I’m the lazy web

My last post was on making use of foaf:OnlineAccount information found in FOAF files to create a complete OPML or better yet feed (or personal planet) of all the information your friends are dumping all over the web. As already stated, I didn’t think it was anything new and I found a post by Leigh “ideas” Dodds on the very same subject. However, neither the service or the code are available, so I decided to play with Venus instead, especially after Sam added support for FOAF reading lists.

If you want to have your feed extracted from your FOAF file, look at mine or add the following:

  <foaf:weblog> 
    <foaf:Document rdf:about="http://torrez.us/"> 
      <dc:title>Elias Torres</dc:title> 
      <rdfs:seeAlso> 
        <rss:channel rdf:about="http://torrez.us/feed/rdf" />
      </rdfs:seeAlso> 
    </foaf:Document> 
  </foaf:weblog> 

Now if you want to get some of the OnlineAccount magic, add the following to your foaf:Person:

  <foaf:holdsAccount> 
    <foaf:OnlineAccount> 
      <foaf:accountServiceHomepage rdf:resource="http://del.icio.us/"/> 
      <foaf:accountName>eliast</foaf:accountName> 
    </foaf:OnlineAccount> 
  </foaf:holdsAccount> 

The setup was not hard at all. A few IMs with Sam and I was happily coding. I finally got a reason to use bzr and discover what distributed scm was all about: purdy neat. I check out a branch from Sam’s website onto my Ubuntu Dapper thinkpad (VMware image), write some code, run some tests, bzr add, bzr commit and finally I rsync to my site: http://torrez.us/code/venus/. Although for some bizarre issue with my DreamHost Apache configuration, you won’t be able to:

bzr get http://torrez.us/code/venus/

My .htaccess file must be causing something to go wrong in Apache and is not translating %2541 to %41 in filenames in the .bzr folder. If you want the code download the compressed version.

The next feature (when I get around to it) will be to add some recursion. This means that depending on the depth level specified in the config file, I will fetch your friend’s and optionally their friend’s FOAF files. However, Sam, I or someone else needs to refactor the code for me to easily reuse the caching mechanism in Venus.