Advogato Status Report
A new rev of mod_virgule code went live today. See the changelog for the details.
This rev adds FOAF files to our user profiles, helping to make Advogato part of the Semantic Web. Each account profile page has a visible FOAF link as well an auto-discovery meta link that points to a foaf.rdf file for that account. At present the FOAF files have minimal properties. The FOAF standard allows for some additional features that will probably be added over time. At present, outbound trust certifications are converted to foaf:knows properties. Inbound certs are ignored. Project relations are exported as foaf:currentProject properties. To get an idea of what you can do with FOAF, try using the DISCO Hyperdata Browser to view the FOAF file of an Advogato seed account such as Raph's (see also the FOAFer result for the same file).
In addition to the new FOAF badge, you may have noticed some other very minor changes on the user profile. I've done a little HTML clean up and correction. The old, ugly RSS image has been replaced with the standard feed icon established by the Mozilla Foundation. Combined with our new RSS 2.0 feeds, this almost makes it look like Advogato is a modern website. :-)
Among other minor changes, trust certifications now include a date stamp. This will allow the future addition of date-dependent trust features such as age-based certificate expiration for inactive users.
All of the admin functionality of mod_virgule has been moved to a single base URL where it can be password protected. This includes the diagnostics page and crank pages for diary ratings, trust metrics, and the aggregator. Several of these pages were security risks either by leaking information about the server configuration or by being CPU intensive enough to be useful for DoS attacks.