Category Archives: Blogging

Citations, Names and Language Documentation

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I have recently been reading the blog of Martin Fenner and came upon the article Personal names around the world [1] Martin Fenner. 14 August 2011. Personal names around the world. PLoS Blog Network. http://blogs.plos.org/mfenner/2011/08/14/personal-names-around-the-world . [Accessed: 16 September 2011]. [Link] . His post is in fact a reflection on a W3C paper on Personal Names around the WorldSeveral other reflections are here: http://www.w3.org/International/wiki/Personal_names (same title). This is apparently coming out of the i18n effort and is an effort to help authors and database designers make informed decisions about names on the web.
I read Martin’s post with some interest because in Language Documentation getting someone’s name as a source or for informed consent is very important (from a U.S. context). Working in a archive dealing with language materials, I see lot of names. One of the interesting situations which came to me from an Ecuadorian context was different from what I have seen in the w3.org paper or in the w3.org discussion. The naming convention went like this:

The elder was known by the younger’s name plus a relationship.

My suspicion is that it is a taboo to name the dead. So to avoid possibly naming the dead, the younger was referenced and the the relationship was invoked. This affected me in the archive as I am supposed to note who the speaker is on the recordings. In lue of the speakers name, I have the young son’s first name, who is well known in the community, and is in his 30’s or so, and I have the relationship. So in English this might sound like John’s mother. Now what am I supposed to put in the metadata record for the audio recordings I am cataloging? I do not have a name but I do have a relationship to a known (to the community) person.

I inquired with a literacy consultant who has worked in Ecuador with indigenous people for some years, she informed me that in one context she was working in everyone knew what family line they were from and all the names were derived from that family line by position. It was of such that to call someone by there name was an insult.

It sort of reminds me of this sketch by Fry and Laurie.

References

References
↑1 Martin Fenner. 14 August 2011. Personal names around the world. PLoS Blog Network. http://blogs.plos.org/mfenner/2011/08/14/personal-names-around-the-world . [Accessed: 16 September 2011]. [Link]

Smart Lists and UI

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Working in an archive, I deal with a lot of metadata. Some of this metadata is from controlled vocabularies. Sometimes they show up in lists. Some times these controlled vocabularies can be very large, like for the names of language where there are a limited amount of languages but the amount is just over 7,000. I like to keep an eye out for how websites optimized the options for users. FaceBook, has a pretty cool feature for narrowing down the list of possible family relationships someone has to you. i.e. a sibling could be a brother/sister, step-brother/step-sister, or a half-brother/half-sister. But if the sibling is male, it can only be a brother, step-brother, or a half-brother.

FaceBook narrows the logical selection down based on atributes of the person mentioned in the relationship.

meun with all the relationship options

All the relationship options.

That is if I select Becky, my wife, as an person to be in a relationship with me then FaceBook determines that based on her gender atribute that she can only be referenced by the female relationships.

Menu showing just some relationships

Menu showing just some relationships based on an atribute of the person referenced.

JetPack, Menus, and Others

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Sharing

Jetpack is in no way new… But I have never installed it (it seems that half a million other people have though). The only service I have used from Automattic is akismet. Then about a month ago I installed after the dead line as a Google Chrome plugin to help me with my spelling mistakes. It seemed to work so I thought I would give it a go as a WordPress plugin.

What was new was that I had not integrated a sharing solution for readers of my blog. So as of now there is a share this option at the end of my posts.

Sharing options

Of course Sharedaddy, the sharing plugin did not have a Google +1 sharing option, nor del.ic.ious sharing option. So I had to find some solutions. I found a fork of Sharedaddy on github which had added Google+ and LinkedIn. (I am not on Google+ but I just joined LinkedIn last week as I was redoing my resume).
To add delicious I followed a post by Ryan Markel to find the right share service URLs.

Menus

The other thing I figured out this week was how to use the Menus Feature under the Appearance tab. I have been using K2 since 2005 and have always thought that the menus in the default theme were sufficient. I have usually not had complex menu desires. So there was no real need to learn these new features, however. Now I wanted to put several picture pages under the same menu. So wal-la. It is done now.

picture of menus

New menu settings

Others

(Mostly RDFa and HTML5)
I also have a plugin that is adding Open Graph RDFa tags to my theme. My current version of K2 is HTML5 but, it is not validating with the RDFa tags in it. So I was trying to validate them but have not been successful. I looked at this answer which said to add something to the doctype. But then there is more answers too. Sometimes these answers are beyond me. I which I had some structured learning in this subject area.

