Dieter on the web

PhpDeliciousClient is a console based client for doing maintenance on Del.icio.us accounts.
I wrote it because - to my knowledge - there currently is no good program (including the personalized del.icio.us web page itself) that lets you make changes to your del.icio.us data in a powerful, productive manner. (with data I primarily mean tags. Posts and bundles are considered less important).

You probably are familiar with the fact that a Delicious account (or any tag based meta data organizing system, for that matter) can soon become bloated: It gets filled with way too many tags. Among those tags several of them mean the same (fun, funny, humor, ...) or include the other (humor, jokes, ...) You can group them in bundles but even then you need to add all the tags to a post if you want it to appear in the results for that tag. Not very convenient. Also, if you have your del.icio.us bookmarks available in Firefox, you'd have a menu with several hundreds of entries (one for each tag), each menu containing usually just a few (or worse: just one) entry.

When I got in this situation I tried to fix it, but it was a hell of a task to do this on the Delicious webpage itself, and I although I found some other tools they were far to basic, outdated, dependent on other stuff or just not meant for this kind of task, so I decided to write my own.

The result is a php command line program called PhpDeliciousClient (as you can see, I added it to the menu on the left too), which uses the PhpDelicious library to access the Del.icio.us api.

The primary focus of the program is to help you to bring your tags in balance, in an as efficient way as possible. Other stuff, which can be done just fine on the delicious page (editing single posts, changing your password, ...) is not implemented.

It's a bit hacky, I don't give any guarantees but I can tell I used it to edit my own Del.icio.us page, going from about 400 tags to about 80 without any problems.

That said, head over to the PhpDeliciousClient project page for some more information, and to download it ;-)

At work, we've setup the Netlog Developer Pages

It is the place where you can/will find all information around our OpenSocial implementation, our own API, skin development, sample code and so on.
We've also launched a group where you can communicate with fellow developers and Netlog employees.
The page also features a blog where you can follow what is going on in the Netlog Tech team.

PS: We've also updated our jobs page

I don't like pages / articles / blog posts /.. accompanied by "Digg this", "add to Del.icio.us" or "add to Technorati" links.
Why not? Because this is meta level functionality. Not functionality of the blog/article/page in question, but on a higher level. And thus this should be handled on a higher level: the web browser. Just like we can create and manage bookmarks (I mean the old fashioned ones, not the delicious ones) in our browser: this is not the task of a web page. (we all know how silly "bookmark this" links look on a page, right?)

Whether you like these kind of services or not is up to you (personally I think the most popular content is often the most subjective, biased and close minded, not to mention too mainstream for "real" geeks but that's another story) but people who are serious about it should just make sure they can do it for any page they visit (eg use a Firefox extension to enable digging and adding to delicious) so we can get rid of this ugly clutter that is put on some pages.

I know not every browser supports this already (either by default or by extending it with (3rd party) plug-ins) and even if it is, not everyone enables this functionality, so it's a bit a chicken and egg problem.

But then again, most web2.0 people already use a browser that supports it, or will support it in the very near future, so let's get rid of this inappropriately placed meta-functionality !

Every year, during a special weekend in February, the University Libre of Brussels suddenly becomes a little more geeky.
It's that time of the year when many European (and some inter-continental) colleagues join us at
Fosdem: the Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting (more info here).

Finally, my own website...
I already wanted to get this up for a long time. My initial idea was writing (and styling) it all from scratch using the marvelous CakePHP framework along with an authentication system i wrote, dAuth.
However, due to my lack of time I decided to use the excellent drupal platform, of which I'm quite sure will get the job done equally well, while drastically liberating my time, so I can invest it in other projects :-)
Dries Buytaert's talk on fosdem this year really helped on making that decision ;-)

So, what will this site be about?

• me
• my interests
  • Free & Opensource software, and the thoughts/ideals behind it
  • PHP scripting/programming (I like C(++), bash and j2se too but I'm not as good at it as I am at php)
  • Audio recording/mixing/production
  • Drumming, one of my greatest hobbies
  • Music, bands, movies,... I like
  • productivity (TDD, automation scripts, shell/DE tweaks, ...)
  • ethics and philosophy, these aspects are really important in my life
  • Jeugdhuis SjaTOo, our local youth club

Now let's get started ;-)

Today I'm finally out of Google's Sandbox.

Google has this system called the sandbox where new pages go into for 6 months, in order to prevent scammers/spammers from resurrecting dummy pages - and scoring well in Google - all the time.
During these 6 months a page will score very bad in search results, even if it should rate very well for the specific keywords.

Smart people will look at my first post, dated 03/04/2007, but keep in mind that before this blog existed I already had a dummy page with my name on (the keywords I want to score on) as soon as I could because back then I already knew I wanted to put a blog here and I wanted to get out of the sandbox as soon as possible.

I know some people who kept forgetting my URL and didn't find it in Google, well, you will find me now!

In the Cake community, there has always been much interest in authentication/authorization systems. The issue of authentication has been addressed in several add-ons provided by the community, such as DAuth (written by me), OthAuth (written by Crazylegs) and many others.

However, one of the additions to the 1.2 branch which is currently in active development , is a built-in auth module. A module that isn't finished yet but it sure is worth it looking at. (In fact I'm thinking about making a new dAuth version built on cake's own auth system.). As most bakers know, there is very little information about the 1.2 branch in general, and the auth component in specific. So what I will try to do, is delve in the code, mess with it, and explain my findings in this post. For this first post it will be more trying to decipher the source code, messing with it will probably for a little later on.

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You probably already heard of Google Analytics. It's a pretty nice program that (basically) gathers data about visits of your site and creates reports of it. It works by including some JavaScript code on your page, so that each page request triggers a call to the Analytics tracker sending along some data such as which page is requested and which resolution was used. (no personal or other privacy-sensitive data is sent). But here is the deal! I just discovered that you can also track events that don't require page requests!
Think of links to files or to external locations, JavaScript events (Ajax anyone?) or even Flash events (but who is crazy enough to use Flash anyway?).

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