Steve Cassidy

John Udell is taggins some of his del.icio.us links to podcasts with transcriptavailable, transcripts have been generated manually. This could be a nice source of data for experiments with information retrieval from podcasts.

Sort of relatedly, I just discovered LibriVox which hosts volunteer recordings of out of copyright literary works (eg. Project Gutenberg books). I sampled War of the Worlds and the quality seems great. Worth a browse.

Gnowsis is a Semantic Web desktop System which means it aggregates various bits of personal data into an RDF store and provides a browser for the store. It is able to look at MP3-ID3 tags, email (in Outlook or Thunderbird), bookmarks in Firebird and at the file system. It will do full text indexing and provides a web server interface for browsing the store.

Which is weird because that’s just how Giggle is evolving at the moment. I’ve begun to build in an RDF store which in the first instance will just contain the individual weblog posts and their metadata (date, title, etc). The web pages and RSS feeds will then be generated from this store rather than from the tangle of variables in the current implementation. The page generation will still be template based but now the templates include references to the rdf store rather than simple variable references. One outcome of this is less of a need to precompute lots of variables for the templates (eg. the time of the post in minutes), instead letting the templates compute things from the store if they want to. Currently my new templates are coded as procedures which generate text (eg. HTML) and I’m using xmlgen to do the work internally.

Once I have an RDF store I can begin to put other bits of data in there. CANTCL already works on an RDF store populated from the package metadata. I could scan Tcl packages that I’ve written to generate something like my Tcl page. Drop some RDF annotated jpeg images into a directory and I could have a photoblog; scan my MP3 library, read my bookmarks, grok my calendar. The key to making this easy to use, which derives from the original blosxom idea, is to leave the data in it’s original format (or invent a simple text file format) and leverage the file system to build structure into the weblog.

So I’ve just started using Bloglines as a blog aggregator and it’s working well thanks to the Firefox plugin that makes subscription and seeing updates easy. If you care you could see my subscriptions. A nice feature is that the site will recommend new feeds to read based on your subscriptions but for some reason it has decided that I’d like to read all kinds of Italian sites! So what is it in my subscriptions that enables this inference? Answers on a postcard please…

So now there are two giggle users (to my knowledge) since I’ve encouraged James to keep a blog of how his research project on Topic segmentation in meetings is going. Tomorow the world..

So this is Giggle, my weblog system which I’ve ripped off almost completely from Blosxom which is written in Perl. Why? Well, because I wanted to fiddle with it and didn’t want to write Perl (not that there’s anything wrong with that…).

Giggle steals the idea from Blosxom that weblog posts are just text files inside some directory on your server. There are no databases to configure and consequently the code driving the weblog is simple. The generated pages come from various flavour templates which are just text file fragments into which various bits and pieces are substituted. This lets us serve HTML pages from the HTML flavour and RSS from the RSS flavour. Giggle itself knows nothing of either (except that it has default HTML and RSS flavours built in). Kudos to Rael Dornfest for his neat design. Giggle templates are really Blosxom templates.

One reason for writing this was to revive my own blog, previously it ran on Moveable Type but that was just too dependant on various Perl modules to work on our web server. Another motivation is to be able to source the news items on my unit web pages. This is where would need to hack since I want one cgi script to serve news for all of these unit pages. So, that’s next on the list.

If anyone actually reads this and wants to get their own Giggle, the link on the left should point to a downloadable zip file. As yet there’s no documentation but you could bug me if you really wanted to.