Tag: Links

A Week After Ada Lovelace Day (ALD09) [en]

[fr] La Journée Ada Lovelace a été un grand succès, avec une participation dépassant les espérances. Je voudrais remercier tout particulièrement ceux et celles qui m'ont choisie comme sujet de leur article pour cette journée: Jean-Christophe, Michel, Graham, Stéphanie, Baud, et Delphine. On se retrouve l'année prochaine!

Oh heck, it’s been a week without a blog post on CTTS again. Maybe one day somebody will write a WordPress plugin to send reminders to over-busy bloggers like me. I had decided to write a post this morning before starting my work for the day, so here we are: a summary-roundup with a few post-event thoughts for Ada Lovelace Day.

First, it was a huge success. Nearly 2000 people signed the pledge. (Not that many have marked it as completed, but to be honest, I almost forgot myself, and a friend of mine had quite a lot of trouble figuring out how to mark her pledge as completed…) 1400 people signed up for the event on Facebook. On the day itself, #ald09 was trending nicely on Twitter (see Twitter search page screenshot). About 1000 people added their blog post to the Ada Lovelace Collection (the database needs cleaning up though, so if you are comfy with databases and have a little time to space, do let us know). Not everybody signed up everywhere, so the real numbers are somewhere in the middle.

I spent the day on Twitter, mainly (and writing my blog post about Marie Curie, in French). I was really impressed with the number of people taking part in ALD09, tweeting and blogging about it — clearly, the event had critical mass in the blogosphere. Many of the women blogged about were unknown to me, proof of how useful it is to sing our unsung heroines of tech and blog about these women who can then become role-models for more of us. I had a great time hopping from blog to blog reading about the Ada Lovelaces of today.

If you’d like to read some posts, the Ada Lovelace Day Collection is of course a great place to start. People have posted links to their posts on Twitter, on the Facebook event wall, in the pledge comments, and you can also go digging in Technorati or Google blogsearch. And if you have to check out only one of the creations for this day, go and look at Sydney Padua‘s web comic about Ada Lovelace, part 1 and part 2. I guarantee you’ll like it!

I’d like to thank Suw for having the brilliant idea behind Ada Lovelace Day, and organizing it. I’d also like to thank those of you who picked me as their “woman to blog about” on Ada Lovelace Day — I’m very honoured, humbled, happy, proud, and a little embarrassed. So, a particular thanks to Jean-Christophe, Michel, Graham, Stéphanie, Baud, Delphine, who chose me for Ada Lovelace Day, alone or alongside others. Thanks also to Henriette, Lyonel, and Luis who have included me in their posts and lists for ALD09.

See you next year!

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Ressources for Parents and Teachers (ISL Talks on Social Networking) [en]

[fr] Quelques liens, points de départ pour mes deux conférences plus tard dans la journée (parents et enseignants, au sujet des adolescents et des réseaux sociaux comme Facebook).

I’m giving two talks today at the [ISL](http://www.isl.ch/), one for teachers and another for parents, about teenagers and social networking (that the request was specifically for “social networking” makes me happy, because we’re finally moving away from the whole “blog” thing). I think we’re moving away further and further from the “internet as library” metaphor, and the “internet as city/village” image is the one that most people are starting to have.

I have already gathered many links with useful information all over the place, but I think it’s a good thing to collect some of them here for easier access. If you’re reading this not long after I posted it, you’ll find a whole series of quotes in [my Tumblr](http://steph.tumblr.com/), too.

**General starting-points**

– my bookmarks tagged [teens](http://del.icio.us/steph/teens), [youth](http://del.icio.us/steph/youth), [fear](http://del.icio.us/steph/fear), [digitalyouth](http://del.icio.us/steph/digitalyouth), [edublogging](http://del.icio.us/steph/edublogging) (click on “related tags” at the top right of each page to explore more)
– search Wikipedia for [Bebo](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bebo), [Facebook](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook), [MySpace](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySpace), etc
– search [digital youth on Google](http://www.google.com/search?q=digital+youth) for educational resources and research
– visit [Facebook](http://facebook.com), [MySpace](http://myspace.com) or [skyrock](http://www.skyrock.com/) to explore or create a profile there

**Fear of sexual predators**

This is by large the most important fear linked to teenagers and the internet. Thankfully, it is much exaggerated and no more of concern than fear of predators *offline*. Three starting-points:

– [Predator Panic: Reality Check on Sex Offenders](http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/060516_predator_panic.html)
– [MySpace Banning Sex Offenders: Online Predator Paranoia](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2007/07/25/myspace-banning-sex-offenders-online-predator-paranoia/) (contains relevant quotes and figures from [a 2007 research presentation](http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2007/05/11/just_the_facts.html) one can view/read in full online)
– [My Advice to Parents](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2007/07/25/parents-teenagers-internet-predators-fear/)

**The real issues**

You’ll see that these are much less “newsworthy” than sexual predators.

