Structured Blogging and Microformats
I blogged previously about Microformats (and mentioned in passing Structured Blogging). I’m glad to be able to say that there really seems to be some momentum building behind this. Structured Blogging is basically an impetus to bring microformats to blogging, and they currently make available plugins for WordPress (which is what I use) and Movable Type. I’m now on the mailing list for Structured Blogging and have slowly been reading through the source code of the plugin and the microformat descriptions to see where I can contribute.
Sadly, I had a devil of a time getting the Structured Blogging WordPress plugin to work properly on Phlogiston, but that seems largely to be due to idiosyncracies with Phlogiston. By contrast it worked flawlessly when I installed it into a local copy of WordPress on my laptop.
The first problem was that the Structured Blogging plugin didn’t play nicely with wpLicense, another WordPress plugin which allows you to cleverly manage the Creative Commons licensing of your blog. (I’ve had to disable it until I find a workaround.) Both use a bunch of common AJAX libraries, such as Prototype and script.aculo.us, and it seems they were somehow treading on each other’s toes despite no warnings showing up in Firefox’s Javascript console.
The second problem was that my hosting service, Positive Internet, who I am generally very happy with despite occasionally grumbling about them, had firewalled all outgoing HTTP requests without telling me. Thanks for that, as it meant all of my Meerkat news feeds were broken on the main DZR pages. Still, despite the fact that they hadn’t told me they’d done this, they were very helpful about opening up particular hosts (by IP address) on a per request basis. Okay, I thought, well in order to get the Structured Blogging plugin working properly I need to get all its requests to Amazon’s Web Services through the firewall. This turned out to be no easy matter, as the IP address of, say xml-uk.amznxslt.com seems to vary—presumably they have some kind of load balancing thing going on. But on top of that their load balancing seems to be flakey, as sometimes I get a 500 Internal Server Error, sometimes a 404 Page Not Found Error, and sometimes I just seem to get redirected (with no 3xx redirection response) to something not allowed by the firewall. Oh, and occassionally it actually works. None of this is the fault of the Structured Blogging plugin, by the way. It just seems to be the fault of Amazon, who I’m sure will fix it eventually, and being behind a firewall that’s a little bit too restrictive.
But I do want to make it plain that the Structured Blogging plugin is very cool, and when Amazon are playing nice it is a joy to use. I do highly recommend it, despite the problems I encountered.
