On Friday I was bitching about the lack of websites that can import FOAF profiles. A lot of the popular ones like Twitter and LiveJournal can export them, but they don't seem to be able to import them and make use of the actual FOAF data. A portable file format only works when you can both import and export the data.
There are a lot of websites that export FOAF, Friend Of A Friend, data including: LiveJournal, Twitter, Pownce and hi5. There is a Facebook application that exports your Facebook profile to FOAF too!
FOAF doesn't appear to be dead in terms of exporting, but what about importing? That's the whole point of FOAF...to make your data portable so you can move it around easily. But I've searched and searched and I can't find anything on how to import my FOAF data into Twitter, or LiveJournal, or elsewhere. What's the point of freedom when I can't use it?
A simple example of how importing FOAF is useful: FriendFeed. It aggregates stuff from various social networks. I already have a list of online accounts in my FOAF file. FriendFeed, let me import that file and you can take care of the rest! I hate re-typing in all my account names so you can import them. It's annoying and boring.
The project is still alive. The last time I checked it looked a little dead, but now that I've checked out the mailing list archives, it looks like it's still alive. Awesome awesome :D
Thanks to the list, I've discovered another web application framework for Common Lisp called cl-terrace. It's a Model-View-Controller framework (aren't they all?) with only the View-Controller part covered. I'm not sure exactly how that works, but it uses the Hunchentoot web server, and djula, a Common Lisp template engine based on the Django templating language which is nice.
The documentation for djula should be generated by the developer since the API is apparently changing around quite a bit. Djula looks like it handles internationalization and translations in a sane way. You specify translations using a dictionary (a.k.a. hash-table), the example shows how to do this.
cl-terrace is ASDF-installable in case you're itching to try it out. Using SBCL, run this:
(require 'asdf) (require 'asdf-install) (asdf-install:install 'cl-terrace)to install it.
On another note, a Ruby note, Chris Wanstrath of GitHub fame presented a keynote at the 2008 Ruby Hoedown about side projects where he said,
First off, the time issue. I don't know how many of you read RSS, but I challenge you (that's a keynote term) to give it up for a month. Just turn it off...What should you do instead? ...let other people do the filtering for you. Use your time for other things.
It's a good keynote and lots of communities could learn a thing or two from the Ruby community. The optimism of the community has to be balanced out as Unspace's Pete Forde says,
Folks in Ruby tend to write a lot of nostalgic, self-aggrandizing bullshit, though. You see a lot of "MY MY, THE COMMUNITY HAS EVOLVED INTO SOMETHING SPECIAL" and talk of changing the history of software development. I'm all for progress, and as a musician, I understand the function of hype in generating momentum. But sometimes we need to get real and be a little more harsh in our own self-analysis.
Anyway, off to write some code.
I overslept by a few hours but I decided to change the colour scheme. The stylesheet I uploaded last night was hideous, though good enough for testing. The new styles and page generation functions are up and I've switched the main page to PHP. The Friend of a Friend Creator is also partially up. I need to add more of the FOAF specification stuff of course, but there's a fancy new date picker (Thanks jQuery-UI!)
The design is very retro, very 70s I would say...at least in terms of the colours. The striped background reminds me of the swimshorts I bought that also have racing stripes. Obviously the design is solid because of this, heh.
Some details...
