integration Archive

Creating content with Blocklayout in Xaraya is flexible and every once in a while i want to take it for a spin. In the past i’ve played with creating a XUL theme where Xaraya served it directly as the XUL mimetype, this time i’ve been playing with creating a calendar feed of any Xaraya content which has some sort of a date attached to it.

What happens is that the content of some part of Xaraya is fed into an iCal theme which produces output according to the iCal standard Blocklayout sets the right content type for us, which allows clients like Apple’s iCal or Gnome’s evolution to ‘subscribe’to the calendar feed.

Above is an example on how that could look in the iCal application. The Feed block on the right side allows you to do exactly what is described here if you have a client which allows you to subscribe to iCal feeds. I’ve tested it with Evolution and iCal. The concept is still young but I can see a lot of potential in this.

For play, i constructed a couple of templates on the Xaraya site to connect the Worldkit package to a xaraya installation to construct a geographical map (flash based) of the registered users on the Xaraya site.

Worldkit uses an RSS feed with location information to construct an image where the data points are shown on a map. In doing so, of course the RSS feed can be subscribed to in the ‘normal’way too, giving you an addressbook directly in your aggregator of all people who have provided their longitude and latitude information on the site.

Gentoo’s Portage to be ported to Windows Services for UNIX:

A group of Windows programmers is working on porting Gentoo’s Portage over to Windows SFU. If you don’t know already, Windows Services for UNIX is a full POSIX subsystem for Windows, enabling it to compile and run almost any software that will compile on BSD, Solaris, HP/UX, and Linux. Details to “emerge” soon.

That sounds a lot like a post i made earlier

I dropped a quick message to Adriaan Tijsseling, the developer of the amazing Ecto package with a number of questions. One of the questions was whether Xaraya could be included as an endpoint in the accounts screen.

This morning, I fired up Ecto, and the update which contained it was already there! Man, this guy is quick.

Awesome!

Those marketing guys must be rather clueless, lots of software vendors pick a couple of letters and prefix all their software titles with it. I can only gues this is due to lack of inspiration or to create at least the impression that the software is like a suite of packages which work together (which it does not in most cases) It’s not only the professional marketing departments who lack inspiration, Open Source developers, whether professional or not, have a liking for prefabricated names too. Here’s the slate what i could come up with without much research, lots of letters left, so i you have some plans grab one, while they are still in stock:

1. The a is liberally replaced with a @ in both names of classes (eM@il) and names of software packages;
2. The e seems to have grown into a prefix to be used for a class of software (eMail, eLearning, eCommerce) roughly describing doing the classical thing, but then with the internet (whatever that means in practice);
3. gnu – Applications which like to identify themselves (i guess) with the FSF or the GNU software set or the GPL (gnuTella,;
4. g – GNOME stuff;
5. i – Apple (iTunes, iChat);
6. k – KDE applications (kNode, kWrite);
7. moz – Based on mozilla framework (mozBlog, mozEdit) [Note: also the postfix zilla is often used];
8. x – X windows applications (xChat, xEyes);
9. xar – Xaraya modules [ hesitated a bit to put this one in ;-) ] And of course there is microsoft which just puts MS in front of everything. I’m sure there are more examples, the above is by head. So, if you want a letter prefix, get one fast; we only have 26 letters.

Interesting discussion last night on Xaraya’s IRC channel. I installed An amazingly good looking IRC client for OSX. This client has a feature called a buddy list which shows you the online status of people on IRC servers they are on regularly, much like the IM clients show an online status for people.

The feature saves me visiting tens of irc servers just to find out that the person i need is not there.

To be able to maintain this online status, colloquy sends /whois commands to the registered servers and channels to get the online status of the people in the buddy list. Obviously the sending of some command is necessary for this information.

When i started adding people to the buddy list, one of the serverops asked me why i was sending him /whois commands every 30 seconds. At that time, i didnt know what was happening. A little investigating showed that it was the buddy list feature.

In short, the discussion went fairly quickly into “user experience” versus “irc is not designed for this and stop doing this please”. This is interesting for me, because usually i am on the side telling people the the system is not designed to do this while at this time i was in the end users chair

There’s no escape from this argument, the feature saves a lot of time, but is using a technique not intended for that particular goal. Who should give in? I dont know.

