captsolo weblog

Recently I did some changes to improve your experience when visiting this site.

First of them was getting rid of comment spam. Now the site is reasonably spam-free and it is safe to subscribe to comments feeds and have a more dynamic way to follow conversations:

- comments in RSS - comments in Atom

You may have been wondering why the number of post comments in a recent posts list was often much higher than the number of comments a post has. No, I was not inflating it to make those posts more interesting. That number also included a number of comments rejected by the spam filter. Fixed - now shows only a number of published comments.

That's all for the comments.

Power-user's tip: subscribe to a category-specific posts feed.

First you need to find out the category id (see below). Go to any invidual post page on the blog and find a list of categories in the right-hand sidebar (it's hidden on the front page, for simplicity). Look at the category link URL and find the category number at the end of it: "?cat=number".

Once found, add it to the URL of the main posts feed. E.g. Semantic Web is category #3 and its feed URL is: http://captsolo.net/info/xmlsrv/rdf.php?blog=1&cat=3

There are some more interesting things you can do with per-category feeds:

- Combine multiple categories together = "Social Software" + "Semantic Web" would be: http://captsolo.net/info/xmlsrv/rdf.php?blog=1&cat=3,82

- Aggregate sub-categories (automatically done by b2evolution). A category feed will contain posts that appear in the main category or in any of its sub-categories. E.g., a feed for "My Folder" also contains "Art", "Presentations", ...: http://captsolo.net/info/xmlsrv/rdf.php?blog=1&cat=41

This is quite powerful (and been in b2evolution for years). Main downside is that you can't easily guess that these feeds are available or find out what category identifiers to use. That's where we would benefit from a structured category hierarchy made available in RDF using SKOS (and integrated into the SIOC profile of the blog).