LH Relationships wordpress plugin

Intoducing LH Relationships.

LH Relationships is a WordPress plugin that enables the creation of true post to post relationships. More information for the rationale driving this is available here. It was built as a core part of the LocalHero project.

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The structural weaknesses of WordPress

WordPress is a great system for personal semantic publishing and is more than adequate for the vast the majority of websites. No other CMS can match it for simplicity, ease of use, breadth of plugins, and an active developer community.

However due to its blogging background it has one very substantial weakness. Namely there is no way of easily relating one post to another and detailing its realationship. Of course taxonomies can be used to group posts and provide some form of relationship. However this is not an elegant solution.

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LH RDF wordpress plugin

Adds a SIOC compliant RDF feed to a WP site.

I have finally released the first WordPress plugin I have written as part of the LocaHero project. The plugin itself once installed adds a SIOC compliant RDF feed to a WordPress site.

The current RDF feed is deficient as it basically just rehashes the existing RSS feed as RDF XML. LH-RDF is an improvement as it exposes the internal post, author, and category objects as dereferencable URI thus publishing them in the semantic web.

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Unethical thieves: localhero.com

Several months ago I received an offer to buy the domain I am currently using for the LocalHero. A price couldn’t be agreed

However I also pointed out to the domain name broker that given I have been using the name LocalHero in the area of local news are services for longer than 3 years I also have a common law trademark on the name in that category. She assured me she had passed this information on to her client.

A week ago I discovered that a Californian company LocalHero Inc offering local services are now trading under the name LocalHero (the same capitalization as my organization). This behaviour is likely illegal, being in contravention of my common law trademark to the term LocalHero in this category. More importantly this behaviour is definitely unethical and high hypocritical for a company for company dedicated to “helping people”.

It is likely i will be taking legal action however I have already started to prosecute this in the court of public opinion and therefore will be putting together a shame file of the people responsible. Stay tuned.

What is the Shaw Cup

The tradition continues

The Shaw Cup, or to give its full name the E.M. Shaw Challenge Cup, is a trophy for social rugby in Victoria. The cup itself was presented by Peter Shaw for annual rugby competition and named after his grandmother: Ethel Margaret Shaw.

<html><body><iframe title=”Shaw Cup Highlights” width=”840″ height=”630″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/bsDSgfQ3e7M?feature=oembed” frameborder=”0″ allow=”accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture” allowfullscreen></iframe></body></html>

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Why javascript libraries stink

JavaScript’s is a language everybody loves to hate, and the language which, more than any other in the modern web developer’s toolbox, people will go to insane lengths to avoid writing directly (witness Google Web Toolkit, JavaScript “helpers” in server-side frameworks, etc.).

Which isn’t fair, really, because (as I’ve said many a time) most people don’t actually hate JavaScript the language; they hate the buggy and inconsistent implementations of JavaScript in major web browsers and, to a larger extent, the buggy and inconsistent implementations of the DOM in major browsers.

Which is why as I have said before I do not like and do not advocate the use of JavaScript libraries. At first glance this may seem hypocriticial given you could argue that the LocalHero code repository is a JavaScript library in itself. However as I have said before LocalHero Code is not a library just a collection of useful functions and ways to harmonise browser behaviour. It is not an attempt to change the way the language should behave or abstract it.

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The naming of the streets of Melbourne

Robert Hoddle, the surveyor who laid out the grid of early Melbourne, tells us in his journal how However Governor Bourke came to his tent one morning with names of the streets.

Edmund Finn came to Melbourne in the early days of European settlement and worked as a journalist under the name of Garryowen. Here is what he tells of the city street names.

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