How many ways can you spell Charlottesville? At least 5.

I recently went to the search tags page to see how many companies are based in Charlottesville. I typed in “Char” and was surprised to see in my AJAXy search box that 5 suggestions for “Char” were entered. At first I thought it was a bug, but then I realized that indeed there were multiple misspellings for Charlottesville: Charlotesville, Charlotsville, Charlottesvile, and Charlotteville.

What is ironic is that this data was loaded from the data compiled as part of CBIC’s survey of high tech business in the Charlottesville area! Clearly whoever was supplying that data was hand entering it into the spreadsheet.

To help deal with bad tags like this, I have moved up to the main navigation a “Browse Tags” link that shows you all the tags, and reformatted the tag pages. By the time you read this, the various tags that should be part of Charlottesville should be!

Please feel free to login to the site with your OpenID and start cleaning some tags up!

Tags are now properly microformatted as Tags!

A somewhat odd title, but what I mean is that the various links to tags in HighTechCville now have an extra attribute in the url:

rel ='tag'


That extra piece of markup is an example of Microformatting, which is an attempt to add machine readable meaning to dynamic content. If you look at Matt Dawson’s you will see that he is tagged with CSS. The URL is marked up like this:

<a href="/search/tag/CSS" id="CSS" rel="tag">CSS</a>


Now, any search engine or other tool will know that CSS is a tag. The interesting wrinkle is that the value for the tag is now what is the text of the link, but the end of the url! So in the below example the tag is CSS, not I Love CSS:


<a href="/search/tag/CSS" id="CSS" rel="tag">I Love CSS</a>


To learn more about the rel-tag microformat, visit the microformat.org page. Also, to easily see what rel-tag are defined on a page, use this little JavaScript Validator

A big thanks to Michael Herndon for bringing up the use of the rel-tag!

The next step is to find a real use for rel-tag! Technorati uses tags heavily because they index lots of blog content. However, HighTechCville isn’t a blog, so we’ll see if this extra meaning gets reused!

Moving up to Rails 2.1! See events in your Timezone!

So I finally wanted to sort out a lot of the timezone issues that have been in HTC. Things like an event being imported at 2 PM EST, but stored in the database as 2 PM GMT! Which is 5 hours off!

Rails 2.1 offers a couple of features that will simplify the HTC codebase including:

• Timezone support, and make comparing dates and time easier
• Built in support for “scoped” data, like show me all folks opted out, or opted in to HTC
• Tracking data changes aka “Partial Updates” or “Dirty Objects”. Right now it’s a bit of pain figuring out what data for a Person/Organization has changed, and therefore should be tracked for provenance usage

The upgrade has been the usual battle, partly caused by trying to do it on a new laptop so I had to install all the prerequisties, but also because many of the plugins I use now have moved from SVN to GIT, and so I need new software to handle that!

Some of the changes are:

• Update strip_attributes
• Install Git
• Update Rspec and Rspec Rails plugins
• Tweak specs since I moved from 1.0.8 to 1.1.4
• Remove scope_out plugin

Launch of HighTechCville to Neon Guild Members

Cross posted from http://www.opensourceconnections.com/2008/09/10/hightechcvilleneon-guild-91508/

I’ll be presenting HighTechCville to the Neon Guild next Monday, September 15.

I’ve been looking forward to this for months because most of the people information in HighTechCville comes from the Neon Guild public membership database. My initial success in finding Communities of Interest came about by looking at the over 200 people in the Neon Guild and finding 8 folks who were all technical writer folks! I would never have guess that there are enough people in the Neon Guild who do technical writing to do a group dinner together!

See you’all there!

Here are directions from Debra Weiss:

Location:
Inova Solutions
110 Avon Street
Charlottesville, VA 22902

Directions from downtown Cville:
Take Market Street E to Ninth/Avon St, turn right.
Go over the bridge, get in the left lane.
Look for Spudnuts on the left.
Turn Left at Spudnuts, and then another immediate left.
Follow around, you’ll see a large brick building. That’s Inova.
Go around to the front of the building and park.
Take the elevator to the second floor. We’re in the café.

URI’s for Event reduces duplication?

CalendarSwamp is one of my favorite blogs, and a recent post about handling duplicate events made me wonder about using Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI’s) to track an event. If microformats like hCal supported some sort of unique identifier built on URI’s, then if you see two events that are slightly different, but share a URI, then you know where to go for the canonical information.

HighTechCville is starting to grow enough that we will have duplicate events listed, and if we pull in an event from a feed, and it’s later updated, say the date changed, then it’s a challenge to figure out which differences to update your data from.

I strongly disagree with Scott’s comment that maybe Yahoo or Eventful or Facebook be THE registry of events:

Eventful has more than 7 million future events in its database. If Eventful opened that up in a special way that’s queryable by anybody, Eventful could issue a unique identifier. Yahoo’s Max Engel, who was also at this session, notes that Digg already checks for duplication of news postings. Maybe Eventful could do the same thing for events.

I think any system that is based on centralized registries is doomed to failure, and instead we need to support having multiple sources of data, ie use URI’s. However, if Eventful is one among many data providers providing a unique identifier that is a URI, then more power to them!

My take on multiple sources of data, with URI’s pointing to the source, means that people can make a decision on who they trust for the real “canonical” data. A single event, say an opera show may be listed on multiple services, so you might trust the URI that points to the Seattle Opera’s homepage the most, followed by maybe a pointer to Eventful’s record of the opera show.

And I think hCal is the right way of communicating this data around. While hCal is just really getting traction (along with the other microformats) I still think they will be THE way of tying User Generated Content together in the future.

Bot’s are removing profiles!

Folks,

Bill just sent me an email asking why he had asked to remove his profile, when he hadn’t asked to: I did NOT request to be removed. On the other hand, I don’t remember signing up for it, either..

I violated a key rule of web design which is that HTTP GET’s should never delete anything or change anything… Only HTTP POST should change/modfiy your data. So bot’s are attempting to click this link and causing false “Remove your profile” emails to be sent.

I’ve commented out the link and am working on a fix.

Eric

How much RSS is Too Much RSS?

I realized that while showing the blog feed inline is nice, most people read blogs via some other tool that consumes RSS feeds. So, if I want people to know when changes are made, I should add a RSS feed icon. However, that makes me start wondering, should everything be an RSS feed? Like say the events page? Or how about for an individual person you can see an RSS feed of data changes being made? What do you think??? Am I risking RSS feed overload?

Self service removal of profiles!

Since HighTechCville soft launched in January, I’m very happy to say we’ve only had 3 people request that their profile be removed. But, I still get 1 every 5 weeks or so, and each time I have to tweak the database. So today I did a bit of housekeeping by adding a “Remove Me” link next to each unclaimed profile that allows anyone to request removal.

Ah, but this sounds like an opportunity for malicious folks to delete their arch-enemies in the Cville Geek scene… If HTC has an email registered for a profile, then an email goes to that address with a unique removal code. And if it doesn’t, then you are prompted for some basic personal info (name, phone, email, message) and I can look at that and follow up in real life if required.

Blog articles now displayed in HTC

It seems somewhat self-referenctial, but the posts made on this site(hightechcville.wordpress.com) are now displayed as an RSS feed on the homepage of www.hightechcville.com:

Hello world!

Well, how about Hello Cville!

In an attempt to document the changes and progress that I make with HighTechCville, and provide a forum for comments, I’m going to try and post as things evolve.