Shawfactor

WordPress development is apathetic

I think the area where Worpress has dropped the ball is that sensible projects that could make its so much better are not being tackled, instead deveopment seems to be based on UI improvements and quick wins.

There has been a lot of discussion that WordPress is becoming less user friendly and indeed it has got some traction as the recent WordPress 3.8 is certainly aimed (amongst other things) around making the dashboard more user friendly. Given this I don’t think wordpress is becoming less user friendly, however it’s never been friendly to newbies.

Instead I think the area where Worpress has dropped the ball is that sensible projects that could make its so much better are not being tackled, instead development seems to be based on UI improvements and quick wins. These are great but a better WordPress platform would make these sort of improvements easier. Indeed a better platform would enable people to build their own UI. Thus rendering the rolling MP6 (and similar initiatives) into the core moot (because developers would be rolling their own version of the dashboard through plugins).

Some clarification to the webmentions discussion

In reply to this analysis by Barnaby Walters of my original article.

Barnaby you wrote:

The evidence is against you here, as almost all known usage of webmention has been for short replies which don’t make sense without context.

Actually we aren’t disagreeing, maybe I didn’t express myself well when I wrote “At the moment of the method is built around a POSSE architecture. This works well for long form articles which can stand alone but address issues or ideas that are posted on an external website”.

Thoughts on extending webmentions

My thoughts on extending the webmentions functionality

I recently installed Matthias Pfefferle’s web mention plugin. It is a great plugin and hopefully when he has polished it up further he will push it out to the wordpress.org plugin repository so it can enjoy a wider audience. I actually think the Jetpack team should look at including an extended set of this functionality in its plugins as the potential for distributed sharing that the indieweb provides could be a major distinguishing feature for WordPress, and certainly a better bet than trying to roll their own social networking ecosystem.

LH RDF not just xml anymore

LH Rdf is back!!

Yes development has started again and the first stop is to add additional formats to the output. Previously Lh Rdf only supported RDF-xml and has been designed almost exclusively around that. Therefore to add other formats I have bundled the Easyrdf library into the plugin. When the query string lhrdf is added to the feed URL the Easyrdf parser is invoked to parse the rdf xml output string and the output is then available in various triple formats.

See code extract:

$graph = new EasyRdf_Graph();
$graph->parse($out,”rdfxml”);
$data = $graph->serialise($_GET[‘lhrdf’]);

The format chosen by value of the lhrdf variable E.G. ~~http://localhero.biz/?feed=lhrdf&lhrdf=json~~

As well as simply being cool, having an option to output JSON is the main benefit as the triples are now no longer imprisoned by the same domain policy.

Visualising RDF with Incontext

Surfing around the internet I recently discovered SURF‘s InContext Visualiser, which I think is a neat way to visualise of RDF relationships, especially OAI-ORE aggregated publications

I also discovered that people have already created a set of WordPress plugins (see: ~~http://ep-books.ehumanities.nl/~~ ) to visualise books and other similar publications. However blogs do not fit into a book/chapter model.

However given there is already a schema for publishing blog data and my lh-rdf plugin already exposes most publicly available WordPress blog data as RDF using that format. It was an obvious next step to get the visualiser working with the LH RDF output. I have done so and hopefully you think the output is cool.

https://shawfactor.com/visualiser-test/

Introducing LH Tools

A RDF Store and SPARQL Endpoint for WP.

Intoducing LH Tools.

LH Tools is a WordPress extension that adds an (ARC-based) RDF Store and SPARQL Endpoint to the WordPress blogging system. The store is kept separate from the WP tables (i.e. it’s not a wrapper), but you can use WP’s nice admin screens to configure it, it and embed it using the large number of developer-friendly hooks that WP offers. It is based on the original work by Ben Nowack.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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