blog.no-panic.at

• AJAX Matters Blog » AJAX Tutorials
  A comprehensive list of AJAX tutorials from around the web

Just a quick note:
Feed Rinse just made their premium service free.
I haven’t tried it yet, because you had to pay for the advanced features. I’ll maybe give it a go now

In this post I’ll briefly describe the steps I took to implement hAtom into my Wordpress template.
hAtom is a draft specification for a Microformat to incorporate the common Atom format into HTML. Marking up your blog with those desciptive elements gives you several advantages but more on this later.

To make Wordpress hAtom ready you have to edit the file named ‘Main Index Template’. The easiest way to do this is to go into the Wordpress Admin and then to ‘Presentation’ -> ‘Theme Editor’.
This file includes the main ‘Wordpress Loop’ that displays all of your posts. To add the hAtom Microformat here the only thing you have to do, is to set some HTML class attributes.

(Note: All examples taken from the “WordPress Default” template, edits are in bold)

1. Find the div that has the id “content” and add a class “hfeed”. It’s ok for elements to have more than one class name. So if there’s already a class attribute there, just seperate them with a space. This marks the beginning of the Atom ‘feed’.
   Now it should look like this:
   <div id="content" class="narrowcolumn hfeed">
2. Next we have to define a single entry. For this to happen I choose to include the “hentry” class to the alrady existent “post” div.
   <div class="post hentry" id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">
3. To set the post title correctly I simply added a class=”entry-title” to the link surrounding the post title.
   <a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>" class="entry-title">
4. Now comes the tricky part. To have a correct date format for the point of time the entry was postet we have to change the date display from the following
   <?php the_time('Y-m-d H:i') ?>;
   to
   <abbr class="published" title="<?php the_time(’Y-m-d\TH:i:s\Z’) ?>"><?php the_time(’Y-m-d H:i’) ?></abbr>
   This setting only applies if you are posting in CET. Please consult the datetime Design Patterns on the Microformats Website and the PHP date() function to adapt the part in the ‘title’ of the ‘abbr’ tag to your timezone.
5. Now find a tag surrounding the Wordpress function named the_content() (or just put a div around there) and add the class “entry-content”.
   <div class="entry entry-content">
<?php the_content(’Read the rest of the entry.’); ?>
</div>

That’s basically it. You could of course add several more tags and classes for categories for instance. The good thing is that Microformats are nice to each other, so if you already have some Technorati tags in your blog that feature the ‘rel=”tag”‘ attribute, they will be incorporated in the hAtom format automatically.

So the question is now, how can you take advantage of your new semantic additions to your blog?
Well, as mentioned in my previous post about Microformats there is tails for Firefox but you can do all sorts of crazy stuff like converting your hAtom posts to a real Atom feed using the awesome webapp Luke Arno made: hatom2atom.
And that brings us to a whole new level. I’m asking myself why do I need a seperate feed that features the very same content that’s already displayed on my HTML pages? That’s where the magic of Microformats sets in. Their nature being that they are humans first and machines second I can now have both served just from one source.
Having Atom feeds for all of my blog posts also enables them to be used more widely for instance I can think of a few situations where an Atom feed of my archived posts could come in very handy. I’m sure you can think of several more ways to use this.

• Smashing Magazine | Blog Archive » CSS-Based Forms: Modern Solutions
  A nice list of examples on what you can do with HTML forms these days.
  (tags: ajax css design tips)

Today I took the time to ‘microformatize‘ my blog a little bit. Each post is now fitted with an hCard for my person and the About page got a little bit of extra markup as well.
I now also try and use Microformats whenever I refer to other people, organisations or if I ever post about events and such.

So this is an ongoing process. Expect to find more and more Microformats here in the future!

One way to take advantage of the Microformats on this page and others which are using Microformats, is to install the great Tails Firefox extension.

Inspired by a blog post from Adrian Sutton and the comments beneath it I am now documenting how I train Spamassassin from within Apple Mail.
The setup is fairly straight forward but implies that you at least have a working Spamassassin instance running somewhere and know your way around UNIX a little bit. So I’m just going to explain the rough details to get you going.

1. Switch on the bayes database for SA. On my Debian box this is done via putting the line use_bayes 1 in the file /etc/spamassassin/local.cf. After that restart SA (eg. /etc/init.d/spamassassin restart)
2. Let SA put all your Junk Messages in the folder “Junk” in your IMAP Account
3. Let Apple Mail put all your Junk Messages in the folger “Junk” in your IMAP Account
4. Install a little Cronjob to have SA learn Spam from your Junk folder and Ham (=not Spam) from your Inbox. The following is my script:
   echo "----learn spam----"
sa-learn --spam /var/opt/vmail/no-panic.at/flo/Maildir/.Junk/*
echo "----learn ham----"
sa-learn --ham /var/opt/vmail/no-panic.at/flo/Maildir/*
   Note: those are just 4 lines, the blog just wrapps the two ’sa-learn’ lines because of limited horizontal space. Of course you have to change the path to the real location of your ‘Junk’ folder.
5. Last thing to do is installing the cronjob. Mine looks like this:
   0 */4 * * * /path_to_your/script > /dev/null 2>&1

Actually my setup involves learning from 4 different user accounts, who all use Apple Mail just to get more Ham- & Spam-volume faster.
I hope this is helpfull to you. It works perfectly on my server for over a month now.