– privacy (in the sense of revealing too much about yourself or in an inappropriate context, which leads to embarrassement or social problems) — a look at Facebook privacy settings
– permanence of online media
– weakness of anonymity
– misunderstanding of how online interactions affect communication and relationships (“chat effect”, flame wars…)
– [slide-show of a presentation I gave](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2006/10/01/teenagers-and-skyblog-cartigny-powerpoint-presentation/) about the kind of mischief teenagers get upto on blogs (what I managed to lay my hands on, with screenshots — no fear, it’s pretty mild)
– intellectual property (copyright)
– necessary to move away from a model of “education through control” as everything is available at a click of a mouse (age-restricted content like porn, shopping, gambling)
– rumors, hoaxes and urban legends (use [snopes.com](http://snopes.com/) to debunk them)
– bullying and many other unpleasant online phenomenons are also offline phenomenons, but sometimes less visible to adults; the core issue does not change — if these problems are addressed properly offline, then they will also be online
– [cyberaddiction](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2007/03/06/technological-overload-or-internet-addiction/) is not common at all, despite what some articles might want to have you believe — unhealthy usage of the computer usually is not the problem in itself, but an element of a larger problem which needs to be addressed
– the jury is still out on [gaming](http://del.icio.us/steph/gaming) — though it’s clearly not healthy to be spending *too* much time immersed in interactive virtual worlds when you’re learning to get to grips with reality, it seems that participating in multi-player online games [can have a significant positive impact](http://spotlight.macfound.org/main/entry/gina_svarovsky_thinking_like_an_engineer/#When:19:52:00Z) on ability to work in teams and solve problems creatively

**Other links or comments**

– [Notes of round table discussion with 4 International School teenagers from the Geneva region](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2008/06/12/lift08-david-brown-workshop-teenagers-and-generation-y/)
– [blog of “web2.0-enabled” educator Ewan McIntosh](http://edu.blogs.com/)
– [blog of danah boyd, PhD researcher on youth and digital spaces](http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/)
– tip for teachers present in social networks where students are: make “public” part of profile “school-compatible”, don’t send out friend requests to students, but accept incoming ones (people outside the teaching sphere have similar issues between “personal life” and “business)
– the computer is not the only device which gives access to the living web
– [should parents spy on their kids online? (Facebook)](http://www.viddler.com/steph/videos/3/)
– a good book for parents: [Totally Wired: What Teens and Tweens Are Really Doing Online](http://www.amazon.com/Totally-Wired-Tweens-Really-Online/dp/0312360126)
– beyond teenagers, into business (there are many, but two pointers): [How Blogging Brings Dialogue to Corporate Communications](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2007/09/24/how-blogging-brings-dialogue-to-corporate-communications/), and [The Cluetrain Manifesto](http://cluetrain.com/book.html), a book that gives you the bigger picture

I will probably add to this article later on, following the requests made during the talks. If you want to suggest a topic or ask a question, feel free to do so in the comments.

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Bunny's Language Linker: New WordPress Plugin [en]

[fr] Un nouveau plugin WordPress que je viens d'écrire. Celui-ci vous permet de gérer les liens entre pages équivalentes de deux versions linguistiques d'un site. Par exemple, si vous avez http://stephanie-booth.com/en et http://stephanie-booth.com/fr (deux installations WordPress séparées!), le plugin vous aidera à faire en sorte qu'il y ait des liens entre http://stephanie-booth.com/en/about et http://stephanie-booth.com/fr/a-propos.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I’m proud to announce the WordPress plugin [Bunny’s Language Linker](/code/language-linker.tgz) ([zip](/code/language-linker.zip), [phps](/code/language-linker.phps)).

