Category Archives: Semantics

Semantics

Reactivate All Plugins feature in WordPress 2.5

By Dougal | Published: January 22, 2008

Once upon a time, I whipped up a Reactivate All Plugins feature for WordPress, to compliment the Deactivate All Plugins action (which is recommended before an upgrade). Unfortunately, the patch didn’t make it into the WordPress 2.2 release. And I forgot to nudge anybody about it for the 2.3 release until it was too late. But, the plugin reactivation patch is slated for inclusion in the 2.5 release, due in March (BTW, you did know that version 2.4 is being skipped, right?).

That said, you might notice that I added a note on the feature request ticket. [...]

Also posted in Plugins, Tech, WordPress | Tagged features, interface, plugin, Plugins, reactivate, safemode, ui, usability, WordPress | 49 Comments

New theme, same as the old theme

By Dougal | Published: October 16, 2007

I’ve done some minor maintenance around here. Can you spot the differences? Probably not. What I’ve done is upgraded my old Sandbox 0.6.1 theme to the new 1.0 version, and made a few minor adjustments to my CSS to account for the differences. Visually, there’s not a whole heck of a lot of difference between the current theme and the previous version, other than the addition of tags to the post metadata.

Speaking of tags, I’ve mentioned before that I had been using the WordPress category system more like a tagging system, and that I regretted that decision. [...]

Also posted in Themes, WordPress | Tagged categories, CSS, delicious, Flickr, Metadata, Sandbox, SemanticWeb, tagging, Tags, WordPress | 11 Comments

Tags and Categories in WordPress 2.3

By Dougal | Published: September 22, 2007

Since the upcoming WordPress 2.3 release will debut the new tagging system, I thought I’d take some time to address what it means to use “tags” versus using “categories”. These things mean different things to different people, as it’s really just a matter of how you want to use them. But let’s examine what tags and categories are, how they are similar, how they are different, and why you might choose to use one system over the other, or use them together.

Also posted in Blogging, Microformats, Search, Tech, WordPress | Tagged API, delicious, Folksonomies, Metadata, plugin, Plugins, Politics, Tags, taxonomy, Technorati, Web, WordPress | 50 Comments

Dougal 4.0

By Dougal | Published: January 30, 2007

Today I turn the big Four-Oh. I’m not sure how I should feel about that. Since I’m a web development geek, how about we consider some possible responses in terms of HTTP 1.1 Status Codes:

I suppose the expected response would be 406 Not Acceptable. How could I possibly be forty? Where did the years go? Many people’s reaction is 416 Requested Range Not Satisfiable, also known as a “mid-life crisis”. As Adam from Mythbusters would say, “I reject your reality, and substitute my own!”

I don’t really feel any different, though. [...]

Also posted in Fun, Humor, Personal, Standards | Tagged Birthday | 6 Comments

Linkitude

By Dougal | Published: March 15, 2006

The previous post was the first on this site that was auto-generated by the del.icio.us “daily blog posting” feature. Geof has been doing this for a while, and I was already planning to do something like this on my own eventually, anyhow. But I hadn’t gotten a round tuit yet, and since I ran across a couple of links reminding me about this del.icio.us service yesterday, I decided to try it out. [...]

Also posted in Blogs, Microformats, Services, WordPress | Tagged Folksonomies, PHP, plugin, Tags, this-site | 10 Comments

Microformat for media descriptions

By Dougal | Published: July 26, 2005

I’m interested in coming up with a good metadata system for describing various sorts of media. Obviously, this ties in to my recent work on my “now playing” feature, and also into my interest in microformats. And I plan to expand this with links to books, DVDs, and perhaps other media or products. I asked about it on the microformats-discuss mailing list, and they pointed me to a page on the wiki about media-metadata.

This seems to be primarily aimed at electronic media, but I’m hoping that the primary authors might be willing to expand the scope a bit. [...]

Also posted in Microformats, Standards, Tech | Tagged Media | 2 Comments

More on microformats

By Dougal | Published: June 21, 2005

There is now a dedicated site for information about microformats: microformats.org

I’m working on a movie review using the hReview format. I’m hoping that we’ll see one of the big search engines start correlating microformat data soon. . [...]