Seth Ladd's Blog

Restful Routes talks about the new RESTful programming models that are now possible in Rails (now in Edge, soon to be in the released version). In this case, the url /comments/1;approve would be created. The rationale is to use the path to the left of the semicolon for a resource’s identity, and to use the path to the right of the semicolon as a modifier. Frequently this modifier would be an operation that you would perform on the resource, such as approving a comment that requires moderation. This isn't very restful. This modifier hack is just another way to force another verb into the mix. The best way to be more RESTful would be to PUT a representation of the comment with the approval flag set to true. In REST, representations of resources are exchanged. Instead of referencing the URI of the comment, with a verb modifier stuck on the end, send along a representation of the whole comment. Now, you're saying, "But how do I do that in Rails?" This is, of course,

XML.com: What Is RDF has been updated for Summer 2006. The last update was back in 2001.

On the theme of "How to get my del.icio.us links to be useful", I have another idea. Problem: My del.icio.us links are a blackhole, where good links go, never to be retrieved again. Hypothesis: Why are they never able to be retrieved? I believe it's because there is no good way to pull them back out at the moment I need them. Solution: My computer should *know* what I'm doing, and do the search or lookup for me in real time. Google is good for when I need a specific answer to a question. del.icio.us is good for when I don't even know I know the answer. Let me explain. Let's say I'm writing some Ruby on Rails code. As I'm performing Rails related tasks, shouldn't my computer say, "You're writing some Rails migrations. Here's your del.icio.us links related to migrations." Sounds a bit Clippy (It's looks like you're writing a business letter?!), but I think it would be useful. I want those information nuggets (my de

Just thinking about how to get better ROI from my del.icio.us links . I typically put links in there that I want to retrieve later, usually multiple times. I don't put transiently interesting links in there usually, as I know I'll never go back there. I use del.icio.us to store links I know I'll want to refer to again and again. Problem is, del.icio.us is a black hole. I throw stuff in there, and I never return to it. Why? Because the little Google search box in firefox makes it way to easy to just search google. What I need is a single search box, but with the ability to search google and del.icio.us. I want to see my del.icio.us links have very high priority on my google searches. If I can integrate the two databases, then I'd have something special. I'm sure there's a way to do this with a firefox plugin. There real issue is, "How do I know I put something into del.icio.us?" Once it's in there, how do I know I'm even able to retriev

Grand Text Auto » Google’s Norvig Questions Berners-Lee on the Semantic Web closes its post with this excellent quote: Although Berners-Lee closed by encouraging everyone to contribute data that they had in RDF to the Semantic Web, here I am typing up a blog post instead