I’ve been wanting to write this plugin for ages, and I’ve finally done it this evening. This is a plugin for people who have a WordPress site with content duplicated in more than one language, like I’m going to have with [stephanie-booth.com](http://stephanie-booth.com). For example, you have an “about” page in English, and another “about” page in German. This plugin helps you create and manage links between such “sister” pages. (“Pages”, not “posts”. It doesn’t work with posts at all.)

The plugin adds an extra field to the page editing form, inviting you to input the *page slug* of the sister page:

Bunny's Language Linker - Admin view

The screenshot is a bit small, but there on the right, there is a little box with “a-propos” — the slug of the French sister page. It works with more than one other language, too. You just need to edit the settings in the plugin file to specify which languages you’re playing with (instructions are in the plugin file). If I had sites in 3 other languages, say French, Spanish, and German, my settings line in the plugin file would look like this:

$bll_other_languages=array(‘fr’, ‘es’, ‘de’);

And the little box would provide three different fields for the page slugs of the different localized sites. (OK, I’m making this sound complicated, sorry.)

The plugin then automatically adds links to the sister pages you’ve indicated. Here’s what it could look like:

Bunny's Language Linker - Page view

There’s a readme file with the plugin which will give you some more details. I’ll soon have a client site in production using that plugin, so if these explanations weren’t very clear, hopefully the demonstration will help.

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Google Shared Stuff: First Impressions [en]

[fr] Google Shared Stuff, nouveau venu dans l'arène du social bookmarking. Pas convaincue qu'ils aient pour le moment quelque chose de plus à apporter que leurs concurrents déjà bien établis.

I’ve briefly tried [Google Shared Stuff](http://www.google.com/s2/sharing/stuff?user=107197629738478684722), and here are my first impressions. I’m one of those horrible people who always see what the problems are instead of what’s good, so I’ll just say as a preamble to the few gripes I’m raising here that overall, it looks neat, shiny, and it works roughly as it should.

#### Profile Photo

Your Shared Stuff -- Upload Picture

– **nice:** I can choose photos from various sources
– **not so nice:** “The photo you specify here will be used across all Google products and services which display your public photo, including Google Talk and Gmail.”

I already have a photo in my Gmail/Google Talk profile. Why can’t you use it? If I upload a photo here, is it going to overwrite it? Need more info, folks.

#### Private vs. Public

This is my shared stuff:

Your Shared Stuff -- As I See It

Shared stuff can be public or private. Above is the page as *I, the account owner* see it. Below is the page that the public sees:

Shared Stuff from Stephanie Booth -- As Everyone Sees It

See the missing link? (Not difficult, there are only two in total.) “Hah, you’ll say, you made the second link private! That’s why the public can’t see it!” Try again:

Trying - And Failing - To Share CTTS

The link was shared as “public”. This is obviously broken in some way, folks. Please fix it.

#### Email/Share Bookmarklet

The bookmarklet is nice, but nothing revolutionary:

Sharing Bookmarklets and Buttons

What about the sharing pane? It looks very much like the del.icio.us sharing pane, but more cluttered. The nice thing is that it lets you choose a photo to illustrate your share (like FaceBook does, for example):

Google Shared Stuff Email / Share Bookmarklet Pane

del.icio.us Sharing Pane

Besides being less cluttered, the del.icio.us pane has a huge advantage over the Google one: it’s a resizable window. Really really appreciated when a link you clicked (or a page opened by Skitch) uses that window for the new tab.

One interesting feature of this sharing pane is that it allows you to share to other social bookmarking services — not just Google’s. That’s nice. Open. No lock-in. But… isn’t it a bit pointless when I can access the del.icio.us bookmarking pane in just one click instead of three?

Google Shared Stuff Bookmarklet Pane

#### What I Wish For

**One-Click**

I’d like a one-click bookmarklet which works exactly like the “Share” button in Google Reader:

Google Reader Share Button

Clicking the “Share” button adds the post to the stream of my [Shared Items page/feed](http://www.google.com/reader/shared/09081754150283874260). Painless. I can easily add them to my sidebar:

Google Shared Items on CTTS

However, now that I’m using [the Google Reader “Next” bookmarklet](http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2007/06/doing-shuffle.html) more, I find that I’m in Google Reader less, so something like a “Share Bookmarklet” (Google Reader-style) would come in really handy.

The main point here is that to share something in Google Reader, I click once. With Shared Stuff or del.icio.us, I click at least twice.

