Long story short, I have been working on my research project two months ago. Throughout the mentioned time period, I basically spent a lot of time trying to read and understand some of the related topics in semantic web, information retrieval as well as machine learning as suggested by my supervisor.

I first started with revisiting RDF by putting more emphasis on how it is usually implemented. Yea, I know I did some when I was preparing my research proposal, but I didn’t go to the detail and skipped the section describing RDF/XML all together.

Recently there have been some debates on whether JSON should be used as another data serialization format. I personally like JSON for its simplicity (especially comparing it to XML), but I find RDF/XML actually makes sense (read: good enough) because I find RDF is very URI dependent and it would probably be a bit awkward to see a lot of URI popping up in JSON. However, I am still very interested to see how this is sorted out, as W3C initiated a group to work on it. (Some thought-provoking read on this by nathan@webr3)

I have also read on RDFS for the first time and the more I read it, the more I find it related to my classes on AI (especially Prolog) in my Bachelor Degree. However, I am also slightly surprised to see how tolerant it is (leaving too much room for error?). Besides RDFS, I also read on OWL and find more similarity with Prolog (I really should post the summary of the readings here, yeah, too much to blog about, but lack of time and motivation).

What really surprised me was that with the combination of these (RDF, RDFS and OWL) technologies, I actually tried re-inventing the same thing for my last task in my previous job (over and over again). Although usage of RDF may not exactly fit the problem, but I feel it is close enough to solve the problem.

While looking for some articles on Linked Data Principle, I came across this TED talk by Sir Tim-Berners-Lee. Yeah, I do feel sorry for not publishing enough semantic data online after watching that, the talk was very motivating indeed (but is posting personal info that is machine readable without limit actually a good idea, I don’t feel like injecting a great portion of my life into social networking site, but that’s a different story).

I also read the beginner’s guide to SPARQL, and this is the real wow-factor to me. Although I don’t really like the SQL-like syntax, but the similarity to Prolog makes everything looks cool now. Yeah, I am pretty new in this, so I keep referring everything to Prolog XD.

Then I started to read on information retrieval, this is when everything suddenly seems not cool anymore. However, it did force me to do a lot of revision on statistics and some basic maths stuff (you will be surprised to see how much I forget after working for 2 years). And it wasn’t encouraging when I began to watch a video lecture on machine learning hoping to pick up in shorter time span because I find myself not understanding most of the lectures XD.

Yeah, that’s basically wraps up my progress for the past 2 months, getting myself excited with new stuff for the first month, and getting frustrated in the second month not able to understand the material.

The main reason behind the re-organization of files is to stop putting everything together within wp-content folder. As I am using SVN to manage my WordPress files, I feel more secured if I have less files changed / modified / added to my working copy. The previous structure was designed to store everything, including things are not meant to be shared among sites (installations) like attachments within wp-content folder.

Besides, although putting in everything within the same wp-content folder sounds like a good idea, but what if I want to create yet another new site (installation) for somebody which I don’t feel like sharing plugins and themes to this new site? After digging in the codex for some time, I found this guide that guides me how to further customize WordPress folder path very useful.

So the structure for a site now looks like this

/
|-scripts/ < - where I store my shared scripts
|-|-wordpress/ <- my wordpress, obviously
|-|-|-www/ <- my wordpress working copy
|-|-|-content/ <- new wp-content folders
|-|-|-|-site-id/ <- new wp-content folders for $site_id
|-|-|-|-|-plugins/
|-|-|-|-|-themes/
|-public_html/ <- my public folder, links to /scripts/wordpress/www
|-|-wp-site/ <- new wp-content folder, links to /scripts/wordpress/content/site-id

So now visitors of this blog should not be able to view attachment for my other blogs.

The deployed new theme in development is actually my current weekend project. As you can see, there's no color scheme being applied to it at the moment. I am now focusing on completing the basic features and the basic template files before being able to further customizing the color scheme.

Just in case if anyone is interested in this new theme, it can actually be forked via my bitbucket repository. I have not actually decide what license to be used, but most probably GPL as WordPress would probably requires. If there's any problem regarding this new theme, please do not hesitate to post a bug report @ the issue tracker.

Because I am writing two blogs in different languages, to reduce my work in maintaining to identical themes but in different languages, I have to make sure these two themes are in sync so that the appearance would not greatly differ (because most of the changes are done in the stylesheet files). But having to copy and paste the styles whenever I make changes to make sure both themes with identical appearance but different language is very tedious. Hence I added a symbolic link so that I do not have to copy and paste the stylesheets time. (however, I made some stupid mistakes while I was editing the theme files through openkomodo hence both themes are now in the same language, fixing)

Then I thought why don’t I use symbolic links so that I do not have to upload wordpress installation twice whenever there is an update to wordpress. Some may suggest switching to WPMU but I don’t think my problem needs to be solved using a WPMU installation. I have some experience in maintaining a WPMU and I know how troublesome it can be for a small blog like mine.

So now I am having two folders pointing to a single folder and a problem arises. How do I make them share a single wp-config.php file? My solution is to add a switch-case statement in the wp-config.php file to decide what configuration options to load depending on the host name. Another minor problem is with the permalink structure, currently i display post-id instead of post-title in my chinese blog, I have still no idea how to solve it, the worse case would be changing the permalink for this blog into the format used in my chinese blog.