a dialup account from a particular company in a particular city), and graphic smilies, which I can’t stand. So it’s hard to maintain much of an effort on it.

TrackBack RDF validation: there are a number of unsatisfying solutions. The best, and least likely to be accepted, is to simply include the RDF and let the validator go. That’s the W3C’s official recommendation, an has been since 1999. Second best is to write a DTD which will make RDF embedded in XHTML valid under XHTML 1.1, but because the W3C validator doesn’t know the first thing about validating modularized XHTML 1.1 DTDs, that will make your page valid but not validatable, which isn’t exactly what there’s a demand for. So the only practical solution is to comment it out with either a CDATA comment section or HTML comments, which negates the whole purpose of putting it in RDF: if you can’t get to it with an XML parser, you might just as well have it in text in a particular pattern, <!– This is my trackback data for this post. The author of this post is Phil. The title of this post is “Why bother?” … –>. Bleah. No satisfaction from a lot of hours of research and trial with much error.

My version of Open Posting for Blogger, an API script that lets people contribute posts to my Blogger FAQ, works like a charm. It worked when Ruzz tested it the day after I finished it, and it worked like a charm three weeks later, when someone else tested it. Not exactly a flood of contributors waiting for their chance, I guess.

So, what fun, cool, exciting projects are you working on? And how close are you to the brick wall?