**[Holes in Buckets!](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2007/02/13/please-make-holes-in-my-buckets/)**

So here we are. Again. Make all this stuff communicate, will ya? **When I share stuff in Google Reader, I’d love it to be pushed to my del.icio.us account automatically, with a preset tag or tags (“shareditem” for example).** It annoys me to have links I’ve saved [in del.icio.us](http://del.icio.us/steph) **and** in Shared Items (Google Reader). It’s not as bad as it was when you couldn’t search Google Reader, but still.

Am I going to add yet another list of “shared stuff” to my online ecosystem? That’s the question. Make that bookmarklet share to Google Reader Shared Items, and let me push all that to del.icio.us, and you’ll really have something that adds value for me.

Otherwise, I’m not sure where Shared Stuff will fit in my social bookmarking life.

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Response to Yvette: Loving Links in Posts Through Tabbed Browsing. [en]

[fr] Comment lire un texte plein d'hyperliens? Le mieux, à mon avis, c'est d'ouvrir les liens dans des onglets séparés en utilisant un navigateur comme Firefox. On peut ainsi facilement y jeter un coup d'oeil sans perdre de vue notre lecture principale, et y revenir plus tard si désir il y a.

Je pense qu'il est de la nature du web de nous disperser. Je commence à écrire un billet, en consultant mon matériel source, je me retrouve à répondre à un commentaire, et pour ce faire à mettre en ligne une saisie d'écran sur Flickr... J'utilise depuis peu un "mind map" pour me souvenir de ce que je suis en train de faire. Cela m'évite de perdre de vue ma tâche principale quand je suis plongée dans les ramifications des tâches secondaires qui en dépendent.

The best way to deal with [reading links in a blog entry](http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/lawgeek/2006/09/11/day-one/#comment-4), IMHO, is to open them in tabs in the background. Then you can either go to the link page straight away to look at it, come back to the blog post, and read the linked page more in detail later.

To work with tabs, you’ll need a browser like Firefox, which you can download and install for free. Once you’re in Firefox, instead of simply clicking the links you want to visit, ctrl-click them (or command-click if you’re on a mac, like me).

Here’s a picture of what it can look like.

I find that there is something in the nature of the web that encourages one to get sidetracked. It’s a web, not a road! For example, I started [writing a blog post](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2006/09/13/harvard-law-in-second-life/), came to read this page (as “source” material), decided I was going to reply to Yvette’s comment, then halfway through thought “hey, I should show a screenshot of what tabbed browsing looks like!”, so took a screenshot, saved it as jpg, uploaded it to Flickr, added a few notes to it…

I sometimes find it useful to keep a mindmap current with what I’m doing, when the “sidetracks” start becoming “tracks” in their own right. In this case it’s not too hard for me to remember I’m actually trying to write a blog post (my main task), because the “secondary tasks” (visiting links, putting a screenshot on Flickr) are things I’m comfortable doing.

And finally, now, because this comment is becoming really long, I’m going to make it into a blog post and publish it on my blog instead. See how things go on the web?

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Links in WordPress Comments not Linking [en]

[fr] Les URLs dans les commentaires de ce blog ne sont pas transformés en liens, alors qu'ils le devraient. Appel aux idées pour résoudre ce problème.

[Lazyweb, hear my call!](http://lazyweb.org)

When people type URLs in my comments, they aren’t converted into links. WordPress should do this, but it’s not doing it. I don’t know where to start troubleshooting.

Suggestions and solutions will be thankfully tried out 🙂

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Should I sell it? [en]

[fr] Est-ce que je devrais vendre mon blog?

Google et les noms [fr]

Citer le nom de quelqu’un sur un blog n’est pas un acte anodin. Sommes-nous préparés à  la responsabilité qui va avec le pouvoir de la parole publique? Quelques exemples de situations… embarrassantes.

[en] Mentioning the name of somebody in one's blog can have embarrassing consequences. People with less web presence than the blogger might find their official site behind a blog post that mentions them in passing when they google their name. How do you know if people will be happy to get your google juice or not? Bloggers are always happy with google juice... but what about the non-blogging crowd?

As people with the power to express themselves in public, bloggers have responsabilities they might not be well-prepared for. Here are a few embarrassing experiences I made: for exemple, unintentionally google-bombing people I had no hard feelings against, or not giving google juice when it would have been appreciated.