Worked a bit on the  blog by email stuff. Sanitized the script a bit. The posting should now be a bit more clean as the backend now only includes stuff between the body tags of the received html. Nowhere near rock-solid, but useable nevertheless.

Just for the technically inclined, this is the regexp used to extract the blog entry from the html:

!<body[^>]*>(.*?)</body>!

Next step, getting some regular expression which makes sense to extract excerpt and extended entry (if any) out of there. Thinking about using <hr /> as a separator; it just looks natural when composing the entry. Dunno.

As mentioned earlier i like to treat weblogs as much as possible as a messaging activity. Not because i like messaging so much, but it has become the major activity in working the internet for me; communicating through news and mail. I find blogging interesting, but the threshold was always a bit high.

Especially blogging on linux seems a tab bit less friendly than the excellent clients available for windows, and those didn’t fit my pattern. What I did was basically the following:

1. searched the net for email gateways to MT (found 3)
   
2. literally threw the three files into one perl script ( they all had something i needed)
3. reorganized and made it fit to be a baseline for me.

So, phase 1 is complete, i can post in html with my email client to my blog (through a special email-address linked to it), selecting multiple categories.(by specifying them in a X-Categories custom mail header). Attachments to the email are automatically placed in the right location.

Outstanding issues:

1. a bit better extracting of the message (i left this posting as it is generated, definitely not what you want for all postings, look at the source of this page!)
2. keywords, excerpt and extended entry support
3. being able to comment through the same mechanism
4. get the stylesheet of the blog as a template in the email composer (well, maybe not)
5. Editting of posts
6. specifying sites to ping

As I’m working on several different computers at different locations, with at least two different operating systems, it’s sometimes hard to maintain the status of all the message types you need to follow these days.

Mail, nntp, rss and websites all boil down to messages for me in some form, so I would like to treat them that way. It’s not easy to have all places you work behind a computer synced up. I got one step further tho with the help of nntp//rss

For mail only, my problem has been solved a while ago. Using the Cyrus mail server, i can access my mail from basically anywhere, maintaining status across locations and computers.

For newsgroups, the solution is basically the same, using shared folders in Cyrus as newsgroups and the ‘seen’status of the newsgroups is maintained as well. At this point, the complexity starts. I read newsgroups from different news-servers and chances are about 100% they are NOT Cyrus shared folders.

So, to be able to maintain status, I have to install a ‘proxy’news server which gathers the newsgroups from the different servers and then let the Cyrus server sync with that proxy news server. I’m not sure how posting to those newsgroups would work in this case, but i guess that is manageable by creating accounts in a clever way.

Now, for RSS-feeds i used to have a separate reader and couldn’t figure out why that was needed. I fed ‘rss to nntp’ into google and after some searching i found a couple of RSS to NNTP and RSS to IMAP gateways.

Installing nntp//rss was easy enough. It creates a newsgroup for every channel and behaves like a news-server for them, so you can read RSS feeds through your newsreader.

At this point i read mail, news and rss feeds all with the same program (in my case mozilla), the ‘seen’state is only maintained for mail, but at least the RSS subscriptions are all in one place, instead of on all the computers i work on.

For posting, nntp//rss allows you to define the defined newsgroups as ‘writeable’and link a blog to it using the blogger API or metaWebLog. Although pretty unstable and not quite useable yet, i really like the idea, especially if replying to a ‘newsgroup’message would show up as a comment on the linked weblog

In conclusion, integration is possible for me, because i run my own servers. The amount of work and the expertise needed to do it is, as of now, far too high for this to become mainstream.

Spent the most part of this day getting http links in thunderbird to open in firebird. Still not succeeding. This is pathetic, i’m pretty sure my local configuration is not broken. I’m NOT a linux newbie and can’t get it to work.

There’s no option to configure it, the system wide configuration in gnome is at least confusing, and no obvious way to debug it. On a related issue; had to install the MozEx extension and write a custom shell script to get mailto links to open the compose window in thunderbird when clicked on in firebird.

What are these people expecting from me?