Plugin Development

Will Norris‘ talk at WordCamp PDX introduces WordPress coding standards, common functions, and constants to would be plugin developers (and smacks those who’ve already done it wrong). Also notable: functions, classes, variables, and constants in the WordPress trunk.

Custom Installations

Just as WordPress has a number of hooks and filters that plugins can use to modify and extend behavior, it also has a cool way to customize the installation process.

Extending The WYSIWYG Editor

TinyMCE, the WYSIWYG editor in WordPress has a rich API to allow adding buttons and stuff, but the docs are hard to get into. We can get a jump on that by looking at how it’s implemented in other WP plugins. This code creates the buttons, while the function that responds to the button click and does the work is defined within the plugin. The TinyMCE plugins in core are also informative.

Encyclopodia – the encyclopedia on your iPod

GeoCool! – Rasmus’ Toys Page

IE7 and OpenSearch Autodiscovery

Information Management Now: Social Tagging For The Enterprise

How can I not appreciate thenonist’s link dumps and other posts when they’re illustrated with works like those above?

The men in suits come from May 29. June 4 offers us these funny trading cards and a gallery of horror movie damsels (in distress, of course). June 5 offers a good look at sincerity among other things.

And all of this amidst a context of intelligent commentary and smart politics.

blog, damsels in distress, galleries, links, quality, russian theater, thenonist, trading cards

A discussion on Web4Lib last month raised the issue of Google indexing our library catalogs. My answer spoke of the huge number of searches being done in search engines every day and the way that people increasingly expect that anything worth finding can be found in Google.

There were doubts about the effectiveness of such plans, and concerns about how frustrating it might be for a searcher in California to find books (that he or she can’t access) in New Hampshire.

My answer to the first point was that once we start participating in the Google Economy, we’ll find our records well represented within it, and my answer to the second point is that we already have good solutions to that problem: ILL and OpenWorldCat. Examples: a Google search for my favorite author/friend/example returns with WPopac among the top results. And if you view one of the resulting records, you’ll see a link to “find in WorldCat Libraries.”

Thing is, it’s not just the stuff I’ve been linking to as examples that’s getting found in search engines. Listed below are the top 100 incoming search terms to WPopac from major search engines in the last week. The list is generated by bsuite, my multipurpose WordPress plugin, and the links lead to the item found with the search terms.

• What works: documenting energy conservation in buildings
• Online Recording of Pomp and Circumstance
• recording of pomp and circumstance
• harry stack sullivan
• miguel de unamuno website
• “cathedrals +england”
• athalie
• symbols in art
• Dadaism by Marcel Duchamp and Frances Picabia
• frank moake
• william luijpen
• “Man, Culture and Society”
• music scores elgar wand of youth slumber song
• Cats and Bats and Things with Wings by Conrad AIken
• paul cuffe african american
• biography of george e. mowry
• don giovanni libretto italian english
• Steroids-opposing viewpoints
• ballet plot
• ballet plots
• grice, h.p., studies in the way of words
• african american identity
• Allan Freed and the Big Beat
• The Blue Octavo Notebooks
• The Self Reliant Potter
• kartinki
• the little brown book of anecdotes
• “the fields are full”+“Armstrong Gibbs”
• forty french songs for voice and piano
• Fantasien, Op. 116
• Literary Themes
• biography ramses the great
• ramses II essays
• Rita Rapoza
• deutsche nobelpreisträger
• Erotica
• ‘henry and mudge and the green time’ website
• “Henry and Mudge in the Green Time”
• tally’s corner
• ECCENTRIC MUSCLE LOADING BASEBALL
• indian mythology 0600023699
• climacteric psychology menopause
• emilie flöge
• Brigance Comprehensive inventory of basic skills
• Brigance Diagnostic Comprehensive Inventory of Basic Skills
• Brigance Diagnostic Inventory of Basic Skills
• brigance diagnostic
• Brigance INventory of Basic Skills
• brigance inventory
• brigance testing
• Brigance
• Metropolitan readiness tests
• Bayley assessment kit
• kaja silverman “fragments of a fashionable discourse”
• palmer hayden biography african-american
• feminist theories on battered women syndrome
• otis lennon mental ability test
• otis-lennon intelligence test
• Otis-Lennon School Ability Test
• Poetry from norton anthology of by s.m.gilbert and susan gubar woman writer
• Black Frontiers
• Pioneers Of The American West.
• joycelyn elders biography
• pros and cons of tqm
• Encyclopedia of world biography
• Death Penalty:an historical& Theological survey,J.J.Megivern
• “Jewish Deliberations on Suicide: Exceptions, Toleration and Assistance” — Noam Zohar
• Samuel H. Kress biography
• biomechanical analysis leg stretching
• arguments against suicide
• assisted suicide
• assited suicide
• physician assisted suicide cartoons
• “ice age”+homophobia
• suite española Gaspar Sanz
• leprosy:king baldwin IV
• Socolow The women of colonial Latin America.
• popular music and youth culture
• mandarin revolution Keynes
• sports professionalization test
• “criminology theories, patterns, and typologies”
• xiajia
• Pangwe Africa
• “hanif kureishi+life”
• All Shook Up: How Rock ‘n“ Roll Changed America
• Fraenkel and Wallen validity and reliability
• j.k. rowling biography isbn
• tina modotti biography
• essays on Rescuing a planet under stress
• criticism beatrix potter
• harry potter literary criticism
• ”Jewish Women in the Holocaust“
• crimes and misdemeanors plato
• California and the Southwest history
• Life In the American West
• funny chemistry caricature
• di vinci ”symbols“
• di vinci symbols
• Symbols of japan
• biograph dewey

Some links will leave you scratching your head, others are clearly misdirected. But, I’m especially proud of this link, from a person who was especially happy to get a new book. Making our collections indexable also makes them linkable, and that means people can make libraries part of their lives — wherever their lives take them.

