Weblog: Archive

We had amazing time in the medieval Georgian cave cities of Vardzia and Vanis kvabebi last weekend. I've already contributed some information on Vardzia to WikiPedia, and plan to write more about both later on.

The monastery consisted of over six thousand apartments created as protection from Mongols into the hidden thirteen floors high complex. The city included a church, throne room, and a complex irrigation system watering terraced farmlands. Only access to the complex was through some well hidden tunnels near the Mtkvari river.

An earthquake in Samtskhe destroyed approximately two thirds of the city in 1283, exposing the caves to outside view and collapsing the irrigation system. The church was reinforced and an externally visible bell tower added during the reign of Bektha Jakheli in the thirteenth century.

Thanks to Irakli from Info-Tbilisi for being our guide for this trip, and especially for encouraging us to climb up the "impossible" rabbit holes into the white church of Vani's caves. And thanks obviously to Taya and Lasha for the whole time in Georgia!

The UNDP Samtskhe-Javakheti office was also most helpful.

It seems that Google is now autodetecting PermaLinks of dynamically-generated pages using the rel="PermaLink" syntax. Here's one of the results for my blog:

This is probably a really good idea, as it allows their search result links point to correct document even if the target site has been reorganized, combatting linkrot. Of course cool URLs don't change, but as they're titles too they can change during reorganizations, creating the need for permanent links.

Making the PermaLink of a page machine-readable is really easy, as shown by WikiPedia:

Permalinks can be displayed on the system using a HTML link element. This way authoring tools can automatically detect the permalink and use that for linking instead of the regular URL. The Link element should include two attributes:

<link rel="bookmark" href="<PermaLink URL>" />

Updated 16:00: Tantek from #microformats pointed me to an even earlier convention for making PermaLinks machine-readable: rel="bookmark".

Midgard CMS has now been updated support rel="bookmark" as it is outlined even in the HTML spec.

net.nemein.calendar is the new default calendar in Midgard CMS. It replaces the old de.linkm.events component with several clear advantages:

• Repeating events support (different rules, weekly, daily, monthly etc)
• Storage of the events is MidgardEvent instead of MidgardArticle, meaning that the DB queries are more optimal, storage more semantic, and the structure supports things like event participants
• Output is by default in the hCalendar microformat.

The calendar uses the OpenPsa Calendar libraries to provide its features. This means that it is easy to add new capabilities like publish/subscribe webcal feeds and SyncML as we go.

I've deployed the new calendar for Midgard events. Converting events from de.linkm.events to the new format was done with a simple PHP script. Prior to running this script inside a Midgard style I installed OpenPsa and the latest net.nemein.calendar.

The hCalendar feed can be subscribed to iCalendar-aware applications using the X2V application. Unfortunately as X2V doesn't yet support iCalendar UIDs, Evolution will not display the calendar. But here is what it looks like on Apple iCal:

Business Opportunities Weblog has a funny tool for calculating blog's worth:

The tool bases its calculations into some research about the AOL - Weblogs Inc. deal:

In acquiring Weblogs Inc., AOL has now provided us with some numbers traditional media are willing to pay for a blog. Looking at the numbers above, one can try to guess at the value of a link from an external site. a single link on the weblogsinc network represents 0.002258559942180087 percent of the overall network.

However, things are unfortunately not quite so sunny:

Should we now assume that traditional media companies are willing to pay between $500 and $1000 per site that links into a blog?

Not quite. The incremental value is in the size of the network and the underlying tools. Jason and Brian have been working on developing a blog authoring technology, called BlogSmith, that sits at the core of their network and one has to believe that AOL saw some value in the software too. However, one can easily say that blog valuations are going to be easier to make after this deal since it provides the first yardstick in that space.

Via Billmon.

While numbers like this are obviously irrelevant, I'm still quite happy how my blog's visitor counts have climbed from dozen to over 1000 visits per day between when I switched from static website to a blog in March 2004 and now.

Something interesting is going to happen with OpenPsa and Digital Business Ecosystem:

The DBE integration can be seen in action in Linköping Midgard developer meeting this weekend, or in Tampere DBE workshop on monday.

This weekend is being spent in the Midgard developer meeting hosted by Anykey Solutions in Linköping, Sweden. Besides the ferry Suicide Tequila episode reported by Edi, the time has been both productive and fun.

Happened so far:

Tarjei ran a pretty interesting demo and presentation on the Aegir 2 project. It seems that once the object browser is done, we can safely remove both old Aegir and SpiderAdmin from the distribution.

After some initial bugs had been hammered out, we also were able to run the promised demo on managing subcontracted projects with OpenPsa 2 over the DBE P2P network. I'll try to post screenshots of the whole project workflow after the Tampere demo on monday.

Another result of the demo was that everybody agreed heartily that Exorcist should replace Repligard as Midgard's replication system of choice. This will make replication faster, easier to handle two-way, and push the use of Java Content Repository in Midgard CMS.

We also had a very good discussion about refining Midgard's style engine to work on a clearer stack model. This will make MidCOM's style template system integrate transparently into Midgard's powerful page composition system, and make the eventual page transition of MidCOM much easier.

Also, the annoying MySQL 4.1 typecasting bug got fixed, Midgard 1.9 feature requirements got decided, and many people wrote their first MidCOM component based on Tarjei's tutorial.

In the saturday evening we had a thai dinner in the SmallOne Mansion.