icogs

Added tags

Finally added tags to my regular posts. One thing I struggled with, was if I was going to use commas or spaces as separators or rather if I was going to allow multi word tags. In a way I think it is a little illogical to only allow one word tags as some combination don’t make much sense unless they are merged. Lets say I wanted to tag a story "intelligent design" in a single wording system like del.icio.us it would be tagged as both "intelligent" and "design" which makes very little sense. on the other hand if I wanted to tag something "fly fishing" there would be some relevance in also tagging it "fishing" but then "fly" would not be very relevant.

After looking around on the net I found a good post on 37 Signals that swayed my decision to go with multi word tags and for me the most logical was to have them comma separated in one field.

icogs getting very close

icogs

Finally, after way too much time we are getting ready to launch icogs. Although icogs has been running in private beta for a long time we are now ready to expand the program, so if you are interested in trying a dirt simple content management system you can find out more and sign up here.

OK I'm back!

Still settling into blogging again and trying to get comfortable with this new version of beeth.com. This time I am experimenting with strongly typed posts. Instead of have on one post format fits all I am working with some types of posts, there will be:

  • Raw Links Will be lumps of links without much comment, Last time around I noticed that I often refrain from posting a link since I don’t have much to add to it. So this time I will collect them and publish them in lumps, some will be lumped together in logical groups and others will just be published like remainder links.
  • Reviews Self explanatory except that they will have a some kind of scrape-able XML that will allow other parties to do interesting stuff with it. Only problem is have yet to find a elegant format for these. More on this in a later post
  • Audio Following on the popularity of podcasting I thought it might be a good idea to start a meta podcast. Having no talent as a DJ (I know because I used to be one) I thought I would link to other peoples media files. I’ll explain more about this also in later posts

Of course there will still be "normal" posts and probably there will be more special formats to follow. Jason Kottke has been doing similar stuff for some time. I have three objectives with this experiment

  • Making the data generated by a a weblog more usable by the comunity. Sites like daypop and others are already doing very interesting trend analysis by just looking at links on sites, but if we started to publish more semantically there would be many more interesting things that could be done
  • Push icogs further, and make my site more flexible in its design
  • And I still foolishly want to learn how to write

Wotan est mort les chiens aussi

Odball news in French

Carl Beeth

At least I have one reader ;-)

Greg comments on my new design.
The only thing I'm missing compared to the previous version is the little picture on the top, which was clearly showing in which category we were...
I was so frustrated that I could not create categories on the fly. It required a trip to PhotoShop each time. By dropping the image I could make it much easier. Irony has it that since the change I have of course not added a single category. But at least I just activated the multi category and it seems to be working. Well anyway, I'm starting to prepare the next lift that will bring back the icons without the trip to PhotoShop and hopefully fix some other annoyances.

Alpha Party

icogs alpha partyYesterday we had a icogs get together to celebrate the alpha version. I want to thank everyone who took the time to come and hope they now have a better idea of what icogs is about.

Very cool!

The archives work and so do the categories. Just figured out that I can do some really cool stuff with the categories. In the category template I added a bit of Cog code to the banner image that now feeds a custom banner for each category: <img src="" cog:attribute="src = text:/img/${#url}_banner.gif" ... > this allows me to point to a custom image for each category. Here you can see the results: Still have lots of ideas for improvements using the categories but still need to check if they are possible... Vincent HELP!

News is spreading fast!

Oups... It seems we have a lot of expectations to live up to. Over at Defrang.com we can read
the upcoming icogs service powered by a killer templating engine. You'd better stay tuned...
and over at Yabon we read:
which announce the very next revolution in the blog world (and a lot more actually)
Well I guess I better get back to work on living up to expectations. Besides I also need to get the categories and archives working here.

Link Titles Added

I added link titles to the bookmarks on the left hand. Try it out roll over one and a little tool tip should pop up with a description. Only sad thing is that DreamWeaver chokes on the double cog:attribute: and rightfully displays it as an error. Ah well cant have everything work perfectly! Here is the code:
<a href="" title="" cog:attribute="href = #url" cog:attribute="title = #description" cog:content="#title">

Update Oups I was going about it in the wrong way! Apparently you just put both attributes in one item and separate them with a ";" like this
<a href="" title="" cog:attribute="href = #url ; title = #description" cog:content="#title">

It's getting there...

OK so not everything is working as I thought, but it's close enough that I can start thinking of moving my site to public space. Well that is when I will post some relevant content of course.

I cheated on a couple of item...
The bookmarks does not yet have a latestBookmarks method so I cheated by adding a category new that I will need to remove and add as time goes by. Since we don't yet have a method to pick a random bookmark from a specific category I added another category "Current Fun" to take care of the Take Five item. I also cheated by creating a story sitem to hold the blob ant the bottom of the page. Since I could not yet use storyWith I just used latestStories and made sure there was only one item in the sitem.

Finally the FTP works!

Ouch that was sort off painful finally got everything else to work and not finding the FTP password. Anyway I finally found an old backup of the palm and uploaded it to the new one. There I was really frustrated to find the same password as I had tried earlier, but, after looking a little I figured that I probably has miss entered it into the palm. I started thinking of typical graphiti error that could have slipped in. Well first try worked!

OK time to get the bookmarks to work!