I replaced the right column of the blog page. There used to be a presence list of people that have subscribed to the presence bot for this site, but now we have a link to my jabber-enabled message form, a link to the RSS feed of my blog, and finally a blog roll. All blogs of people which have subscribed to the presence bot are prefixed with a presence indicator.
When I bought my Palm m505 pda I had one problem. What to do with the Palm Portable Keyboard with its Palm V connector. Midwest PCB Designs, Inc. offered the solution with The Universal Bridge: a small adapter between the two devices.
Then, because I kept the adapter unprotected in my bag, it came into contact with some kind of fluid or perhaps some candy and its circuitry got corroded and didn't work anymore. After openening the adapter, scraping the corrosion away with some small tools seemed to help, but although I could use it to sync my m505 via the V cradle, the keyboard still didn't work. Hmpf. But after applying contact spray generously it works again! Yay!
Now I have to find some glue to put the whole thing together and also some kind of case for it, to prevent this from happening again. I tried those cylinder-shaped 35mm film containers, but the adapter is too wide to fit in. Too bad, because otherwise it would be perfect for it. If you have an idea, let me know.
To lighten up this blog a bit (more), I added a funny feature that
shows the presence of people that are linked in 
my posts. It
uses special tags in the .txt files, so that would mean an
incompatibility with blosxom
and I'm not really sure if I keep this feature.
I've finally completed the e-mail I mentioned yesterday. You can find it in the archives of the standards jig mailinglist: here.
I have been thinking about writing an e-mail about the jabber pubsub proposals that have been put forward as JEPs. These JEPs are JEP-0021: Jabber Event Notification Service (ENS) and JEP-0024: Publish/Subscribe. The e-mail should cover the differences and similarities, pros and cons, and opinions voiced in the Standards JIG Mailinglist with the ultimate goal of merging the best of both into one pubsub proposal.
I have followed the mailinglist a while and think I have not missed anything said on the subject through this list, but a man can only have this much active knowledge. Time for another read, and this has set me back a bit. Lots of things have been said but after 2002/05/11 it has been very quiet. Nevertheless I have to think this over again and hope I can come up with something useful before this week ends. Suggestions are very welcome.
All communication of my website and Jabber is done via a perl bot that monitors presence and waits for messages to arrive from either the database or jabber. For some reason this bot tends to act strangely after some time. Messages from the database then still get to the jabber world, but presence and message never make it out of the parser. Odd.
What I have done now is use two separate bots. One that takes care of the presence packets, and one that takes care of the message passing. Let's see how that works out.
Nick gave me an excerpt of the article. It reads:
Already, some users have built virtual whiteboards, which can be used for real-time presentations, and one user has built a map that lights up to show which of his friends are online.
Cool! The article apparently is not available online, so I'll try and find the dead-tree version here in the Netherlands.
Stpeter told me that
todays edition of the Wall Street Journal has an article on Jabber and that my Jabber World Map was mentioned.
Wow!
To celebrate the 30th anniversary of Youthchoir Zajebo (dutch page, see also this page for some pictures), of which I am the drummer, we will visit Luxembourg from 9 May - 12 May. During this period I will probably not be able to go online (for several reasons, wink).
If I don't drown during canoeing or get lost in the hills, I'll be back on monday!
That was fairly easy. You can now select the blog output by year, year/month or year/month/day in the URL (for examples: check the URL of this blog entry). Also the number of shown blog items can be limited internally.
My blog is not my frontpage. Still I'd like to show the blogging activity on this site. So I added a new template that uses the same parsing of .txt files, but only shows the titles. These titles are linked to the actual blog entry. The template is now included right beneath the navigation bar on the frontpage for everyone to see.
Another thing I implemented was subblogs. As proof of concept I blagg dj's blog and put it in a subblog. Its titles are shown on the frontpage, too...
I've reactivated a feature on this site again: the ability to send me Jabber messages via a webform. And not only that, you can also see my responses on the frontpage.
Since this site has session management, it is known from which session a message originated and this information is used in the resource part of the jabber message. Any reply from me then goes only to the user that sent me a message in the first place. A simple reload of the frontpage then shows these replies.
Do you want to send me a message? Somewhere on this page my presence is shown. If you click me, a form will be opened and you can type your message and hit 'Send'. A simple as that.
Yeah. ralphm.net has a blog now! I hacked some more on it and now has support for syndication as well by adding /xml to the url like this:
http://ralphm.net/blog/xml
Also the anchors have been put in. They only thing left to implement is the date filter.
During one of my chats with dj, he mentioned blosxom. Blosxom is lightweight Weblog application. Very simple and elegant and written in Perl.
I like perl, but mostly use PHP for my web applications. This got me started to reimplement the idea of blosxom in PHP, while using the same input: .txt files with the first line being the title. This has the advantage that I can still use blagg and it's nice plugins. Let's see how this works out...
At this moment it just reads the directory for the blog files and displays them using Smarty templates, like the rest of my site. There is no support for syndication yet, but since it uses templates anyway, it should be fairly easy to do that. Also the 'archiving' feature of blosxom is not implemented.