Why RDF?

And RDFa is the basis of Open Graph, the technology used to sync FaceBook Likes between my site and FaceBook.

Pulling Interactions back to WordPress

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Interactions on FaceBook vs. WordPress

For a while I have been importing my blog posts to FaceBook as Notes. FaceBook as a method of doing this via RSS. I was encountering more interaction on my posts inside of FaceBook than I was outside of FaceBook. (In addition to leaving large quantities of text, as notes, in my FaceBook profile.) This is not the kind of interaction I wanted. While I do not mind having interactions or discussions inside of FaceBook I want the discussion to be portable and to move with the content. That is, If I move my blog I want the content and the discussion both to be carried to the new hosting URL or location.

This means that I needed to make the comments which are in FaceBook integrate with the comments on my self-hosted WordPress site.

I also want to encourage more traffic to my website rather than just interacting with the content as it appears on Facebook. My first step was to stop importing my Blog posts via RSS and to find a WordPress Plugin to facilitate the integration.

A Plugin to do the Job

I found Add Link to FaceBook, a plugin which will post a link to my article to my FaceBook news feed and also sync comments and likes between my FaceBook feed and my post on WordPress. I installed this app followed the instructions and voila it works. I now have a “like” button on my pages and hopefully am increasing traffic to my blog or minimally recording a the comments made on FaceBook on my self-hosted web-site.

Privacy

Considering comments from a privacy perspective, some users inside of the FaceBook ecosystem could comment on content in my feed and think that only I had access to view that comment and this plugin would then pull that comment into a publicly accessible space. There is no way I currently know of to tell potential commenters inside of FaceBook that their comments will be made public. If it is so important that things should be kept private then perhaps making a comment on FaceBook was not the right medium to make the comment in, perhaps the commenter should have used an email. But this is not the pretense that FaceBook sets up its users to expect. (Though there are plenty of examples in the news about how FaceBook is not the most secure place to make remarks or comments which could have impact outside of FaceBook.)

Plugins Removed from WordPress Extend search after two Years

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I watched the State of the Word address by Matt. There are some very exciting things happening with WordPress. It is always interesting to think that WordPress and FaceBook are almost the same age, they have both had a significant effect on the internet landscape.

In his State of the Word Speech, Matt mentioned that plugins which have not been updated in two years will be removed from the search results on WordPress.org/extend. My question is:

Why choose two years? Why not choose votes of “it doesn’t work” for the past two full points on the development cycle?

So if WordPress 3.2 is the newest release of WordPress, then all plugins which are not voted to have worked on at leasts 3.0 and above would get removed from the search results. With just 2 points on the development cycle it would probably be less time than two years. So, what Matt is proposing is probably a more lenient strategy. By my question is not about what time depth but rather why time depth. Why choose time depth rather than the dynamic that an audience says something is working with the current version of WordPress?

Merging and Revitalizing

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Today I started the process of trying to merge my two WordPress blogs. The older one, from 2005 through 2008, and this one, running from 2010-2011. I have the SQL dump from of the original blog. I think I have the original blog setup: WordPress version and all the plugins. So I loaded the SQL dump and started playing with that. I also had hosted version of the data on a hidden URL. I was able to export the blog data as a WXR file. But I am not sure that this really exports all the data that was in the SQL dump. So I am going to have to try revitalizing the old blog with the old plugins. And then replace the main domain location with localhost or something.

I decided to use MAMP and pull all development to my local machine. I have run into a few challenges.

  1. I have some sort of SQL error in the syntax of my Gallery 2 install (it was a parallel install to the WP install where I posted all of my photos linked to in my posts.) I think I can get by without fixing this error. So this is not really a big deal.
  2. All of my links in my posts have my old domain name in the links. I need to either:
    • Change the old domain to my new domain
    • Change the old domain to new shortcode looking like /?=123 so that the interconnectedness of the posts remains on may new blog where ever I host it.

    Obviously I would prefer the later. But I have two questions:

    1. How would I do that technically? It would require a massive search and replace through the whole SQL database.
    2. What will happen to the new items which come into the altered blog. By this I mean if both blogs have post IDs which start at 1 and go to some higher number. How do I perserve the interconnectedness of the second blog? because the second blog will be connected with short links like /?=123.

