Archive for the ‘Site Updates’ Category

Playing with Lilina…

Monday, November 12th, 2007

I’m currently playing around with the web-based RSS aggregator Lilina to act as a LiveJournal-less Friends page, and unfortunately, it leaves a lot to be desired. It does show promise however, but it needs a lot of polishing to get there.

One reason why I wanted Lilina rather than some other source is that I felt that I wanted a personal friends page that didn’t depend on LJ, should I end up transitioning entirely off, and secondly, no WordPress plugins currently do what I want (every one I’ve seen more or less adds ‘crosstalk’ by adding posts directly to this blog, or as a simple aggregator that JUST lists article titles).

Lilina, thus far, seems to be just right: a standalone program that is lightweight enough to act as a public friends page. However, it’s clearly very much alpha, and has issues to this end. Despite this, it seems to be the best available: Feed on Feeds is more like a desktop client than a lightweight browser, Gregarius is incredibly slow, and Zort doesn’t interleave articles from different feeds.

I’ve found quite a few minor bugs in just playing around with it for thirty minutes, and would definitely not recommend it unless you’re willing to get the latest SVN code and tinker with it to make it work (for one thing, it has a fundamental flaw that prevents Slashdot, of all things, from being successfully aggregated, and most probably many others as well).

I’ll keep tinkering with it perhaps, but I might just end up writing my own app, since Lilina’s design is a bit clunky.

It’s also reminded me that I need to upgrade the default installs of PHP and MySQL on this server up to 5 (for each)…

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Posted in Computers, Site Updates | 4 Comments »

So What Exactly Is Up?

Wednesday, February 7th, 2007

The more observant of you may have noticed some signifier of the FOAF linkage on my front page (returned after a hiatus). That’s right, you know who I am now!

That being said, everything up to now (and my quietness) has a fairly long backstory.

It started back in November of last year, when an attempt to renew pipian.com went horribly wrong (Thanks RegisterFly!) $130 and nearly two months later, I finally got it back and, by that time, had started on a new project.

This project is still somewhat secret as it’s incomplete at this time, but it’s progressing well (and some of you already know of it) and will hopefully will be marketable by the summer (crossing my fingers of course).

In the process of working on this and getting back into the groove at school (and in all the hecticness of setting up and being Chief of Operations at Genericon XX) I managed to finally (and briefly) meet Jim Hendler, who is currently in the process of moving to take a constellation chair at RPI this semester. This got me thinking.

One of the items that my ‘secret’ project needs is something of a stable geospatial framework of coordinates, cities, and hierarchies, to enable intuitive and ‘smart’ discovery of as many cities as possible, and as needed. Thus, I came up with the concept of the Semantic Web Locationary, utilizing several well-known semantic ontologies and several free/libre data sources to accurately describe many geopolitical constructs (mainly hierarchies of city->province->country->continent->Earth styles).

I figured this would both help to get my feet wet in a seriously usable semantic web context (The Geonames.org ontology is not terribly human-friendly, even if machine-friendly and more detailed than the Locationary) as well as offering a framework for my program to rest on as well as offer a static reference for other semantic applications (foaf:basedNear anyone?).

At any rate, it’s somewhat stable now, in so far as all the MAIN parts are implemented (if a bit in semantic flux at the moment), so I can move closer back to the project by overlaying one more data store over the existing Locationary (Arash Partow’s Global Airport Database, given the fact that DAML no longer has their airport script online, DAFIF is no longer available, and my project needs airport locations) and probably making that publically available as well…

More information about what I’m REALLY planning with this semantic data when the project gets closer to completion. :)

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Hooray

Wednesday, January 17th, 2007

I got pipian.com back. More details later when I get my things coordinated. Genericon is coming up anyway…

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Pokémon?

Saturday, September 30th, 2006

Not much to speak of lately, as I’ve been hacking on Pokémon Pearl/Diamond as well as fiddling with trying to render the decompressed models of the Pokémon from Colosseum. (Thanks for the LZSS tool and Model Viewer, pika!)

Other than that I picked up 3 Mews (Sassy, Serious, and Rash) today.

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New Website!

Tuesday, August 15th, 2006

Done some final tweaking on the blog and moved its base to the root directory, along with a server move! Still got a few Pages to work on from here on out (e.g. ‘Hosted Sites’, ‘Links’, a Mash-up Home rather than the Blog itself, and fixing up the About page with a FOAF link.)

As for those of you more curious as to whether or not I’m moving the Kiera route and abandoning exclusive updating of the LiveJournal, rest assured. I’m not quite ready to merge my several personas into one and as such, there will be some things posted on the LJ that I don’t feel so comfortable posting on my blog, and a lot of the more boring aspects of my life will probably stay here, since you neither know nor care about my Real Life friends (and frankly, they don’t even know this place exists!)

I’ll also keep checking your posts with my old account, though it might be preferrable for you guys to post here if it’s a crosspost. Fortunately it does have linkbacks, as you should be able to see here…

I’ll also probably be tweaking this blog in the near future (The mood icons, for example, while good, are not so ‘compatible’ with this theme, and I’m missing other useful plugins that Kiera has in spades). Also, the blog name may change as chosen, but I don’t know that for sure yet. In any case, it’s all good!

For those other sites hosted on my domain however, some parts may be broken due to a faulty command I used while mirroring, and some of the old sites that still rely on MySQL may be broken due to my decision to NOT move those databases over. Other old pages may disappear completely, but those will be mentioned as the time comes closer.

Still need to prettify the LJ Extras options in this editor though. =P

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Progress in Website Design and Otherwise…

Thursday, August 10th, 2006

So, I’ve already moved all the current files from pipian.com to the new server. All that remains to be done is setting up DNS, MySQL, and Virtual Hosting.In addition, I’ve more or less finished a design for the new site, but I’m torn as to whether my blog should be the front page, or a separate page under the blog director /blog/ as it is now. I just have minor fix-ups to do before I can actually make the theme (Need to polish up the article display).

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Testing LiveJournal Crossposting…

Monday, August 7th, 2006

This is a test of crossposting to LiveJournal from my other blog on my website. It appears that the “LJ Extras” tab in Word Press (with Live+Press) does need a bit more ‘scripting’ to look pretty.

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What Is This? “It Is A Mystery…”

Monday, August 7th, 2006

This is the first post on the new blog for pipian.com: “It Is A Mystery…”

Now running WordPress!

I promise this will be used more than my last one…

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