You may have noticed that Revyu has recently taken a bashing from the seedy end of the search engine optimisation brigade – people intent on abusing the site’s high ranking in the search engines to try and drive more traffic to whatever destination site pays their fees at a particular point in time. There’s no decent word for these polluters of the Web, who try and make a business by devaluing otherwise useful sites with links to products and services that most people don’t want or need. They’re abhorrent, and they’re taking their toll on Revyu, leaving junk reviews that have to be cleaned up by someone. They will be beaten in the end, but in the meantime we need to take a break from their onslaught and replenish our resources for the inevitable fight to come.

To this end we’ve temporarily disabled new registrations on the site while we clean out the garbage that’s been left behind.  Existing users can still login and add new reviews, and we welcome these thoughtful contributions as readily as always. There’s still a chance that some accounts have been created with junk reviews in mind but not yet used; these will be deleted as soon as possible after they’re detected. Our plan is to clean up the mess, take a break from the effort, and come back with a smarter system to prevent (or at least reduce) the kind of contributions that devalue the site for the majority of users. Thanks for your patience while we do this.

In fixing the content negotiation earlier in the week I managed to break a couple of other things on the site. Oops. Sorry.

Happily these are now fixed, but if you ever spot any bugs on the site, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

So, when you lookup the URI of something on Revyu (like a review, a person, a reviewed thing, or a tag), we do something in the background called content negotiation, which basically tries to give you information back in the form that you (or your browser) asked for. (In fact, we actually we use HTTP303 redirect response to send your browser to a location where the information is available in the format you asked for, but you may never notice this as your browser handles it automatically). In most cases your browser will have asked for HTML, but if you are using some form of Semantic Web application it will like have asked for RDF/XML.

Now for something a bit more techie… When Revyu was first implemented we used mod_rewrite rules in the site’s main .htaccess file to carry out this content negotiation following recipes in the excellent Best Practice Recipes for Publishing RDF Vocabularies. This all seemed to work a treat until we tried the site with Disco, when it became clear something was wrong. Whilst working on the very cool Ripple, Joshua Shinavier spotted that q values in the Accept header of the HTTP requests to Revyu were the problem. Thanks Josh!

Basically, as noted in an earlier post, the old mod_rewrite approach only worked if one content type was listed in the Accept header. This is actually not a very common scenario, especially with the growth of GRDDL, and as well as Disco it also broke TimBL et al’s Tabulator.

So, we’ve finally managed to make the time to fix this, and have moved the content negotiation away from htaccess and mod_rewrite, and into a little bit of PHP code. Architecturally it feels like a slightly cludgy way of doing it, but it works nicely according to my tests with the Firefox Modify Headers/LiveHTTPHeaders Plugins, CURL, and Disco.

Here is an example starting point for a Disco session browsing around Revyu and beyond:

Designing with Web Standards, by Jeffrey Zeldman

Enjoy!

Tuesday saw the release of a new “Talking with Talis” podcast, and this time it was me talking to Paul Miller. In the podcast we talk about the origins of my PhD research, where Revyu fits into the grand scheme of things, and what the future holds for both Revyu and its forthcoming partner service Hoonoh. We also discuss the emerging Web of Data and how Revyu is a part of it. So, if the phrase “Semantic Web” makes you go “Semantic huh??”, then have a listen.

…and this is it. If you’re reading, then Welcome. This is a place for announcements, discussions, and anything related to the reviewing and rating site Revyu.com. On the Revyu homepage there is the standard blurb: “Revyu.com is a web site where you can review and rate things. Unlike many other reviewing sites on the web, Revyu.com lets you review and rate absolutely anything you can name.”

And there’s more to it than that. If you’re interested in the web in general you may have heard about something called “the Semantic Web” (*). Well Revyu.com is a Semantic Web application. In practicial terms this means that it’s really easy to combine the reviews people create on the site with other bits of information, and reuse it all in other web sites and applications.

More on that soon…

* No? Not heard about it? Check out the fledgling Semantic Web FAQ for some extra background information.