July 13, 2003
Handshake for OSX design notes
Dan Hon is working on a Java/Cocoa based MacOS X desktop tool using FOAF, called 'Handshake'. He's posted some draft user interface screens, all of which looks very promising. I look forward to trying it...
Updated Autocreation tool from digiboy
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.
June 26, 2003
mobile meta?
if the photo software in this p800 camera-phone knew how to talk to a bluetooth GPS, ...
someday... foaf + location + photos ...
not yet... when?
June 19, 2003
Foaf-a-matic, translated
Foaf-a-matic, Leigh Dodd's popular Javascript FOAF creation tool, is now available in multiple languages.
Current offerings include Japanese, French, Spanish, Danish, and Swedish. See Leigh's 'translating the foaf-a-matic' article for more details, and the lengthy list of credits to all those who have helped with this. Many thanks to everyone who contributed :)
Nearby in the Web, Leigh reports on his progress towards foaf-a-matic version 2, which is a rewrite in Java. Incidentally, the main foaf-a-matic page is made available using HTTP language negotiation, so for users whose browser is set to a language that there's a translation for, you should automatically see the appropriate version.