Category Archives: Open Source

Free and open source software, licensing, community, and why it matters.

XFN Press

Open Source, Tech,

Today was a great day in that I got to read two excellent write-ups of XFN. The first comes from Shirley Kaiser at Brainstorms and Raves: Friends, XFN, and Hyperlinks. The second came from Molly and it’s a mouthful: Integrated Web Design: Social Networking — The Relationship between Humans and Computers is Coming of Age. Molly’s article quotes me on pages 3 and 4, so watch out.

I suppose now is as good a time as any to announce this little tool I wrote for XFN about a month ago. Exefen (pronounced exy-fen) reads any public HTML page you give it and then returns every external link on the page with a XFN Creator widget attached to it. You can then go and add XFN values as appropiate just by clicking a few boxes. Then when you submit that data exefen returns the original page source with all the XFN data added. Some features:

  • Works with all reasonably formed XHTML and HTML, different quoting styles etc.
  • Parses any existing rel values and uses those
  • Preserves formatting, etc in original document
  • Ignores internal and relative links

It could probably do more, and reasonable requests will be entertained. This tool was actually made in response to a comment by Zeldman saying he didn’t have time to add XFN values to his externals page. Using this tool he did it in less than an hour. In his words, “Fabulous! Great tool.” Are you XFN friendly yet?

Retiring Microsoft Executive

Microsoft, Open Source

A retiring Microsoft executive said some pretty interesting things in his farewell letter. It sounds like not everyone is oblivious in the Evil Empire.

“Microsoft must survive and prosper by learning from the open-source software movement and by borrowing from and improving its techniques. Open-source software is as large and powerful a wave as the Internet was, and is rapidly accreting into a legitimate alternative to Windows. It can and should be harnessed.” Simply fighting open source through “litigation and proprietary protocols” is a strategy for failure, Stutz said.

“Microsoft is in agreement with much of the position that David has of the future. But Microsoft believes that breakthroughs will come mostly through commercial software companies, like Microsoft,” a company spokeswoman said.

I’m glad she said “like Microsoft” to clear things up, for a moment there I thought she might be talking about Oracle, Sun, or IBM.