Updates

• I've expired all entries in the database that are older than 3 weeks old. This shouldn't have any serious operational effect, though it's sad to see it go and I need the disk space.
• I've added the ability for users to have multiple blogrolls, from which they can switch between. The user interface details for this are still being worked out, but if you have any suggestions, send me a note!
• I've been silently adding lots of little newspapers to the system. Click here to see them all in BlogTrack. You can add them to your own Blogroll by using the [+] or [Add All] commands.

Update

I've changed the navigation bar at the top, once again, to make it easier to get to the News and to Add a blog (formerly "Join"). They're both in bold right now, till people get used to seeing them. "Login/Settings" or "Logout" has now become "My Login" all the time. I've fixed up the presentation, but not the content, of the Help and FAQ pages. Finally, I've made what you've seen in BlogTrack persist over multiple sessions -- a badly needed feature.

Outage

If you noticed problems yesterday, it's because of this problem at HostMatters.

Bug

Sorry for the flakiness of searching -- it needs a major overhaul, and I'm stretch very thin these days. It works, but not always. Soon!

Update

I made a major upgrade to the presentation of BlogTrack, BlogInfo and Search in the left pane, making extensive use of style sheets. I've testes this on IE and Phoenix (Mozilla), but if you see a problem with these or with some other browser, please send me a note!

Endorsement

Endorsement

I'm cleaning up in the multilingual category this week!

FAQ: what is QSM?

QSM is:

• QSM is the method the Janes' Blogosphere uses to add additional information to your blog so it can recognize the contents. This process is called scraping.
• QSM stands for Quick Structure Markup. It is a standard for adding non-hierarchical record-oriented data to HTML. It does this by encoding the data inside HTML comments -- as opposed to adding new tags
• QSM also stands for Quick Site Metadata. It is a standard set of metadata for talking about what is inside of a blog (or, in fact, other documents).

Sub-questions:

• How do I add QSM data to my blog? Markup is added to a blog via the blogs' template. Your blog's template converts your raw data posting's into the final format seen by your readers. One could add QSM tags manually to your blog's template -- it has been done -- but a better was is to use the Template Rewriter, an interactive tool that recognizes many major blog's template formats and adds the QSM markup at the appropriate points.
• Why not use the HTML <meta> tag? There are two main problems with the HTML meta tag:
  1. It is not record oriented: The meta tag ensources a tag/value pair for encoding data. For example <meta name="title" value="some value">. The problem with this is that every meta tag stands on its own -- there is no simple way for one knows what this is applying to -- the document? the entry?
  2. It is overly verbose: when a lot of meta data is to be ensourced within a blog, I believe the signal-to-noise ratio -- the amount of actual data ensourced compared to the number of bytes used to do this -- is too high.
• Why not use the HTML <span> or <div>? tags My two problems with this are:
  1. div and span tags can introduce formatting into the document. Ideally, metadata should never have any effect on the appearence of a document to an end user -- it's their for software tools and robots only.
  2. div and span tags are hierarchical. This isn't inherently a problem, except for my experience has shown that users rarely put things into documents correctly -- check out how many broken XML/RSS documents are out there (one number I have heard is 10%), or how users struggle to correctly produce XHTML (a stricktly hierarchical markup format) documents. My fear was that by introducing metadata using div or span, it would break other data ensourced in the user's blog.
• Why not invent your own HTML tags? In fact, if we are dealing with XHTML or other XML documents (which HTML is not), we can (and will define) tags for encoding QSM using XML namespaces. However, you cannot have valid HTML and add your own tags. Internet Explorer (and probably other major browsers) will display your blog correctly but other software tools will probably choke. MoveableType tries to get around this problem by encoding their metadata tag (well, <rdf:RDF>) within a HTML comment block, but I can see no particular advantage to this -- all you have is a complex data format uncomfortably ensourced within a comment. Here is an example, for your perusal.
  [example goes here]
• What metadata is ensourced in my blog? QSM currently ensources the following information:
  • QSM:MARKUP: Information about the entire blog -- that it has QSM markup, a brief description, the language, used for blogging, and a list of keywords.
  • QSM:BLOGROLL: The location -- within the blog -- of the user's blogroll: that is, a list of permament links to other sites. QSM:BLOGROLL records are always ended by a QSM:END BLOGROLL record.
  • QSM:LOCATION: Information about the blogger's physical location
  • QSM:ENTRY: The location -- within the blog -- of blog entries. This record may repeat many times within a blog. QSM:ENTRY records are always ended by a QSM:END ENTRY record. This record also includes useful information, particularly the permalink URL to the blog entry.
• What is the format of QSM comment records?

  QSM records are either a simple one line format:

  <!-- QSM:record-name optional-data -->

  or an extended record format:

  <!-- QSM:record-name optional-data
  tag1 value1
  tag2 value2
  -->
• Where's the XML/XHTML version? Uhhh .... right over here...

Metadata and Blog Directories

Here's another blog directory doing Metadata, called Blizg. We really need to coordinate this! Expect a lot more messages about QSM from me in the near future.

Endorsement

Endorsement

Endorsement