Tagging adds to the difficulty for the blogger, as tags are often chosen for private reasons, but as they are links that are indexed, they have an impact on the online presence of other people when they are of the firstname+name form.

Depuis quelque temps, je médite sur la responsabilité du blogueur qui nomme dans son blog d’autres personnes que lui, particulièrement si celui-ci a passablement de “google juice”, comme on dit en anglais. En effet, si je nomme une personne dans mon blog, il y a de fortes chances que mon article se retrouve en position assez proéminente [lorsque l’on recherche le nom](http://www.google.com/search?q=luc-olivier+erard “Un exemple de ce phénomène.”) de cette personne.

Si vous [cherchez mon nom dans Google](http://www.google.com/search?q=stephanie+booth), la grande majorité des liens sur les deux ou trois premières pages m’appartiennent — je suis responsable de la présence de mon nom dans ces pages. C’est le cas, bien entendu, parce que je suis quelqu’un qui a une très forte présence en ligne et une vie sociale “internautique” importante. (Je rassure les lecteurs qui ne me connaîtraient pas assez… ma vie sociale “non-internautique” se porte également très bien!)

Ce “pouvoir” que me donne mon blog peut être utile lorsque quelqu’un désire obtenir plus de visibilité sur le net (hop! un petit lien, ça donne un coup de pouce au référencement d’un site qui se lance, par exemple), mais c’est surtout [une petite bombe](http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardement_Google) qui peut se déclencher de façon involontaire si je ne fais pas particulièrement attention. Par exemple, [je suis allée mercredi à  un concert que j’ai apprécié](http://steph.wordpress.com/2005/12/08/fan-experience/ “En anglais, dans mon blog personnel.”). J’évite de mettre le nom de l’artiste dans le titre de mon billet, de peur qu’il n’arrive ce qui arrive à  l’école d’arts martiaux dans laquelle je m’entraîne: [en cherchant le nom de l’école dans Google](http://www.google.com/search?q=reighikan+dojo), mon article est placé avant le site officiel de l’école. C’est un peu embarrassant!

Il y a encore bien pire: reprenons le cas de l’artiste de mercredi, dont j’écoute les chansons régulièrement depuis quelque temps. J’ai un compte [LastFM](http://www.last.fm/user/Steph-Tara/), qui établit des statistiques sur les morceaux que j’écoute avec iTunes. Je publie sur la première page de Climb to the Stars la liste des derniers morceaux écoutés; cette liste renvoie aux pages consacrées aux morceaux en question sur LastFM (par exemple: [We Will Rock You (Queen)](http://www.last.fm/music/Queen/_/We+Will+Rock+You). On peut y lire combien de personnes ont écouté le morceau, et encore bien d’autres choses fort sympathiques. Si on cherche [le nom de l’artiste (LB)](http://www.google.com/search?q=laurent+brunetti) dans Google, on voit que [la page LastFM qui lui est consacrée](http://www.last.fm/music/Laurent+Brunetti) (et qui existe par ma faute, si on veut) sort droit derrière son site officiel. Limite embarrassant, également!

Donc, je ne mets pas son nom complet dans ce billet. Premièrement, cet article ne lui est pas consacré en tant qu’artiste, ce qui m’embarrasserait triplement s’il finissait bien placé dans Google pour une recherche sur son nom. Deuxièmement, mon [Cheese Sandwich Blog](http://steph.wordpress.com/) est bien plus récent que Climb to the Stars, moins bien référencé, et avec un peu de chance il le restera, puisqu’il est consacré à  mon petit quotidien plutôt qu’à  des questions d’importance nationale comme celle que vous êtes en train de lire maintenant. Une mention “en passant” du nom de LB dans le corps d’un article ne porte pas à  conséquence sur mon “petit blog”, mais qu’en serait-il dans celui-ci? Je ne veux pas prendre le risque.

