Alcides Fonseca

Suggestion by BB.

Note: I’m not posting anymore because of a) lack of time (see my flickr for the why) and b) i’m moving to a new bliki and it’s set that I won’t be importing this posts (mainly because I was too dumb when I started it).

Ou como outros o dizem mais suavemente, este blog tem os comentários moderados. Ao contrário do que alguém comentou, isto aqui não é democracia. Tudo dentro do dominio alcidesfonseca.com está sujeito à minha aprovação. Não há um conjunto de regras, nem termos de condições nem nada. Eu apago os comentários que bem me apetecer e estou nessa liberdade. Se não gostam, têm boas alternativas (ver mais abaixo).

Apesar de eu poder apagar qualquer post que me apeteça, na maior parte do tempo estou sóbrio e só apago o spam, comentários inutéis que só tenham publicidade (também se podem considerar spam), comentários escritos noutra língua que não a do post (sim, sou muito esquisito nisso, porque considero falta de educação) e comentários feitos por trolls.

Mesmo que demonstrem opiniões contrárias as minhas, posso não apagar os comentários. Simplesmente há que o fazer de uma forma educada, coisa que falta a muito boa gente aqui pela internet. Ainda me lembro quando era puto e havia uma coisa que era a netiqueta. Eu até gostava…

Para quem não gostar da minha política, escusa sequer de escrever aqui. A internet tem uma coisa muito fixe que são os links, e podem linkar os meus posts nos vossos blogs a vontade. Aí não serão alvo da minha censura. E podem até chamar-me nomes!

Entretanto estou a considerar mudar o meu site para um wiki pessoal (não é bem wiki porque não grava todas as versões das páginas, mas pronto) e para já não vai ter comentários. Apesar de gostar de receber feedback, a quantidade de trolls começa a aumentar significamente e eu não tenho paciência para os aturar. E o email é uma forma de contacto interessante :)

Neil has this great post on how take advantage of the full capabilities of modern browsers to improve the user experience. I just love the OpenID provider example since I’m in the long process of implementing OpenID comments in this blog.

Oh, and I am thinking of making possible to receive updates to comments through Jabber…

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 :(

With this popular stuff called blogs, new posts are coming up every millisecond and one post gives birth to another and by the end of the day you got a post about another post that comments yet another post that cites someone else in the blogosphere.

To connect this dots there were created linkbacks that is basically a way of telling a post his has a new child. That I know of there are 3 kinds of linkbacks: Trackback, Pingback and Refback.

Pingback and Trackback are both notifications systems where the linking post tells the linked one “Hey, I am you son!” and Pingback is more secure because he does the DNA exam to be sure (he scans the linking post to see if it really has the link) so that prevents spam, a real issue with Trackback.

As for Refback, it is the black sheep of the family since what he does is record the people who visit your posts and then guesses that they came from a post. They have to be really smart to do this, but generally they are worst than track or pingback, but don’t need some implementation of some awkward protocol.

While people who use Wordpress, Blogger, Movable Type and so on don’t need to worry about this since the software already has that installed, some really weird people that code their own weblog system (I’m referring to myself!) have to learn this stuff and if they want to notify people who they link to, they have to code it themselves.

So last night I did it! And now every time I post, I send both trackbacks and pingbacks to every link in the post, just to be sure. In order to accomplish this, I used Matt Croydon’s Trackback Library and Mathieu Fenniak’s Pingback library both in Python with some custom modifications by me to be more an automated process.

Now I can find the fathers of my posts, but I don’t know who my children are… I already started recording the referers, but from what I can see it’s kinda messy and I will probably implement pingbacks in a near future.

No, I haven’t upgraded this blog’s engine to wordpress vX.X.X, simply because it does not run on wordpress, nor blogger, nor any other engine. It was coded by me using my microframework pungi. It now supports tagging (using pungi N-N relations) and blog posts are now archived by date.

For those who don’t understand a word of Portuguese, there is now a feed containing english-only posts, so feel free to change or subscribe it.

Apart from the design changes, I added more microformats, this time XFN (XHTML friends network so I can use this website as my portable social network (besides the already implemented openID). If you are interested in learning about this, try to run this website address under XFN Graph.

Since Age of Wizards Kingdoms, I’ve been using Google Adsense for displaying publicity and earning some bucks. Well, for now I have google ads in that game for over an year and in the last month, I’ve added them to my other websites. ATM, I have 26 dollars, that suck for the page hits and clicks I had for now. And I dislike the fact that they only pay us when you achieve $100. I have to get another system!

As a blog, most of my readers use RSS and not the website itself, so I had to get some RSS ads. Google’s Feedburner has this advertising program, but it is invite-only, so my little web log had no chance. Text Link Ads sounded nice, and they pay through PayPal! (great to buy domains!). I’ve submitted my website for approval almost one month ago, but I did had no answer. I decided today to contact them in order to find out what was happening. 10 minutes later, I had the email confirming it and another from the technical support explaining the rest of the process: I had to install the code, and one week later I will have ads selected by them.

When getting the code, I could choose from PHP, ASP, ASP.NET, Ruby on Rails, JSP and PERL code, or even pluggins for various blogging systems (WordPress, Blogger, Drupal, MovableType, etc). Well, my blog is handwritten in Python. Bad luck! Fortunately I’m a nice coder and did this helper that you can use when working with Python.

Now I have to wait one week for it, but from people who use it, it’s very nice. In about one month I will post about my earnings. If you are interested in getting this too, please use my referral link and get $100 in free links.

In the last days, I’ve been changing some stuff in this blog. As requested by some users, I made a RSS feed for comments, so you can be warned when new comments are made. It was also meant to work with Bloppy, but there is some weird thing going on, I will correct with Mário Lopes, it’s author.

I’ve also added Gravatars to the comments. For those who don’t know what it is, it’s simply a 80×80px avatar that is associated with your email address and used in a lot of blog systems. As in the official website, there was PHP, PERL, ColdFusion and JAVA implementation, but no Python, here it goes:

And this code is part of my Pungi webmicroframework I think I might release in September. Let's see how it goes.

Yet regarding Gravatars, I was thinking of adding it to ejaki, but the fact that an API is not available for creating gravatars is taking that idea out of my mind. Who knows, with Gravatar v2...

Note: I’ve been victim of a slow internet connection for this weekend. I blame SAPO and hope it will be restored as soon as possible :/

This blog’s RSS feed is now back on line.

Now it’s hosted at Feedburner for me to have a better idea of those who follow my adventures. I have also added a analytics code for the same purpose.

Subscribe http://feeds.feedburner.com/alcides Now

My website was a bit ugly so I started to make a new layout. It’s kinda weird this one, but I think makes this more readable. Other pages moved to the sides so you have all the information in the front page.

Now the website is heavier and confused to mobile browsers, so when I got time, I’ll do a mobile version.

I've just finished my own tagging system.

It's very very simple and I like it :) The main reason I made it was to test Pungi's relation N-N capabilities.

When I got time, I'll add more links for you to check.

Well, I got myself this brand new website :)

Although it's still under construction, I'm already loving it! I just need a personal blog and I used this to test Pungi's database relations features.

Tomorrow I will add the projects and links.

More news coming up soon.