Small news to share my amazement for CSS: changing the design of my website took me around 15 minutes (based on a Ganesh Gunasegaran’s initial template). The content didn’t change. Only the way “semantic elements” are displayed was changed (+ some minor adaptations, of course). Et voilÃ! :-) Next step: adapt this blog design to my website design (I won’t do it right now).
OpenStreetMap is a “project aimed squarely at creating and providing free geographic data such as street maps to anyone who wants them. The project was started because most maps you think of as free actually have legal or technical restrictions on their use, holding back people from using them in creative, productive or unexpected ways.” I thought it was worth participating and more documented than the UPCT project. So I got a Locosys NaviGPS GT-11 and used it for the first time on the way to FOSDEM (and back). I did a small mistake by taking an interval between points of 30s: on a highway, at 120km/h, 30s means 1km and the road direction can change a lot. When I’ll have more time, the next step will be to do some edition and mark roads, highways, interesting landmarks, etc. Stay tuned … ...
I couldn’t find sleep tonight (*) so I did two small variations on the Ruby official logo for Ruby France, since they are looking for a new logo (**). Double-clic to enlarge, single-clic to reduce back to the small images (***) : I also like Greg’s proposal. (*) it happens very often these days (**) No, I don’t know Ruby (***) Doesn’t work if javascript isn’t enabled in your browser (usually it is) + Internet Explorer doesn’t correctly render the transparency ; please use a real browser instead
After having updated WordPress to version 2.0.5, you can find some Error 500 (or 302) when writing new posts (you’ll fortunately not lose any content). Mark Jaquith wrote a simple plug-in to fix this little annoyance. Upload it, activate it and you’re free from this small bug.
In a recent post, Alexandre wrote about web indexing and pointed to a nice tool for webmaster: the sitemap. The Sitemap Protocol “allows you to inform search engines about URLs on your websites that are available for crawling” (since it’s a Google creation, it seems that only Google is using it, according to Alexandre). If you have a shell access to your webserver and Python on it, Google has a nice Python script to automatically create your sitemap. ...
On his blog, Laurent wanted to know who is this guy. I though it was an interesting starting point to see how good is Retrievr, “an experimental service which lets you search and explore in a selection of Flickr images by drawing a rough sketch”. Although my drawing skills really needs to be improved (and their drawing tools more refined - always blame the others for your weaknesses ;-) ), a first sketch gives some interesting results (see screenshot below): 7 retrieved photos (44%) show a b/w human face in “frontal view” (if you count the dog, it’s even 8 correct images). ...
A lot of blogs, Belgian or not, are talking about the fact that the Belgian French-speaking press (lead by CopiePress, a Belgian rights management company) successfully sued Google in Belgium over indexing, author rights, content copying, etc. The full order is available on the Belgian Google homepage (in French). I am not a lawyer. So I read the order: CopiePress wanted the Belgian court to look at the lawfullness of Google News and Googgle Cache services, according to the Belgian law CopiePress wanted Google to remove all links to any data from CopiePress clients CopiePress wanted Google to publish the order in its first page on their Belgian website So, CopiePress won the first case (the case will be heard again in appeal). I assume that the Belgian justice department is doing its job. So, let us consider that Google broke the Belgian law with their services. If you want to know more about the legal stuff, P. Van den Bulck, E. Wery and M. de Bellefroid wrote an article about which Belgian laws Google seems to have broken (in French). ...
Although the University of Liege ( ULg) network of libraries webpage is very old and ugly, the network is starting to use new, technologically advanced tools to allow digital access to its content (articles, books, thesis and other media). Three tools are available since a short time: Source gives access to all media currently available in libraries (it replaces the Telnet-based Liber, for those who used it before). Source is based on Aleph from ExLibris, a proprietary software. PoPuPS is a publication platform for scientific journals from the ULg and the FSAGx. PoPuPS is based on Lodel CMS, a free (GPL) web publishing software. Articles in this database seem to be Open Access although no precise licence is defined (and some articles look strange : see the second picture in this geological article). BICTEL/e is an institutional repository of Ph.D. thesis. It seems to be developed internally by the UCL With these tools, the ULg try to catch the Open Access movement. Source is already connected to other types of databases but it seems that PoPuPS and BICTEL are not (yet) connected to cross-references systems like DOI nor using standardised metadata like in Eprints. ...
On Friday, having to wait for a librarian to fetch the old articles I wanted to read, I spent a few minutes removing spam from the AEL wiki. This form of spam is very easy to spot because it’s always the same : HTML tags enclosing 30 links and the text linking to these sites have well-known spam, adult-oriented words in it (see the end of MsSecurity page where I didn’t had time to remove spam). ...
While looking for something totally different (what exactly is the Mascot score? Partial answer here), I found the Original photo gallery, a two-parts tool to get digital photos on the web. This tool could be interesting for the family website I plan to build. Since my hosting company enabled PHP Safe Mode, I cannot use most on-line gallery tools. Original seems to be an ideal solution because all the treatments are done off-line, on my own PC. Then everything is loaded on the website. Still, it’s not a static gallery like the one Picasa does (for example). ...