weblogs

The IVRPA website is running Drupal 4.7. The site has many dependencies on contributed and custom modules, so upgrading to Drupal 5 would not be an light undertaking. Especially with the work I have been putting into the conference site, I would not fathom upgrading at this point.

If you look at the url for this blog post, you may notice that it in contrast to how urls to blog posts used to look, they now contain (part of) the post title. This makes blog posts stand out between the other types of nodes on the site (such as forum posts or gallery items), and it makes a url easier to recognise.

The change has been retrofitted to all current blog posts on the site.

Regarding my earlier post on relative links in feeds, I have now implemented fixes for both parts of the issue.

• The feeds that Drupal creates are now checked for relative urls. Relative urls are changed to absolute urls instead.
  Like I did before, I have submitted a patch. Since this is a Drupal core issue, I fully expect the patch to be altered quite a bit or even be rejected, but we'll see.

• Incomming feeds are also checked for relative urls.
  Unlike the other part above, this could be fixed using Drupal's theming system, without patching any of the modules. Once there is more clarity on the patch I submitted, I will make another patch for the incoming feeds and submit that.

Andras Frenyo has brought to my attention the fact that for some feeds in the blog aggregator, links or even images don't work. Andras, as a content producer, does not like his content to be misrepresented, and requested I remove his blog from the aggregator.

The problem is a common problem with 'syndication'. In syndication feeds, such as RSS and Atom, links and images are required to be fully qualified URIs; according to the specifications, all links are supposed to have the whole http://server bit, instead of pointing to a location relative to the current document. The idea is that since the content is presented on another location, the 'current document' is undefined, so relative urls don't exist.

The Photokina 2006 panorama blog has thusfar gathered 51 fullscreen panoramas of the 7 days of Photokina. We expect the number to grow during the following days as some of us stitch some of the remaining images. The project was highlighted by Rob Galbraith, the lomography blog, macnn.com and macuser.com, as well as a number of camera enthusiast forums. As a result of many sites linking to us, and because of the search engine friendliness of Drupal, as of the time of writing we're on the second page of results Googling for 'Photokina 2006'. Not bad at all.

Yet another nifty new page. This page combines teasers for blogs written by IVRPA members with feed items aggregated from the web. Both pages existed separately, but they look lots better together.

I'm not the only one who already has a weblog somewhere else on the web, but we still want to be able to include as much (useful/nice) news in the IVRPA website. Thanks to the magic of RSS and ATOM feeds, blogs/journals and other services (such as the World Wide Panorama of the day) can now be incorporated into the website. It's called 'syndication' (of web content).