Now this is damn clever: using Google searches to trend flu outbreaks. Google is aggregating flu-related searches into trending where flu outbreaks might be occurring, or about to occur.
So far, knock on wood, the flu trend graph shows low activity for Missouri.
You don't have to wait for Drupal 7 to RDFaificate your Drupal site. I spent yesterday tweaking my space, and if you access the site now with a tool, such as the Semantic Radar Firefox add-on, you'll see all sorts of semantic goodness. I used a combination of plug-ins and theme modifications to make my changes, and will probably add to the overall effect over time.
Read through for the gory details...
Virginia DeBolt has posted another in her series on Women in Technology, this one about Maria Webster from .51. It's a terrific interview, and appreciations to Virginia in her effort to promote more awareness of women in tech.
Maria is an Über geek, with interests that cross the lines from computers to electrical engineering, ham radio, to physics, and all points between. And Tron, which reminded that I hadn't seen this movie in years.
Don't you love it when people take bits and pieces of different words, creating a new word that manages, somehow, to be understandable? A word like RDFaification?
But the RDFa beautification of Drupal is upon us, helped along by writings such as A Roadmap for RDFa in Drupal 7, based, in part, on this previous post and discussion, kicked off by Drupal's Dries Buytaert.
Years ago, we used to talk about the "ugly" serialization of RDF (RDF/XML at the time) and how the serialization technique really didn't matter, because one day, the metadata annotation of a site would be handled automatically via whatever content management tool people used.
Future, meet Drupal.
I'm doing a curriculum outline for a suggested SVG class for the WaSP Education Task Force.
If you were looking for a class on SVG, what would you like it to include? What would you hope to be able to do with SVG, once you came away from the class? Would you be more interested in working with end-user tools that generate SVG, like Inkscape? Or with tools that generate SVG progamatically, such as a PHP library that can create SVG elements given a set of data?
Speaking of learning SVG, I wanted to point you to David Dailey's book on SVG, State of the Art: An SVG Primer, hosted by the W3C. David's included some nice, easy to follow examples, with associated graphics.
Created my first formal Drupal patch, providing an XHTML content type to the Atom module. Once I walked through the module, and the procedure to apply a patch, it really wasn't all that difficult to both create the patch, and submit it for review. And the feed validates, though with a warning because of the object element in the last post.
I was surprised at how easy it was to modify the administration form for the module— a couple of lines of code, and that's it.
I borrowed Jeff Schiller's SVG election map, and added the appropriate "rep" class to Montana, and "dem" class to North Carolina, to preserve Missouri's pristine undecided-to-the end status. Sure is simple to modify an SVG map.
Stuart Langridge's purple map using the same basic map from Wikipedia, but shading the states based on the closeness of the vote. He also provides access to his Python script to generate the map.
That's us, ole too-close-to-call Missouri.
And the NY Times had a great title for an op-ed piece: Missouri Compromised? I can tell you, Missourians are not happy losing official Bellwether status. It's all Nader's fault.
