Technology
Entries related to technology.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 07/21/2008 - 14:19
Today, I’m upgrading micro.orient-lodge.com to the latest version of Laconica. Given the frequent updates to the core, I figured I needed to come up with a better way of doing these upgrades, so I’ve split my tarball into two different pieces. laconicadepends.tar.gz and laconica044.tar.gz.
The laconicadepends tarball are all of those little files, that you would normally install using PEAR or by hunting around that laconica depends on. The second tarball is a straight tarball of the current darcs repository. In theory, you should be able to combine the depends tarball with just about any standard repository to have a version that runs on many shared hosts. If you do set up a site using this, let me know how it goes.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 07/21/2008 - 11:10
Before I went on vacation, I was writing a bit about laconi.ca and about my efforts to make it easier for developers to start contributing. One of the first hurdles to face is getting used to the version control system.
Many people I’ve spoken with are used to using CVS or SVN to get and submit code from a version control repository. I don’t know as many people that are up to speed with darcs. In my case, my hosting service already has CVS and SVN installed, but darcs is not an option. So, I spent a little time playing around to see what I could do.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 07/20/2008 - 20:57
EntreCard and SezWho
While I was off on vacation, EntreCard announced a partnership with SezWho. EntreCard is a site where bloggers can drop cards on one another as part of an advertising scheme to drive traffic to their sites. The folks at EntreCard note that adding comments is another key part of how to drive traffic to a site. So, they’ve partnered with SezWho, which is a site aimed at driving traffic through comments.
SezWho has gotten some mixed reviews early on. Apparently, early on, they had some distributed denial of service attacks which slowed down everyone who has using SezWho. In my case, I’m using Drupal for my blog, and their support for Drupal is in beta. So far, my experiences it that it is probably better to think of it as Alpha code.
When you install SezWho for Drupal, you need to go through the regular steps of a Drupal install. Then, you need to edit a configuration file, go in and tweak your theme files and hope things work.
In my case, they did not seem to work at all. The blocks showed up, but that was about it. After digging into the code, I found that it actually had synchronized some of my content, but a very limited amount. The posts that it synchronized didn’t have comments, so I couldn’t see what was going on. To complicate things even further, it seemed to have my content attributed to my old Optonline email address, while my comments were being attributed to my Orient Lodge email address, as was my registration and my EnterCard connection. This remains an outstanding issue which I hope will get addressed when their Drupal person gets back.
As I explored further, I found that their synchronize software only synchronizes content for non-blog nodes for the website as a whole. Since Drupal can have multiple blogs, SezWho has separate synchronization for each individual blogger, and that separate synchronization applies only to blog posts. In my case, I’m the only person using this Drupal site as a blog, so I didn’t set up a separate account for the site as a whole as well as for my individual blog here. So, it didn’t find any of my blog posts, just a few random other pages. I changed the synchronization program to synchronize blog posts for the main account, and now it shows all my posts as being synchronized. That is, at least, in the database. I had to tweak a few other places to force the blogid to zero to get other content to show up, and even with that it is spotty, either lagging or failing, and not managing to handle comments at all.
Later, I tried tweaking parameters another way, adding my Optonline email address to my SezWho profile and setting up a separate blog on the SezWho profile for my blog entries. Convoluted. Also, it hasn’t made any apparent difference.
Oh well.
General discussion
So, now I’m tied into three different comment systems. If you follow me on FriendFeed you can add comments there. I’ve tweaked Drupal to pull in those comments. There is a little bit of a lag. I like the way FriendFeed integrates with all the other life streams. I just don’t like the lag, or the difficulty of finding a place to add a comment initially.
You can also use Disqus. It seems to work pretty well, but for some reason, it is flagging some very old content as new. I’m not sure why that is happening. However, the comments can be added from the Drupal site and it seems to work pretty well. A nice plus is that if you use Seesmic, you can add video comments. The downside is that comments are stored on their server, and my access and control of the content is limited.
Then, there is SezWho. What is nice about SezWho is that they are supposed to integrate with the Drupal comment system, so comments stay part of Drupal. I can control them however I wish. The downside is that SezWho just doesn’t seem ready for beta testing.
So, for the time being, you’ll have different options for adding comments. None of them are perfect. All of them, hopefully, will be evolving to be better systems in the future.
 Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 07/19/2008 - 21:45 (Check me out!)
Turnip of Power has a blog post up about Alexa as a random number generator.
They write: Now Alexa has changed their algorithm, making it worse than useless. I’m surprised my site doesn’t record a negative score seeing how off base their estimates are.
Well, I thought I should check to see how my site did during my vacation. Sure enough, both Google Analytics and Quantcast showed my traffic drop to about a quarter what it was before I left for vacation.
At the same time, Alexa has shown a significant increase in traffic to my site.
So, I think that Turnip of Power is wrong. Alexa isn't a random number generator. It is showing a strong negative correlation to actual traffic.
