Discuss! Discuss!

Just a note about a couple of minor renovations to the website here.

First, you’ll notice that you can now enter the address of your very own website when you’re responding to a note here using the DISCUSS link. Not only will this get your post linked back to your own home base, but the automagical system will go looking there for a FOAF file, and will incorporate your FOAF into mine if it finds one (watch the Reinvented Labs space for results).

Also, I’ve cleaned up the display of discussion items a little — to separate your text into paragraphs you can now simply leave a couple of carriage returns (aka “press [ENTER] twice”) between each paragraph. No need to insert your own paragraph or line break tags.

If the preceding has left you dazed and confused, please ignore and continue on as you ever have, as things are mostly same as they ever was.

Comments

Lou Quillio's picture
Lou Quillio on July 24, 2003 - 20:13 Permalink

If you’d care to test, FOAF file here. (Actually it’s me that’s testing.)

Alan's picture
Alan on July 24, 2003 - 20:18 Permalink

Would it be possible to reduce the font size of the web address? It is going to be chunky on a Wayne-Al-pete-Lou spicy brain dump.

Rob MacD's picture
Rob MacD on July 24, 2003 - 20:20 Permalink

Since I don’t have a website to call my own, and since I don’t know a FOAF from a FOGRE, I can’t comment on that.

I do appreciate the new paragraph implementation.

Also, I’m not sure if this has ever been discussed, or brought up, (I think it has) but… when I visit, I’m greeted with the Front Page (for lack of a better phrase) and, on the right, a listing of postings ‘New since your Last Visit’ and of postings in ‘Discussion since your Last Visit’. When I click on one of the ‘new post/discussion links’ and it comes up, all the other ‘new posts/discussion links’ have disappeared.

So, in other words, in order to be able to visit all the ‘new since my last visit’ posts, I have to click on a new post, read it, click the ‘back’ button to go to the cached Front Page (which still shows the ‘new since last visit’ posts), click on another new post, repeat.

Any way to keep the listing of new posts current with each new post I read?

Steven Garrity's picture
Steven Garrity on July 24, 2003 - 20:21 Permalink

How are you automagically looking for FOAF files? Just domain.com/foaf.rdf or something like that? Is there a convention or standard for discovery of FOAF files?

Oliver B's picture
Oliver B on July 24, 2003 - 20:24 Permalink

I enthusiastically second Rob MacD’s desire for a more permanent record of what I’ve read and what I haven’t…although I wouldn’t want it going to John Ashcroft.

Lou Quillio's picture
Lou Quillio on July 24, 2003 - 20:24 Permalink

Is there a convention or standard for discovery of FOAF files?

Just a proposal from Aaron Swartz, for now:

<link rel=”meta” type=”application/rdf+xml” title=”FOAF” href=”foaf.rdf” />

Peter Rukavina's picture
Peter Rukavina on July 24, 2003 - 22:29 Permalink

Rob, you have exposed my great perceptual thought weakness, which is judging the relative position of things, especially when their positions change. I once had a university professor expose this quickly by holding up a book and asking me to draw it, but as if I was sitting in his chair, not mine. I couldn’t do it.

The problem you point out — the fact that the website instantly “forgets” what you’ve not read as soon as you’ve read one of the unread items — is a similar problem. There’s a simple solution. It’s just that to arrive at this simple solution will require that I sit down and spend 15 minutes of hard and deliberate thought overcoming my perceptual time-shifting difficulties.

I’ll do it soon, I promise.

At the same time I want to solve another problem, which is that when I move from laptop to desktop, or even from browser to browser on the same machine, this same information about “what’s read” doesn’t get transferred. This is a simple problem, and a solution is coming soon.