Just for fun, I’m playing with a few plugins on this blog that are intended to provide metadata and catalog services. For instance, there is a plugin called ScholarPress COinS which inserts a Context Object in Spans (aka COinS) element into each post. The COinS element provides metadata about the post, such as the title, author, date, etc, making it easily importable into other tools (such as Zotero) or reference / search platforms. In order to expose this sort of metadata in a catalog form (i.e. list, resource map, etc) I’ve also installed the COinS-PMH, OAI-ORE, and unAPI (also see Peter Binkley’s blog and unAPI.info) plugins. I wanted a complete OAI-PMH plugin but couldn’t find one; please let me know if you’re aware of this space and have a suggestion of where I could look.
Given that most of my blog posts aren’t the sort of thing people will care to archive, I recognize that most of these plugins aren’t practically useful–they’re just for me to play and learn. However, I also installed a PubSubHubBub plugin which, not surprisingely, implements the PubSubHubBub protocol. Basically, it pings "hubs" when a new post is available, which in-turn pings a list of URLs that have been registered as web-hook callbacks. The built-in hubs are http://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com/ and SuperFeedr, and I’d like to implement my own hub just to become more familiar. The interesting example of how this could be interesting is SuperFeedr’s ability to translate feed pings to an XMPP stream (aka Jabber). I’ve got some interesting ideas about how to use that in some infrastructure management and monitoring tools.
So, if you’re interested in experimenting with any of these technologies please let me know. I’d be happy to test out new code, either in this blog or independently.
