Who I am

I'm Nils Dagsson Moskopp, a 22 year old student of philosophy and computer science, living in Berlin (German speakers may check out my blog). I dislike the act of programming, but love the results, so I seem to have no other choice than to do it from time to time.

Recently, after submitting a proposal, I got accepted into the Google Summer of Code program, being mentored by Nathan Kinkade. In the rest of this entry, I will do my best to explain how it came to that and what kind of software I intend to create.

The Idea

As far as I know, there currently is no automated, easy way to have human- and machine-readable markup for specific subsections of a blog post in the blogging software Wordpress; it is only possible to have an entire page licensed under one specific license. Further complicating the issue is the fact that the Wordpress media manager actually does not know about licenses accociated with specific content. This poses a problem for the not-so-uncommon use case of embedding CC-licensed media, mainly photos.

I was first confronted with the idea of having an automated way to markup media with Creative Commons licensing information when reading Matthias Mehldau 's post More precise Creative Commons HTML-Codes. He envisioned an annotation containing not only the well-known CC license symbols, but also the jurisdiction and a button to show the markup used, for easy re-embedding. Well versed in graphics design, he also created a mockup:

Matthias Mehldau's Mockup

Shortly after that, Julia Seeliger posted a suggestion how a Creative Commons plugin backend for Wordpress could look like. She suggested integrating the official license chooser or a drop down list within the Wordpress upload form.

We three chatted about these ideas, me even actually implementing some parts (see next section), but nothing qualifying as currently usable came from that. When approximately one year later, I did come upon the CC wiki site describing the developer challenge titled Support for CC licenses in WordPress Media Manager, I chose to apply for that with Google Summer of Code.

Existing Solutions

As mentioned in the introduction to the last section, a tool that provides easy licensing management for Wordpress media content, automating subsequent insertion, currently does not exist. Several existing projects, however, have features related to this goal; code re-use may be possible.

In 2006, George Notaras created the Creative-Commons-Configurator WordPress Plugin. It allows the user to choose a global license for his or her blog, using " the web-based license selection engine from CreativeCommons.org" and adds localized machine- and human-readable license information to pages and feeds. Similar plugins, putting global licensing information into footer and sidebars, exist.

For GSoC 2009, Dinishika Nuwangi made a Wordpress plugin called wprdfa (not to confuse with wp-rdfa). Unfortunately, the project has an empty README file. Judging from a quick glance at the source code, part of its intended purpose is to add buttons to the TinyMCE editor integrated into Wordpress, although on installation I was unable to see this functionality. The related developer challenge still seems to be open, on the page the plugin is described as " foundational work".

Also in 2009, I created two pieces of software, inspired by a post on the WHATWG mailing list. First, a web application generating HTML5 license markup (enriched with Microdata , see next section), second a Wordpress plugin capable of generating similar markup using both Microdata and RDFa. And there was much rejoicing.
It is important to note that since then the HTML5 standardhas changed and the generated markup is no longer valid.

On a less technical note, the German blog Spreeblick has a unique way of presenting the license information, only showing a small "cc" in the bottom left corner; on hovering, author name and a link to the source are presented (live example). However, while Spreeblick is using Wordpress, the folks behind it have no intention of releasing their plugin: As Max Winde told me in April 2009, it is tightly entangled with their image layout functionality and would require complex cleanup.

Planned Interface

I plan to implement the presentation part using the new HTML5 elements figure and figcaption. Together, they can be used to denote content " with a caption […] that is self-contained and is typically referenced as a single unit from the main flow of the document". A code example shows how markup using the figure element may looks like:

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