L’expérience me rend prudente. Il y a quelques mois, on m’a demandé de [retirer un nom de mon blog](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2005/06/08/incident-diplomatique/). La personne en question avait fait des photos de moi pour [l’article dans Migros Magazine](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2005/01/07/article-dans-migros-magazine/), et m’avait gentiment autorisé à  les [mettre en ligne sur Flickr](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2005/02/12/migros-magazine-photos-on-flickr/). Comme je considère qu’il faut citer ses sources et l’annoncer lorsqu’on utilise le travail de quelqu’un d’autres, j’avais consciencieusement mis son nom dans mon article et également [dans les tags des photos en question](http://flickr.com/photos/bunny/tags/migrosmagazine). Ce que je n’avais pas prévu, c’est que ces photos, qui ne sont pas forcément représentatives de son travail, et qu’elle m’a laissé à  bien plaire mettre dans mon album photos en ligne, se retrouveraient en première position lorsque l’on cherchait [son nom dans Google](http://www.google.com/search?q=vanessa+p%C3%BCntener). Ma présence en ligne étant plus forte que la sienne, j’ai littéralement fait mainmise sur son nom sans m’en rendre compte. Bien entendu, j’ai immédiatement fait de mon mieux pour réparer les choses quand elle me l’a demandé (à  juste titre!), et si j’en crois ce que je vois dans Google, les choses sont maintenant rentrées dans l’ordre. Néanmoins, expérience embarrassante (j’ai déjà  utilisé ce mot aujourd’hui?)

La généralisation des [folksnomies](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy “En anglais.”) pour catégoriser et classer l’information, à  l’aide de [“tags” ou “étiquettes”](http://technorati.com/help/tags.html), ajoute encore des occasions de commettre des impairs malgré soi. Sur [Flickr](http://flickr.com/ “Merci de prononcer comme “flicker” et non à  la suisse-allemande…”), par exemple, il est souvent d’usage d’accoler [un tag nom+prénom](http://flickr.com/photos/tags/stephaniebooth “Le résultat en ce qui me concerne.”) lorsqu’une photo représente quelqu’un. Mais lorsque je mets en ligne [une série de photos passablement floues prises après le concert dont j’ai parlé](http://www.flickr.com/photos/bunny/sets/1539556/), est-ce que je vais mettre le nom et le prénom de chaque personne sur chacune des photos? Du coup, j’ai commencé à  être un peu plus parcimonieuse dans ma distribution de tags: nom+prénom pour un petit nombre de photos, et un prénom ou un diminutif pour les autres. Le problème avec les tags, c’est que je les utilise surtout pour pouvoir m’y retrouver dans les 4000+ photos que j’ai mises en ligne. Mais en même temps, les tags sont également des liens, et sont également indexés par Google. Ma façon d’organiser mes photos va avoir un impact sur la présence en ligne d’autres personnes. Potentiellement embarrassant quand il s’agit de noms de personnes!

Comment peut-on deviner si une personne donnée préfère que son nom soit mis en avant sur le web, ou pas? Dans le doute, mieux vaut s’abstenir — c’est le message que je tente de faire passer aux ados [lors de mes conférences](http://stephanie-booth.com/offre/conférences/). Ces conférences, en passant, c’est très bien pour moi: à  force de répéter les choses aux gens, je suis forcée d’y réfléchir, et des fois je me rends compte que ma position à  certains sujets est en mouvement…

Cependant… s’abstenir n’est pas une solution sans risques. Plus récemment, alors que je préparais un site dans lequel on parlait du parcours de quelques personnes, j’ai justement évité de mettre en ligne des pages vides (ou presque) ayant pour titre le nom de quelqu’un lorsque je n’avais rien de précis à  y mettre. Ce que je n’avais pas prévu, c’est que l’absence de page signifiait également l’absence du nom dans ce qui ressemble à  la “table des matières” du site et créait un déséquilibre dans la présence en ligne des différents acteurs — ce qui m’a été reproché (à  juste titre également).

A moins que la personne nommée ne soit un blogueur, je dirais que mettre un nom dans un billet est une chose délicate. Plus ou moins délicate, selon que le nom est dans le corps du billet, sur du texte lié, dans le titre du billet, ou pire, dans le titre de la page. Plus ou moins délicat également selon la visibilité du blog dans lequel c’est fait.

Les gens vont-ils nous en vouloir d’avoir cité leur nom? Vont-ils nous en vouloir de ne pas l’avoir fait, ou pas assez? Il n’est pas toujours possible de vérifier auparavant avec la personne en question. De plus, même si on vérifie, la personne est-elle pleinement des conséquences de l’une ou l’autre route? Une vérification sérieuse ne pourra manquer de s’accompagner d’une explication du fonctionnement du référencement, ce qui risque de crisper certains… à  tort.

