I have only used Zemanta for a short time after it was launched, mainly because it makes stuff too easy. I noticed loads of people linking back to me as a “related” article produced by Zemanta and barely had any extra traffic or decent contextual link backs coming from it. It just shows me that the people that use Zemanta “just click” to be done with their post quickly.

The idea

It got me thinking though, what would be handy is a plugin that can get me contextual links and images and other data that are my images, links and data.

To give an example, Alper writes in this post about some “Street Photography” a friend made. He then posts some photos from that friend but he also links back to a photo from himself that is related to street photography. Why isn’t there a plugin that can automatically provide you links of your own Flickr photos for example that are “probably” related to your current post.

Another example, in the same post, Alper talks about the photos he took with his 120mm camera this weekend. He then links back to his trip on Dopplr of last weekend. A plugin that would do a Zemanta-like thing would know Alper’s Dopplr account, guess he either meant next or last weekend, and offer some links to those trips.

I wonder if an all-round plugin like this exists or if it is relatively easy to create one?

I decided to revamp my blog’s theme a bit to fix some issues I was having. I really like the look now and it is just more flexible and consistent. The new look will in the future be added to the rest of the site too.

Additionally I added an iPhone optimized theme that gets automatically loaded if you browse the blog with an iPhone or iPod Touch. I do believe in One Web but I guess reading my blog just becomes easier like this.

After promoting hAvatar during BarcampBrighton and SemanticCamp, I was starting to get pretty happy with the response we got from people. So, you can imagine how annoyed I was when suddenly my own avatar stopped working on several sites. Today I took a dive into the code behind the hAvatar plugin for Wordpress, and most importantly: hKit.

Problem Found

As I expected the issue was not with Alper’s code of the hAvatar plugin but rather with the hKit PHP library. As a step in the process of determining the hCard in the hKit library, the source code that is read is “Tidied”. hKit has 3 build in ways of doing this, the default being using the W3C tidy service.

The W3C service is a very simple service that simply takes a URL as a parameter like this:

http://cgi.w3.org/cgi-bin/tidy?docAddr=http://google.com/

As a result this gives the tidied output of the source of that URL. Now the serious issue that I ran into was that for some weird reason my URL (http://cristianobetta.com) causes a timeout in this service. To be more precise: about every URL on my server causes an issues. Obviously I contacted my hosting provider about this issue but let’s put the problem in a different perspective.

The Bottleneck Dillema

The problem here in my opinion is that hKit relies on a “bottleneck” in their process. Normally this bottleneck only causes a performance issue, but this time it even caused errors. Sadly though, because of this use hKit is not really a standalone script and things can therefore go wrong without hKit knowing. In my opinion hKit would be much more interesting if it shipped with an in-build, platform independent solution to take care of this step.

There are currently some other options besides the proxy to tidy up code. One of the settings of hKit allows for changing the tidy mode to “exec”, “php” or “none”. The first tries to use the tidy command, the second the tidy php functions. Unfortunately none of both are by default available on most systems, making an easy deployment of hAvatar on those systems way harder. To use the “php” option the tidy library needs to be compiled into PHP, which is sometimes impossible, and to use the “exec” command a binary is needed, which makes the solution rather platform dependent.

The Plead

So here I am, asking for a new solution that makes hKit a more independent library. I think it makes sense from a technical and philosophical perspective, but most of all from a performance view. Currently hKit isn’t that fast already (you can’t instance it more than once, making parallel processing of avatars fairly hard) and I think that a server side, non-proxy solution would seriously give this kit a performance boost. Obviously I would be happy as people would by default probably be able to load my avatar, as where it is currently unclear why W3C can’t fetch my url.

* Update: After an email with my hosting provider it seems that the W3C proxy now has access to my server, enabling all hAvatar activities on my domains. Still, I think my point above is valid from a performance point of view.

If you ever read the comments here, you might have noticed the avatars that show up with some people. These are not Gravatars or MyBlogLog avatars, no they are avatars personally hosted by those commenters on their own site. What drives this mechanism? The plugin is called hAvatar and the technology involves Microformats.

hAvatar is build by Alper and what it does is simple: it fetches the URL you use in the comment (either your OpenID or other URL) and sees if you have a hCard on that page. A hCard is a Microformat and is nothing more than some extra semantics added to your page that represents you business-card. In the very literal sense, a hCard is the Microformat equivalent of the vCard format.

Now, if your hCard has a photo attached to it, the hAvatar plugin will take that URL, wrap it in a tag and return it to the template. All you then need to do is call the hAvatar call somewhere in your comments loop, and boom you have an open-standards-defined avatar system on your blog!

Download it here and take a look at my front page for an example of an hCard with an attached photo. People using the plugin at the moment include MissGeeky, TheBleacher, and obviously Alper and I.

Upgraded to Wordpress 2.1.2 because of some stupid security flaw in the 2.1.1. Although Wordpress integrated into my website has its advantages, static pages have the advantage of not having to upgrade the damn framework that runs your blog. Well, all and all everything should work again (including all the version dependet plugins).