June 21, 2003
FOAF MT plugin(s)
I'm experimenting with Eric Sigler's
FOAF plugin software for use with Six Apart's Movable Type. In passing, I've upgraded the rdfweb.org MT installation and installed Ben Trott's OpenPGP and XML::FOAF Perl modules from CPAN. This in turn uses
Ginger Alliance's RDF::Core module (which in turn uses XML::Parser, Expat etc...).
So after installing this stack of interesting software on rdfweb.org, I'm back reading the manual for Movable Type and musing on how the FOAF MT plugin relates to MT's commenting system and ideas for using FOAF for login information, distributed identity description and suchlike. And also, to be honest, geting used to the fact that there's a Perl module for FOAF now. Interesting times...
So anyway, I'll be fiddling around with the comments system on this site, Advance apologies if I break anything. At this point, all I've done is install the software, I'll be experimenting with it in my spare time over the next week or few.
Nearby in the Web: efforts to use MT plugins and FOAF at Burning Man
Posted by danbri at June 21, 2003 11:41 PMThis is a pretty generic comment. I guess I didn't edit the right MT template yet.
One question: is it reasonable to expect people to enter their FOAF URLs here, or better to figure it out from knowing their homepage and/or email address and assuming they are linked from somewhere, perhaps
'link rel' markup in their homepage?
The cost of adoption should be kept low. Why have to know homepage URL as well as FOAF URL? Have most/all people who have FOAF URLs also got homepages? weblogs? Need to investigate...
Posted by: Dan Brickley on June 21, 2003 11:54 PMA common pattern I have seen on many FOAF-enabled weblogs/websites is this "auto-discovery" link in the HEAD element:
[link rel="meta" type="application/rdf+xml" title="FOAF" href="/url/to/foaf/file" /]
It's not an official standard or anything (I think it's more like "Aaron Swartz got drunk on root beer one night and thought this was a neat idea"), but lots of people seem to use it, and I haven't heard any better ideas.
Posted by: Mark on June 22, 2003 03:46 AMAll of which is to say that a home page URL should be sufficient, no need to bother the user with a separate FOAF URL.
We do the same thing with RSS; in fact, your home page has an auto-discovery LINK element that points to your RSS 1.0 feed. Comes standard in Movable Type.
I've heard crazy rumors that upcoming versions of Movable Type will have support for FOAF. Don't know what that means exactly, but if Movable Type is generating FOAF files by default, Ben will probably include an auto-discovery link in the main index template as well.
Posted by: Mark on June 22, 2003 03:51 AM