MiniCard Review

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I have been looking at the WP Theme, MiniCard. It is really cool. The design follows a Tim van Damme style layout.

Tim van Damme's Famous business card layout

I have been playing around with Minicard for some time. I have used it as my splash page for about a year. (I have been using K2 since 2005 so any change in theme is a big step). There are some things I really like and some things I think could be improved upon. (Granted I am using and looking at the free version.) I really like the minimalist business card design. However, one of the things that I find difficult is separating what is too much info from what is just enough. Right now I have quite a few social networks loaded on my front page so, even though it is Minimalist, it is almost not business card.

TheJourneyler.org as I had from 2010-2011

Most of my suggestions have to do with the options page, but a few have to do with layout.

Options:

  1. A place to store a Child Theme.
    K2 has a really cool way of selecting where the author wants to store their child theme so that when the theme is upgraded the child theme is not written over. Because the Code is GPL’d, I think this code could be copied from K2 into the GPL’d version of MiniCard. Being that the whole Tim Van Damme (TVD) idea is to be unique with style, it seems that Minicard would benefit from embracing child themes by providing a user the option to not just use a child theme, but also facilitate where to store that child theme.
  2. More Networks.
    It seems that it would be really easy for users of MiniCard to use more or some Social networks which are not on the list provided on the options page. I think it is crazy for any user to expect a developer to have anticipated all the possible social networks out there. I went through TVD’s wall of fame just to get some inspiration and noticed a few networks that minicard does not offer out of the box:

    • iusethis.com
    • ffffound.com
    • vi.sualize.us
    • corkd.com
    • wikipedia.org
    • www.colourlovers.com
    • soundcloud.com
    • filmreviewfriday.com
    • github.com
    • pandora.com
    • themeforest.net

    In one of the past revisions to the Minicard theme there was released, an easy way to add a custom social network. This is much improved over earlier versions of this theme. (I think this is still the case in the current 2011 release.)

    The Plug-in Find Me On has an interesting interface for adding new network. It is sort of Drag and Drop. I use this plugin on hugh.thejourneyler.org.

  3. A Contact Info page separate from my social networks page.
    One thing that might be helpful too is separating Messaging and Contact from social networks. “Messaging and Contact info” is usually treated differently from “social networks”. That is social network info like skype, aol, google chat, IRC, etc. are not really conceptualized in the minds of the people on the TVD wall of fame as “social networks”. If this information is provided then it most often falls under the “contact” section rather than “my social networks” section. Out of the box MiniCard does not have a contact section, so I can understand how this info is lumped together with the users social networks.

    Perhaps one solution to this is add an optional (included in the theme by default but not active by default) template page that could be added to MiniCard for contact info and pull data from the hCard data as well.

    This contact info page might also display Online Status of Messaging information. One caveat suggestion pertains to aim v.s. iChat. That is the syntax to open these protocols is a little different if the website admin wants ichat to open… it just aint going to work on a windows machine… I am wondering if a little javascript magic might be able to sniff out a OS X machine visiting the site as apposed to a Windows OS and put in the proper syntax for opening up iChat.
    Interesting enough Themeforest had a theme much like MiniCard.

    MiniCard like Theme displaying Contact info

  • Add direct color and background pattern.
    There are more color options “out of the Box” on the pro version of the theme. However, the color options are not as user selectable as they could be. I have seen color wheels and a palates for suggesting associated colors as option panels for selecting css values. A color selector for the background, and the various parts of the theme would be nice.
  • More hCard options:
    MiniCard does support hCard, but as I was looking over the format of hCard I think that more can be embedded in hCard content than what MiniCard allows for out of the box. That is I think that MiniCard could be improved with more fields in the admin section for the site admin to input their data. There is an hCard creator on the Microformats website. It shows the supported values in the hCard speck.

    • Importing Youtube Comments to WordPress

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    When I uploaded my first YouTube video, I got some comments and I wanted to reflect them on my blog where I was also displaying my video. Traffic to my blog is important as well as is the permanent record in my database of these comments. However, I need a two way solution. If someone comments on the video on my blog I want those to appear on my YouTube account. I need to Sync comments between my blog and Youtube.

    The Genki YouTube Comments plug-in works well (I use it on my site now.) for pulling comments from YouTube to a WordPress blog:
    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/genki-youtube-comments/

    However, this is only half the sync. I have yet to find a solution for when someone comments on a WordPress blog that the comment is then sync’d over to YouTube. If someone knows a solution for this then please share.

