so I think I have semi-solved my question of where to post things. now everything I tag with “forfb” on this blog will also show up as a note on Facebook. That way I can post things on one, the other, or both, without having to write them twice. Of course, there will still be comment splitting…
argh. I noticed today that my blog appeared to be completely down, in the sense that all the pages were blank.. hmn… the Wordpress admin interface still worked…
Took me about a half our to track down the problem, which was solved by disabling a plugin that I don’t use anyway. I have no idea why, but can hardly be bothered to figure that out now.
Doing some blog maintenance..
I’ve fixed some .htaccess problems affecting my old (old) blog. I got rid of my outdated and static blogroll, replacing it with one that pulls from Bloglines.
I’m also finally trying out MyBlogLog, so we’ll see how that goes. It seems to be slowing down page loads, but this may only be on the first load? Let me know if you notice slowness of the sidebar. I was prompted to finally do this by hearing more and more about MyBlogLog in the last two months or so, and after registering but not using it yet, noticing my face on a blog I was reading. How cool is that? 
… so now I’ve put it in. The company (now part of Yahoo!) happens to be headed by Scott Rafer, who I worked with back in ye old 2005 at Feedster.
Puzzlepieces - so I think I’ve successfully moved this blog over to it’s new home… everything should look the same. I believe the post IDs have not changed, which is what should happen… except that it’s not because I’ve done it on purpose, it’s because for some reason I seem to have previously hardcoded them, before I learned the best way to make unique IDs for items in Atom feeds. ah well
So for all of you (~2 people) who complained that Puzzlepieces was dead, I’m happy to say it is back and doing well.
During this between-semesters holiday I’ve finally gotten myself a new host, and have (almost) successfully moved all of my websites over. My University of Waterloo search engine (UWhub) doesn’t work, but that will be fixed once I change all my file request function calls to use CURL instead. There is also a minor problem with Fagan Finder’s older .shtml pages, but I’ll worry about that later.
So, congratulations to me. Also, I’ve finally gotten myself a website, faganm.com, and so I intend to move this blog over to somewhere there instead of hijacking my old website’s domain.
From metasearch to distributed information environments (Lorcan Dempsy) is a good overview on metasearch in the academic enviroment, and search/metadata APIs.
I looked at a number of the documents, including the first two PowerPoint files and the information on MXG. All worth looking at.
In terms of meta/federated search, those schools (first two PowerPoints) are definitely making leaps forward. The commercial and academic worlds are beginning to learn from each other. The improvements are great, but need to be much greater.
The MXG (.doc file) proposal looks to me like an attempt to make a simpler but not as great version of SRU, which tried to do the same for Z39.50. Which is good news, the authors seem to have the right attitude. I also like how they’ve made levels of the specification, each of which is more complicated, and thus closer to SRU (that last is SRU).
If I were them I’d think hard about OpenSearch. It is a much simpler specification (clearly not originating from the academic world) which accomplishes less than even MXG Level 1. But not that much less, considering how much easier it is to use.
One specific thing that OpenSearch does that the other specifications don’t, is allow search engines to use their own URL variables instead of predefined ones. It looks fairly trivial to me for this concept to be integrated into the SRU/MXG specifications.
Back to academic ‘multi’ search tools, there is UWhub, my personal project. Right now it does web search and image search (just added that this week), but I would definitely like to expand this to include searching within the school’s library, among other things.
I installed WordPress two days ago and have had a little time to work on it. I’ve never used WordPress before and I’m extremely pleased with how easy it was to work with it and the plugin I’m using. That plugin would be Jerome’s Keywords.
After activating it I made modifications to my templates so that tags are displayed instead of categories for individual posts. I also modified the plugin to add a ‘related tags’ feature to the tag pages and search results pages, and a ‘common recent tags’ feature to the home page. All of which are done in order of frequency. The tags are also displayed with the meta keywords tag on individual post pages, tag pages, and search results pages, the latter two using the ‘related tags’. Lastly, I got the tags to show up in my atom feed in dc:subject, but not in the HTML.
So, that’s that, and I’m very happy with it. The only thing left to do really, is a ‘all tags’ page, but as I don’t know much about either WordPress or this plugin I think I’ll wait until the next version of the plugin for that.
Oh, and I intend to roll this back into the plugin eventually.
Update April 10 - I have added links to ‘this tag elsewhere’ from tag pages, added atom feeds for each tag and for any search, and added a ’search within this tag’ option to tag pages.
My first post in WordPress. I can’t believe this worked, and I can’t believe it was so easy.