Alcides Fonseca

After the RSS feeds being restored, I took the chance to add some new stuff to my online identity. I use this URL as an endpoint to all my online activity. My hCard information is here, my XFN friend list is here, the links to all my profiles in several online services/social networks are here. It even works as my OpenId.

For the past days, I’ve been checking up on FOAF. There is already one opensource social network accepting this format to import all your information. There is a bit of discussion between XFN+hCard versus FOAF since the two of them represent your personal information and the relationship you have with others. I believe more in the microformat way of displaying data, but FOAF follows RDF standards.While Dan Brickey, one of the authors of FOAF, believes there is space for the both of them, I still have my doubts… Either way, I did my own FOAF file with basic info and then linking to the FOAF files extracted from my last.fm, twitter and flickr profiles. If you want to make yours, you can write by hand or you could use FOAF-O-Matic. For wordpress users, there is already one plugin.

If you are interesting in learning about RDFa (a formal way of defining everything! in semantic web) and a bit about FOAF, make sure you see this simple video.

Next, I decided to implement my own APML file from all the tags I use in my blog. The result is already linked in my head tag and I am waiting to use it in some projects. Imagine filtering through your feeds based on what you post (that is probably what you like!). Yes, there is also a wordpress plugin for this too. And then I just adapted the code to serve as a tag cloud in the sidebar. But the evening hacking wasn’t finished until I add the last delicious entry for each tag page.

I hope in less than 6 months I have a daily usage of this stuff I’m working on. It would be a shame if when I register in a website it doesn’t import all my public info :(