April 30, 2007

Best Instructions for running MT in FastCGI under lighttpd

This is a very specific case, but if you've recently upgraded to MT 3.3 and want to run it with Ruby on Rails (or something else) in FastCGI under lighttpd, Michael James Boyle's article is very useful: Running Movable Type 3.3 with LightTPD and FastCGI.

For MT in FastCGI under Apache, this article from Six Apart's dev wiki is worth reading: Running Movable Type Under FastCGI

I have several projects that involve this sort of integration. As the diversity of apps installed on a single web site increases, it would be very helpful if there were a standard approach for sharing sessions - imagine if the oft-used web apps all had config for naming the session cookie. Also, by making web apps more cohesive internally there will be more impetus for accomplishing the same externally - through efforts such as OpenID.

Not everyone can just open the hatch on a wiki, bulletin board, or blog app to alter the method of checking the session.

April 18, 2007

Google's AJAX Feed API

Google's new AJAX Feed API is pretty cool. It provides in-page access to any public RSS feed (handled and cached by their Feedfetcher) while bypassing javascript's same origin policy restriction. It even talks JSON! This service will be helpful to developers who want to creatively mash feeds from different sources without having to set up and host a relay / proxy.

April 6, 2007

James Clark woke me up

I was just getting ready to enter more whimsical videos into my tracker when I saw Norm Walsh's pointer to James Clark's new blog. Clark's awesome first entry: Do we need a new kind of schema language? was worth the time I spent on it.

Here are a few things that I've got on my mind now:

- JSON Schemas

- Microsoft LINQ:

.NET Language Integrated Query adds query capabilities to the CLR and languages that target it. The query facility builds on lambda expressions and expression trees to allow predicates, projections, and key extraction expressions to be used as opaque executable code or as transparent in-memory data suitable for downstream processing or translation.

Source: LINQ Project Overview

- Scala

- TEDI:

TEDI would be defined in terms of a generic data model that makes a tasteful restricted choice from these programming languages' data structures: not limiting the choice to the lowest common denominator, but leaving our frills and focusing on the basics and on things that be naturally mapped into each language. At least initially, I think I would restrict TEDI to trees rather than handle general graphs. Although graphs are important, I think the success of JSON shows that trees are good enough as a programmer-friendly data interchange mechanism.
...
There's one other big piece that's needed to make TEDI work: annotations. Each component of a TEDI schema can have multiple, independent annotations, which may be inline or externally attached in some way. Each annotation has a prefix that identifies a binding. A TEDI binding specification has to be developed for each programming language and each serialization that will be used with TEDI.

Source: Do we need a new kind of schema language?

His description of TEDI reminds me that the semweb community has a huge challenge on our hands: how to make graph data - whether locally or across the web - easier to comprehend and to use.