Week of 12/27/04 - Yet Another Community System

	Yet Another Community System - Sent on Dec. 31 2004 to "all" » Created on Dec. 31 2004 In Archived letters
	Improve Firefox response times - As a network specialist, I've always been interested into protocols. More specifically, the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which is used for web access, allows for several transfers through one single TCP connection. This is called HTTP pipelining, and it has been extensively described in Internet standards. Actually, this is not a new topic, since the W3C proved in 1997 the interest to add pipelining to HTTP version 1.1. What is new, however, is the broadening usage of Firefox to browse the web. By default Firefox has a conservative setting and it makes only one request to a web page at a time. Moreover, this clever piece of software may benefit from HTTP pipelining. You just have to activate it properly. When you enable pipelining Firefox makes several requests at once, which really speeds up page loading. » Published on Dec. 31 2004 In Membership
	Dec-27, neighbours, manual layout, navigation, files syndication, ie bookmarklet and more - This is probably the very last 2004 release of YACS, and we have put as many gifts as possible into the basket. The first gift was on Eoin's wish list. It was about geographical distance computations. YACS has now the complex MySQL statement that makes it all. As a result nearby articles and user profiles are automatically listed where appropriate. All you have to do is to attach one (or several) location(s) items to your pages and/or to your user profile. The second gift is not ready yet, but will pop up in coming weeks. We are preparing an on-line user manual for YACS, and have enhanced the layout articles/layout_as_manual.php to support structured lists of articles, similar to table of contents in electronic books. The outline is based on dotted strings of number (eg, `1.2.3.0`), that allow for up to four levels of classification. The next step is to apply this layout to articles anchored in the section "How to use it?" and to turn this section into an electronic on-line manual, with the support of end-user comments. The third gift is a navigation bar for articles. They make sequential reading of blogs a breeze. Links to go to the previous or next pages appear automatically in the sidebar. Of course, the navigation bar is compatible with the manual layout described previously. Several gifts have been included for people who syndicate everything. The most notable one is the creation of a RSS feed for public files shared at any YACS server. Give it a try.Note that <enclosure> attributes are provided as weel, to enable a bare form of podcasting. Moreover, YACS better integrates with Radio Userland, with Sharpreader and with Moreover. A special gift is given to people who are using Internet Explorer with Windows. They can benefit from a contextual bookmarklet to blog to their YACS server. This is a special gift, since we prefer to support portable solutions. But at the same time we have to recognize that Firefox has not taken over yet... Another big gift for Unicode supporters: YACS translates HTML entities to Unicode, and this means that any character will have only representation in the database. Ok, this may be a little bit too technical. What is the actual impact? First of all, this improves results provided by the embedded search engine. Secondly, this enables a better interoperability of w.bloggar and YACS web forms. See you in 2005! » Commented on Dec. 27 2004 In Releases

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