Marcus Campbell has updated his FOAF Autocreation tool.
The FOAF autocreation script takes two links - one to your current FOAF file and one to your OPML blogroll - and produces a brand new FOAF file for you by attempting FOAF autodiscovery on every site your OPML file mentions. See the autofoaf page for more details on this tool.
So this is yet more reason to take a few seconds to make an auto-discovery link to your FOAF file in from the <head> of your Web page, to give software tools a hint about how to find it. This auto-discovery syntax is detailed in the FOAF spec, but here it is once more as a reminder:
<link rel="meta" type="application/rdf+xml" title="FOAF" href="foaf.rdf" />
...where "foaf.rdf" is a relative link to your FOAF file, with the name changed appropriately.
The upcoming TypePad weblog hosting service from Six Apart also makes use of this auto-discovery markup, as does the XML::FOAF Perl software library, so it is increasingly worthwhile adding in the FOAF autodiscovery link.
The basic idea for FOAF auto-discovery is to remove the need to remember (and type in) a separate URL for your FOAF file. Instead of remembering both your homepage and FOAF address, just know the former and make sure it references your FOAF file in a way that software tools can follow. Less work for humans, more work for machines, just as it should be.
Further reading: Autodiscovery page in the FoafProject wiki.
Posted by danbri at July 13, 2003 10:16 AM
More details on the updated version are at...
http://www.tecknik.net/digiboy/2003/07/index.php#post000891
* My FOAF file has no knows.
* How does it smell?
* Terrible.
:)
Posted by: Dan Brickley on July 13, 2003 11:02 PM