Daniel E. Renfer’s Blog

This is what that site wants me to put in my code. I’m not quite sure I want to do that. I would love to find a way to serve all of my site as application/xhtml+xml, but I have all these old quizzes I took back in my Livejournal days. I’ve tried to clean it up, but there’s just so much of it. I would need a better way to open and edit the MySQL database that Wordpress uses before I’m really going to get it all cleaned up.

That’s my clean up of it. It’s not pretty, but it’s a lot better, markup wise.

I don’t want to talk about my rankings. I don’t really know enough about the records of any of these people (politically correct term) to verify if this is accurate or not. All I had to do was answer a few questions about how I feel about certain current issues, and then rank my interest in those issues. I’m assuming the script merely matched my answers to the public stated opinions of these candidates.

This makes me think that more and more we need a RDF version of APML. The amount of good, semantic, machine-readable data is increasing all the time. I want to be able to link from my FOAF file a service that gives all of the data it has collected for me the ranking and weight of my interest in any given URI.

Once the service is in place, then would come the tools that let me manipulate those settings, and other applications that dump into it. We would just need to mint a URI for each of these issues. Then we could create a database of the candidates, and their relation to those issues. Once I have rated those issues, it’s a simple matter to pull together my interests (in the political profile) and the stances of the politicians, and do a simple match.

Oh well, the happy, shiny, semantic world will come one day. Until then, I will base my voting decisions on a simple CGI script.