And this doesn’t just help Angie, it means faculty and students can link to library resources from class blogs or share them in AIM.

google economy, google in the catalog, lib20, libraries, library, library 20, library catalog, linking, links, loosely linked, opac, remix, search engines, wpopac

Allen asked, via the web4lib list:

I’m interested in how others handle linkrot in library blogs. Do you fix broken links? Remove them if they can’t be fixed? Do nothing?

Michael answered:

I deal with link rot on blogs as I would with any other publication, print or otherwise: do nothing. The post is dated and users should be aware that links from two years ago may no longer work.

We need to understand that the web is a living, breathing, and sometimes dying organism. The forrest will renew itself.

Dropping the metaphor, link rot is frustrating, but deleting links is deleting history. Fixing links (if possible) or adding updates is another matter, but it’s really only something I’d do for active content.

blog archives, currency, fix links, link rot, linkrot, links, old content, web4lib, maintenance

The sale of Weblogs Inc. to AOL last month for $25+ million got a lot of bloggers excited. Tristan Louis did the math and put the sale value into perspective against the number of incoming links the the Weblogs Inc. properties. It’s an interesting assertion of the value of the Google Economy, no?

The various properties have a total of almost 50,000 incoming links, which work out to being worth between about $500 and $900 each, depending on the actual sale price, which everybody’s mum about.

So Dane Carlson created this (now broken) how much is my blog worth? app based on those numbers and powered by the Technorati API. Zach took a stern look at it (while it was working) and decided the numbers probably represent the gross ad revenues of a blog over four years (or two years with strong growth).

tags: ad revenue, ad revenues, aol, assertion, blog, blogger, bloggers, bought, citation analysis, google economy, link value, linking, links, sale, sale price, sold, technorati, weblog, weblogs, weblogs inc, weblogsinc

• Pepper Computer
• Buying a Pepper Pad at Amazon
• Pepper Hacks
• Victor Rehorst has been blogging about his Pepper since he got it (a few days ago)
• Pepper Pad stories at TeleRead
• Other Pepper Pad stories here at MaisonBisson

tags: links, pepper, pepper computer, pepper links, pepper pad, portable computing, ubicomp, ultraportable

I’m rather passionate about the Google Economy, so it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise to learn that I just wrote about it in my first ever Wikipedia entry.

Here it is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_economy

“Google Economy” identifies the concept that the value of a resource can be determined by the way that resource is linked to other resources. It is more complex than search ranking, and broader than interlinked web pages, though it draws meaning from both.

The Internet and World Wide Web have emphasized the role of the citation as a means of identifying the value of a resource. The structure of the print publishing world imposes strict limits on what information is promoted and distributed, but the web imposes much lower barriers to ‘publication,’ eliminating the old-media filters that information consumers once depended on to identify worthy information. Internet Search engines were developed to help navigate the growing number of web pages, but their results could not represent the value of individual pages until Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin started to apply the concept of citation analysis that was developed in the 1950s by Dr. Eugene Garfield at the University of Pennsylvania. Today, Google’s PageRank weighs heavily on citation analysis among the more than 150 criteria evaluated.

The result is that the PageRank of any single web page is highly dependent on the number of web pages that link to it (and their PageRank). The highest ranked pages appear at the top of the search results page. The financial implication for commercial web sites are obvious (and often exploited), but there are serious implications for non-commercial content as well. A person doing any research on the web will find his or her results heavily influenced by PageRank-style ranking. Accurate and correct information that is poorly linked will have lower ranking than incorrect or misleading information that is better linked. Because many of the most authoritative information sources — examples: medical journals, the Oxford English Dictionary — are subscription services, their content is not available for indexing by search engines, and by extension, to those using search engines for research.

Even among free services — many library catalogs, for instance — it can be difficult to index the information because of technical obstacles like dynamic URLs that make it difficult to deep link to content or explicit prohibitions in the robots.txt. The result is that a person searching for a book is far more likely to find the Amazon.com catalog page or blog posts discussing the book long before they will find any library offering the book for loan.
As with market economies, the Google Economy is subject to uncertainties, fluctuation, and occasional manipulation. Manipulators do so, however, at serious risk, as search engines have been known to blacklist them from results pages. Further, search engine engineers continue to refine ranking criteria to deliver quality search results. In general, however, there are three rules for full participation in the Google Economy:

• Linking must be possible
• Linking must be desirable
• Linking must be measurable

External links

• Roger Sperberg on the value of availability and permanence on the web
• David Rothman on hate sites and the Google Economy
• Casey Bisson on politics and the Google Economy, one of a number of his posts about the Google Economy
• Bernard Moonreports on the Google Economy from BlogBusinessSummit 2005
• Joe Griffin on marketing a web site in the Google Economy

tags: citation analysis, dr. eugene garfield, eugene garfield, google, google economy, information consumers, larry page, link, linking, links, media filters, print publishing, search, search engines, sergey brin, value, web pages, wikipedia, world wide web

Links: starting with politics, going to copyfight, ending nowhere.

• On The Mediathis week is reporting on the controversies about Sinclair TV and Bush’s wiring, looks at why there’s a dearth of local real local news, and, most interestingly, compares Bush’s lies to Kerry’s exaggerations.The whole show is available as MP3.
   
• RealClearPolitics lists polls in swing states and elsewhere.
   
• EarthBrowser (for Mac) gives us a glimpse of the world, showing swirling clouds and other weather, but hiding the politics and tension.
   
• WalMart vs. the music industry?
   
• SpyMall

link blogging, link dump, links, walmart, real clear politics, spymall, WalMart vs. the music industry, EarthBrowser