    Interoperability of online dictionary data: 
 A test case using WordPress as a CMS

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    Linked data is an effort to enhance applications and thereby lives with structured knowledge. This structure at its core is developed by human interaction. The challenge to consumers of linked data is to convince holders of unstructured data to structure it into actionable, manipulatable knowledge. Continue reading →

    Metadata Magic

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    The company I work for has an archive for many kinds of materials. In recent times this company has moved to start a digital repository using DSpace. To facilitate contributions to the repository the company has built an Adobe AIR app which allows for the uploading of metadata to the metadata elements of DSpace as well as the attachement of the digital item to the proper bitstream. Totally Awesome.

    However, one of the challenges is that just because the metadata is curated, collected and properly filed, it does not mean that the metadata is embedded in the digital items uploaded to the repository. PDFs are still being uploaded with the PDF’s author attribute set to Microsoft-WordMore about the metadata attributes of PDF/A can be read about on pdfa.org. Not only is the correct metadata and the wrong metadata in the same place at the same time (and being uploaded at the same time) later, when a consumer of the digital file downloads the file, only the wrong metadata will travel with the file. This is not just happening with PDFs but also with .mp3, .wav, .docx, .mov, .jpg and a slew of other file types. This saga of bad metadata in PDFs has been recognized since at least 2004 by James Howison & Abby Goodrum. 2004. Why can’t I manage academic papers like MP3s? The evolution and intent of Metadata standards.

    So, today I was looking around to see if Adobe AIR can indeed use some of the available tools to propagate the correct metadata in the files before upload so that when the files arrive in DSpace that they will have the correct metadata.

    • The first step is to retrieve metadata from files. It seems that Adobe AIR can do this with PDFs. (One would hope so as they are both brain children of the geeks at Adobe.) However, what is needed in this particular set up is a two way street with a check in between. We would need to overwrite what was there with the data we want there.
    • However, as of 2009, there were no tools in AIR which could manipulate exif Data (for photos).
    • But it does look like the situation is more hopeful for working with audio metadata.

    One way around the limitations of JavaScript itself might be to use JavaScript to call a command-line tool or execute a python, perl, or shell script, or even use a library. There are some technical challenges which need bridged when using these kinds of tools in a cross-platform environment. (Anything from flavors of Linux to, OS X 10.4-10.7 and Windows XP – Current.) This is mostly because of the various ways of implementing scripts on differnt platforms.

    The technical challenge is that Adobe AIR is basically a JavaScript environment. As such there are certain technical challenges around implementation of command-line tools like Xpdf from fooLabs and Coherent PDF Tools or Phil Harvey’s ExifTool, Exifv2, pdftk, or even TagLib. One of the things that Adobe AIR can do is call an executable via something called actionscript. There are even examples of how to do this with PDF Metadata. This method uses PurePDF, a complete actionscript PDF library. Actionscript is powerful in and of itself, it can be used to call the XMP metadata of a PDF, Though one could use it to call on Java to do the same “work”.

    Three Lingering Thoughts

    1. Even if the Resource and Metadata Packager has the abilities to embed the metadata in the files themselves, it does not mean that the submitters would know about how to use them or why to use them. This is not, however, a valid reason to not include functionality in a development project. All marketing aside, an archive does have a responsibility to consumers of the digital content, that the content will be functional. Part of today’s “functional” is the interoperability of metadata. Consumers do appreciate – even expect – that the metadata will be interoperable. The extra effort taken on the submitting end of the process, pays dividends as consumers use the files with programs like Picasa, iPhoto, PhotoShop, iTunes, Mendeley, Papers, etc.
    2. Another thought that comes to mind is that When one is dealing with large files (over 1 GB) It occurs to me that there is a reason for making a “preview” version of a couple of MB. That is if I have a 2 GB audio file, why not make 4 MB .mp3 file for rapid assessment of the file to see if it is worth downloading the .wav file. It seems that a metadata packager could also create a presentation file on the fly too. This is no-less true with photos or images. If a command-line tool could be used like imagemagick, that would be awesome.
    3. This problem has been addressed in the open source library science world. In fact a nice piece of software does live out there. It is called the Metadata Extraction Tool. It is not an end-all for all of this archive’s needs but it is a solution for some needs of this type.