interface cobalt

My thesis work at the Knowledge Management Research Group at KTH is going to involve the Semantic Web, REST and some JavaScript. Because of that, I’ve been reading up on those technologies. These are some of the books that I’ve been reading:

A Semantic Web Primer by Grigoris Antoniou and Frank van Harmelen is a very good introduction to the Semantic Web for those new to the field. While I used it mainly to make sure that I hadn’t missed anything important, I did gain an improved understanding of some areas. Particularly the chapter on mathematical formulations of the Semantic Web was interesting to me, although perhaps not all that useful for my work.

RESTful Web Services by Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby offers an architecture for RESTful web services: the Resource-Oriented Architecture (ROA). What is and isn’t REST is a much debated topic.  Richardson and Ruby describe what they believe is RESTful and what isn’t. Thanks to their discussions, I was able to form my own opinions on what I consider to be good RESTful web services and what their advantages and limitations are.

JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford explains which features of JavaScript are good, and which are not that good and should be avoided. Everyone who’s programming in JavaScript ought to listen to Crockford (you can watch his talks at YUI Theater). And perhaps everyone who isn’t should listen to him as well; JavaScript is actually a great language once you get past the bad parts.

In order to migrate this weblog from Pebble 2.2 to WordPress 2.3.3, I created a small, quick-and-dirty migration script. And in case anyone else might have use of it, I’m putting it here: pebble-wordpress.py, pebble-wordpress.xsl.

The script requires a Python installation (tested with version 2.5) with 4Suite. Once you have that, follow these steps:

1. In Pebble, export your blog as a ZIP file (this is located under Utilities). Extract all files.
2. In WordPress, manually create all categories and tags that you’re using in Pebble. Lists of these can be found under /blog/categories/ and /blog/tags/. One simple way of creating the categories and tags is to write a new post and add all categories and tags to it.
3. Download the above files (pebble-wordpress.py and pebble-wordpress.xsl) into the same folder. Open pebble-wordpress.py in a text editor and modify the strings at the beginning of the script. If you have several WordPress users, also edit pebble-wordpress.xsl (modify the line beginning with post_author; set the correct user id). Further modifications to the XSL file are necessary if you do not use the default WordPress table names.
4. Run pebble-wordpress.py.
5. Import the newly created file named wordpress-sql.txt into your WordPress database.

I make no guarantees that this will work for your setup. The script does not take Pebble static pages into consideration as I haven’t used any such pages (if you have, feel free to modify the script and send your changes to me).

This weblog has now been migrated to WordPress.

While doing that, I also renamed it: previously known as Erik Isaksson Weblog, the blog is now officially entitled interface cobalt. A bit more fun, don’t you think?