UPDATE: This is a test update.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 07/12/2008 - 08:21 (Check me out!)
Over the past week, I’ve been spending a lot of time playing with Laconi.ca, an open source microblogging platform.
One of the things most interesting about Laconi.ca is the ability of servers to share content with one another. The mothership laconi.ca server is identi.ca. I’ve set up my account there to subscribe to accounts on other servers. In addition, I’ve set up my own laconi.ca server and subscribe to identi.ca from that server.
Word of warning. The ability to subscribe to and from different servers is still fairly unreliable. Many of my attempts to do remote subscriptions failed. In fact, the only way I managed to subscribe to my server was to turn on debug mode in hopes of figuring out why subscriptions were failing. It figures that subscriptions worked when I had debug on.
Anyway, here is the quick way of subscribing to a remote server. When you find a person on a server that you want to follow, make sure you are not logged into that server. If you are logged in, it will subscribe your local id to the user you want to subscribe to. When you are logged out, click on the name of the person you wish to subscribe to, and click on the subscribe button. You will be asked to enter a profile URL. Enter your profile from the server you want to subscribe from. As an example, my profile on identi.ca is http://identi.ca/ahynes1 on Orient Lodge it is http://micro.orient-lodge.com/ahynes1 If you aren’t currently logged in on the remote server, it will ask you to login. Then, you will be asked to confirm the subscription request.
If this works properly, you should be subscribed to the remote user. As I noted, too often, it doesn’t work properly, but that is how you can test it.
To get a further sense of where things are, you can look at a person’s subscriptions and subscribers. If your browser displays link addresses, mouse over each avatar in the subscribers or subscriptions to see if any of them point to remote servers. Check out mine on identi.ca and you’ll see several remote subscriptions and subscribers.
Why is this important? There are a lot of nice things that remote subscriptions can do. One person is creating a sports oriented laconi.ca site. I could subscribe to his sports oriented messages there, from identi.ca On my own site, I could subscribe to a particular subset of people on the identi.ca server so, when I view my identi.ca feed, I see everyone I’ve subscribed to on identi.ca, but when I’m on my development site, I see only those messages related to development. I’m sure that many of you can come up with other interesting use cases for federate servers.
Well, that’s it for now, I’m about to hit the road for a week, and expect to have very limited access. I’ll be working more on this when I get back.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 07/11/2008 - 14:51 (Check me out!)
dewaldp came up with a fix to the .htaccess files for Laconi.ca that looks like it fixes a problem that I, and others, have been having.
@evan The (\d+) and (\w+) in htaccess didn't work on my Apache server. Had to change both to ([^/.]+)
I’ve changed that in the .htaccess and htaccess.sample files in the tarball. If you want to give it a try, feel free to download the tarball and copy the new .htaccess file into your production directory.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 07/10/2008 - 22:37 (Check me out!)
The software for Laconi.ca continues to evolve quickly. I’ve proposed assorted updates, such as those documented here, but they seem to have been ignored. My tarballs and updates are focused on people who want to quickly and easily set up and customize their own installations of Laconi.ca, though this seems to be a low priority for some of the others.
First, take a copy of your current Laconi.ca directory. Then, download this tarball and unpack it.
If this is a first time install, follow the instructions here for setting up your database and configuring your config.php file, and you should be fine.
If this is an upgrade, copy any customized theme you have, any avatars that you have in your avatar directory, and your config.php If you had to rename or copy the stoica.ini file in the classes directory to get it to work with your database, you will need to do this again.
Next, you need to update the database. On the Laconi.ca developers mailing list, Mike Cochrane listed several SQL changes that need to be applied to upgrade from 0.4.1 to 0.4.3 I have taken them and created an SQL file, upgrade_4_1_to_4_3.sql which is in the root directory. When you do your upgrade, you need to execute these SQL commands.
There are also two scripts, which you should run, fixup_notices_rendered.php and
fixup_replies.php. I’ve had mixed results with them, but it seems like my system is now upgraded to 0.4.3
The other upgrade that I’ve added this time, is following on with my enhanced theming. I’ve added a 'header.tpl.php' file to the default directory, with instructions on how to add header information, such as might be used for Google Analytics.
This required adding a few lines to util.php.
Near the top, I added,
require_once(INSTALLDIR.'/lib/theme.php');
require_once( theme_file('header.tpl.php'));
And then, around line 199, right before
common_element_end('head');
I added
theme_header();
So, that is about it for tonight. I may be online a little this evening, or tomorrow to help people, but then, I’m going on vacation for a week, and won’t have much for upgrades until later.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 07/07/2008 - 18:46 (Check me out!)
Well, identi.ca has added a replies section, so I figured I should probably upgrade my tarball to have replies as well. At the same time, I didn’t want to lose any of my upgrades, so I would create a new tarball, which you can get here and describe what I went through to update my site, as well as the changes that I’ve made.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 07/07/2008 - 12:02 (Check me out!)