Voici à  mon sens démontrée une nouvelle fois l’utilité d’une forte présence en ligne. Vous pouvez mettre mon nom où vous voulez, ça ne me dérange pas, car je sais que sur Google, c’est moi qui possède mon nom.

Ce que démontre également ce genre de situation, c’est la responsabilité qui va avec ce que j’appelle la “parole publique”. La parole publique est un pouvoir, et avant internet, ce pouvoir était en principe limité aux personnes dont c’était le métier (journalistes, politiciens, écrivains). Avec internet, ce pouvoir se démocratise, et c’est une bonne chose. Mais nous sommes peu préparés à  la responsabilité qui va avec. Avec la façon dont fonctionnent les moteurs de recherche comme Google, on ne peut plus écrire sans avoir présent à  l’esprit les conséquences que cela pourrait avoir pour le référencement d’autres sites.

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MagpieRSS Caching Problem [en]

I have a caching problem using the PHP MagpieRSS library to parse feeds. Any help welcome.

[fr] J'ai un problème de cache utilisant la librarie PHP MagpieRSS. Toute aide bienvenue!

I’ve been stuck on a problem with MagpieRSS for weeks. This is a desperate call for help.

At the top of my sidebar, I have two lists of links which are generated by parsing RSS feeds: Delicious Linkball and Recently Playing. They don’t update.

If I delete the cache files, the script creates them all right. If I keep an eye on the cache files, I see their timestamp is updated every hour, but not the contents. I’ve uploaded the PHP code which parses the feeds.

Any suggestions welcome. I’m not far from giving up and setting cron jobs to regularly delete the cache files. Thanks in advance.

Update 13:00: The Recently Playing list updates once an hour (when the cache is “force-refreshed”), it seems — but not the Delicious Links one.

14:00: Some progress: http://del.icio.us/rss/steph/ doesn’t seem to update unless I clear the cache on my machine. (Huh?) http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/rdf/history/Steph-Tara, on the other hand, is — but why does the cache update only once an hour, and not each time the feed is modified?

15:00: crschmidt just pointed out that the last-modified date on my del.icio.us RSS feed was horribly wrong. Might be something that was done at the time when my caching problems were causing me to nastily abuse the poor del.icio.us server. I’ve sent a mail to Joshua to see if indeed this could be the problem.

15:50: Still thanks to the excellent crschmidt, I’ve finally understood how this caching is supposed to work. (Yes, I know, we’re starting to have lots of edits on this post.) There is a setting which determines how old the cache must be to become “stale”. As long as the cache is not stale, any requests made will use the cache directly, without pulling the feed in question. If the cache is stale, a request is sent to the server hosting the feed to check if it has changed since it was last accessed. If it has changed (i.e., if Last-Modified is more recent than the cache), it gets a fresh version of the feed. Otherwise, nothing happens (the cache age is just “reset”).

Now, for a LinkLog service like del.icio.us, setting the cache age to a couple of hours is more than enough as far as I’m concerned. However, for a list of recently played songs, every few minutes should be better. MagpieRSS seems to allow this to be set on a per-call basis by defining MAGPIE_CACHE_AGE, but it doesn’t seem to be working for me. Another variable is set on a per-installation basis: var $MAX_AGE = 1800; — but changing that won’t really help, as I want different values for Recently Playing and Delicious Links. Suggestions on this secondary problem welcome too!

16:40: After exchanging a few e-mails with Joshua, it seems that there was indeed a problem with the Last-Modified date on my feed. Not quite sure how it came about (somebody requesting the feed when I hadn’t posted in some time?), but it should be fixed now. I’ve cleared my cache files to see if my 30-minute “stale time” is working or not.

17:30: (See how I’m updating every 50 minutes? Freaky.) So, the not-so-nice things about PHP constants is that they are constant and (?) local to the function in which they are defined. (Not sure I go that bit right, but.) Important thing here is to note that MAGPIE_CACHE_AGE can’t be used to set different “stale cache” ages for different feeds. The stale cache age needs to be set at the bottom of rss_fetch.inc (the only place I hadn’t touched) — so my cache is now refreshing every half-hour. (Which is a bit too often for del.icio.us, and not often enough for Audioscrobblers.) oqp says he can write a wrapper to get around this limitation — I’m waiting impatiently for him to do it!

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