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.

June 8, 2004

Converting ISBNs into LC Call Numbers

Kendall Grant Clark has been getting into the nitty-gritty of doing a librarian's work with xml and rdf. His latest article is part of his Hacking the Library series at XML.com.

Our isbn2lccn tool will read its command line arguments, one of which will be a required ISBN. It will then make some REST web service calls to either the Library of Congress or the British Library; in some cases it may also make calls to Amazon or to xISBN. Source.