I'm saying goodbye and it was fun time with Radio UserLand over the past year. My subscription has 14 days till it elapses and I get bounced from the UserLand server. So set your bookmarks now to http://www.davidmattison.ca/tiki where The Ten Thousand Year Blog continues in a slightly different form. The RSS 1.0 feed URL for all blogs (two at the moment) at my new home on the Web is http://www.davidmattison.ca/tiki/tiki-blogs_rss.php

The Tiki Wiki version I'm running is 1.6.1 and I am eagerly awaiting the release of 1.7 which updates the blog functionality of Tiki so it's more in tune with other blogging software, with features like multipage posts, posting by e-mail, permalinks and trackbacks.

In case you're wondering, Tiki Wiki, as its name implies, includes wiki functionality, and it runs on a LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP)-type platform. I gave up on Zope as being needlessly complex and with too steep a learning curve for my requirements. Tiki gives me everything and more in one open source, free, sweet package.

3:09:43 PM    comment []  Google It!

FreeRoller.net offers free blog hosting that includes support for RSS headline aggregation (not very useful) and RSS syndication of your blog content via the Java-based Roller Weblogger Version 0.9.6.5+ application. You can easily post without publishing, and use an external Blogger API client such as w.bloggar (a little short on details in the Roller Weblogger manual on how to do this through FreeRoller.net). There's also supposed to be an export feature by which you can export your blog entries into the Roller XML format as a safeguard against a Roller administrator who's not regularly backing up the blog database. Bookmarks are included, and some other goodies you can check out for yourself.

The Roller Weblogger site also points you to some other interesting Java-based blog authoring/publishing software, some of which incorporate wiki-like functionality.

7:54:12 PM    comment []  Google It!

Finally managed to get a full-scale CMS PHP-based wiki-blog installed under Windows. I came across a WAMP (Windows-Apache-MySQL-PHP) product from e-novative in Germany. So I installed that, then installed Tiki version 1.6 Tau Ceti release from SourceForge.net.

The installation part of the documentation with Tiki is not the best because it assumes too much knowledge on the part of the end user. Because Apache got installed into Program FilesApache GroupApache, I had to figure out that the Apache "htdocs" folder is where the "tiki" directory tree needed to reside. There was also a misnamed Tiki database in one of the PHP script files. The Tiki installation also assumed a different MySQL user ID. So once all that was sorted out, the installation worked like a charm.

Tiki's a full-fledged portal-type CMS that incorporates elements of wiki into its design. You can have wiki pages and the blog pages can also be wiki-enabled. There are a whole rack of features, such as a Yahoo!-style Directory or link farm you can build yourself.

Tiki reminds me very much of Infocetera. I think I like Tiki a whole lot better.

10:45:40 PM    comment []  Google It!

Roy Tennant drinks the RSS kool aid in an article in this month's LJ called Feed Your Head: Keeping Up by Using RSS, and he has the [overall] same idea as Steven Cohen about highlighting Library Purchases Via RSS. Curiously, an RSS feed is not listed as one of the Fifteen Library-tested Programs and Policies to Increase Circulation of AV Materials, so let's just write it in ourselves as #16. ...

9:37:13 AM    comment []  Google It!

A copy of a handout I prepared for a presentation to government and special librarians, along with information technologists, at a provincial government office can be found in a couple of places:

Searchers' Zwiki: http://searcher.freezope.org/zwiki/blogs-rss-wikis

Ten Thousand Year Blog: http://radio.weblogs.com/0110793/stories/2003/05/21/blogsrsswikisCompiledByDavidMattison.html

Because the document was written in Microsoft Word 2000, there's a lot of extraneous HTML tagging, even with the Export to Compact HTML feature used. I keep needing to remind myself never to write something in Word that's intended for display as a Web page.

I'll likely maintain the authoritative copy on the Ten Thousand Year Blog. The Zwiki version is fully editable by anyone.

For those interested in RSS, I'd like to again point out the new myRSS.com service, along with Doug Ransom's excellent presentation on RSS, "Connecting Interested People to New Web Content With Syndication and Aggregation", http://www.weav.bc.ca/slides/weav.rss_files/v3_document.htm

Some other RSS tools Doug pointed out for generating RSS content directly from HTML or XHTML pages -- what's called scraping HTML -- are found at

• Site Summaries in XHTML (W3C Semantic Web Development): http://www.w3.org/2000/08/w3c-synd/ (includes basic formatting instructions for your XHTML page and an example using data from the W3C Web site)
• XHTML-to-RSS Extractor service [trial-release]: http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/discovery/2000/08/hss/sw.html ("This service uses a generic webdata transformation service (an XSLT server) to convert from a dialect of XHTML to the proposed RSS 1.0 channel format. Goal: author in XHTML, syndicate in RSS.")

Doug Ransom and Ian Davis are also working on a hypertext syndication proposal that would embed RSS right into XHTML, so a document would be capable of being read as either an RSS feed or an HTML document.

8:56:08 AM    comment []  Google It!

We are very pleased to announce: SimQuest 5.1

You can download SimQuest 5.1 for free from our website: www.simquest.nl

New features of SimQuest 5.1 are:

• improved installation procedure
• long directory name problem solved
• auto store option for graphs
• new library icons
• updated demo simulation
• improved SimQuest meeting
• improved hypothesis scratchpad
• improved hypothesis list
  

[Distribution list notice from Jan van der Meij, member of the SimQuest Team at the University of Twente, Netherlands, 15 May 02003]

2:06:56 PM    comment []  Google It!

Some very cool new and updated Geographic Information Systems (GIS) maps coming out of British Columbia.

• FishWizard (Fisheries and Oceans Canada and Province of British Columbia)
• MapPlace.ca (Ministry of Energy and Mines, Province of British Columbia)
• Online Cadastre (Ministry of Sustainable Resource Management, Province of British Columbia), probably the first of its kind in North America, and designed for locating and displaying detailed information on Crown land holdings, as well as alienated Crown land (private property). Government users can also link directly to Tantalis GATOR, the Crown Land Registry Services database where digitized legal survey plans, surveyor's fieldbooks, and Crown Grant documents are found.
• Provincial Base Map (Ministry of Sustainable Resource Management, Province of British Columbia)
• Aquifers and Water Wells in British Columbia (Ministry of Water, Land and Air Protection, Province of British Columbia; a description of this service is at http://wlapwww.gov.bc.ca/wat/aquifers/index.html)
• MapView Lite (Ministry of Forests, Province of British Columbia)
• Forest Service Recreation Maps (Ministry of Forests, Province of British Columbia; not quite GIS, but large scale maps)
• Natural Areas Atlas for the Capital Region (Capital Regional District, BC)
• VanMap (City of Vancouver)
• GISInquiry (City of Richmond)

11:34:45 AM    comment []  Google It!

CGI::Kwiki by Brian Ingerson, May 13, 2003, Perl.com (O'Reilly Network), describes a new Perl module, CGI::Kwiki, that lets you "create Wiki Web site in less than a minute." CGI:Kwiki is an abbreviated, less complex and non-database version of another Perl wiki module, CGI::Wiki, by  Kate "Kake" Pugh. It's not clear from Brian's article who wrote CGI:Kwiki. You can download CGI::Kwiki from FreePAN, the Free Programming Archive Network.

[Perl.com via Ben Hammersley's Webloggery, May 19, 02003]

11:09:13 AM    comment []  Google It!