Contributed by: Anonymous on Tuesday, June 17 2003 @ 10:57 am EDT
Last modified on
There is a trend towards "semantic web" and distributed repository of content in the web. It is a major change from "website-centric" model. In not so remote times users became members of a community around one website which provided them with ability to publish and ability to form a community: that is to comment each-other's content, to share information in a number of ways. Today this model changes. Ability to publish content is now a commodity. Everyone has access to one or another blogging tool and does not need much technical knowledge. How about sharing information and forming a community? Well, it seems web itself is becoming a community with the help of XML (and xml-based protocols).
A concept of "track-back"[*1] pioneered by Movabletype is a "glue" that ties together *content* of separate websites. After a user publishes an article on his website his software "pings" (or notifies) a number of websites about the fact that the content has changed. Not only that. It provides link to a chink of XML in the article body that can describe the article: topic, url, author etc. So, based on this notice, the remote website can do the following thing:
Now from open content to open functionality. Weblogs are opening up allowding all sorts of applications to communicate with them through XML-RPC (xoops[*3] for example), through a number of standard APIs. This allows posting from other programs and again many other things with content syndication.
I would think this becomes a very important feature of a blog software, and Geeklog should pay attention. So far we are stuck to "website-centric" model. There is huge potential given Geeklog advanced community features.
Finally, some ideas about implementing this. As an intermediate step anyone can use "stand along trackback script[*4] (perl)" from Movabletype. It seems to work with a modified Geeklog template, with standard Geeklog code. I'll try to make a demo in a few days. As to implementing XML-RPC on top of Geeklog, I've came accross an interesting script [*5] with which one can call any method of a PHP class through XML-RPC. Maybe we can use it on top of existing Geeklog? GL2 is a great promise and will have many features but I try make the best of what we have today.