So, I’ve been tweaking my laconica server. For those of you who don’t know about laconi.ca it is an open source microblogging platform. identi.ca is based on laconi.ca and it has lots of neat features, like OpenID and OAuth support. Being Open Source, you can go in and make various changes.
Geeky stuff
For OpenID, I’ve managed to authenticate using I-names from 2idi.com. Another person appears to have authenticated with Yahoo!. I tried idproxy.net and got a 500 Error. I managed to get through with my LiveJournal, but only after a few different tries. Wordpress wouldn’t authenticate, nor would myopenid.com. I suspect that this is because of running my site off of a shared hosting service that is slow and doesn’t always connect with remote sites all that well. Another possibility is that the problems are because I don’t support fancy URLs.
I’ve mentioned my efforts at building a tarball to support installing laconi.ca on shared hosts. You can pull down the latest version of the tarball here. Follow the directions on the previous post, and you should be able to install laconica on your own server.
For my laconica server, I’ve started tweaking the configuration to make the theme look a lot more like the theme for Orient Lodge. So far, the only thing I’ve done has been to change create a new theme which I called ‘orient’. I changed the config.php file to point to the new theme, and then I started changing the display.css file. It wasn’t much work to make a bit of progress. Ideally, I would like to be able to do themeing similar to how you do in Drupal, but Laconi.ca is still at version 0.4.1 so that may be quite a ways off.
I did join the Laconi.ca mailing list where people are sharing ideas about enhancements. One idea was to enhance the email that gets sent to you when someone subscribes to you. I tweaked the code for my server. I went to the actions subdirectory and modified the subscribe.php file. I set it to look for a file called mail.tpl.php in the active theme directory. This will allow people to change the emails to match the behavior they want for their servers. I’ve included this in the tarball.
As is always the case, as soon as you add one feature, people want to tweak it a little more, so there may be changes coming to the mail.tpl.php file soon.
Discussion
So, what does this all mean? Some people are looking at identi.ca as just another subfunctional Twitter knock off. These are probably not early adopters. If you want a better Twitter right now, identi.ca and laconi.ca is not the place to be. However, if you are an innovator or early adopter, identi.ca and laconi.ca are very exciting. Anyone can set up their own server, if they are geeky enough. Anyone can change it. They can share the changes and lots of new things can be created.
Like what?
Well, let’s say you want to have your own white labeled microblog. Perhaps you want a community microblog. Perhaps you are a media outlet that wants to get readers plugged into your microblogging. With Laconi.ca, you can set that up. You can make it look the way you want. At the same time, your subscribers can still subscribe to other federated microblogs. Right now, as far as I know, only laconi.ca based servers participate in this federation. But, there is nothing to prevent Twitter, Plurk, or others from joining in.
Let’s say you want to build your own version of FriendFeed. You can take the laconi.ca software and get it to subscribe not only to other federarted microblogging servers, but potentially to other services as well. You just need to add the code into the framework, and then in good Open Source style, share your hacks.
Or, let’s say you have this incredible idea that is going to revolutionize the way people use microblogs to communicate. You can go out and create your own modifications to laconi.ca.
So, if you’re a geek and want to hack some interesting code, dig in. If you’re a later adopter, keep your eyes on laconi.ca and identi.ca
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 07/05/2008 - 12:34 (Check me out!)
Yesterday, I successfully set up laconi.ca on a Linux box at home. I took copious notes, figuring that I would present them here. However, there is a good description of the process here. Good, that is, if you are using Ubuntu, have root privileges and feel comfortable doing things like apt-get and pear installs. Basically, I poked around and followed a path very similar to that. However, if you have a shared hosting service, without root privileges, is it still possible to get Laconi.ca up and running? Doing a little tweaking, it sure looks like it. Check out www.orient-lodge.com/laconica.
Essentially, what I did was took everything from my Ubuntu installation, rolled them into a nice little tarball and uploaded it to my hosting service. You can grab the tarball here.
Once you’ve unzipped the tarball and put it in a proper directory, you should be able to get going by a few simple steps.
Edit the config.php file. Really the only things you should have to do is change the $config['site']['server'] and the $config['site']['path'] . In my case, I set them to
$config['site']['server'] = 'www.orient-lodge.com';
$config['site']['path'] = 'laconica';
Then, you need to change the $config['db']['database']. If you are running on a shared host, you will probably set up the database, user and password using cpanel. Then, you will need to load the database with the laconica/db/laconica.sql file.
Next caveat. Go into the classes subdirectory and copy the stoica.ini file to a file with the name of your database. e.g., my username on my hosting service is smartcam. All of my databases get created as smartcam_dbname. So, I am using smartcam_laconica as my laconica database. I copied stoica.ini to smartcam_laconica.ini There is probably some other way to set this up in the config file, but I couldn’t figure out the syntax.
At this point, you should be ready to go. Other caveats to know. My site defaults to php4 so I have a directive in the .htaccess file to force it to php5. I also added code to the index.php to define sys_get_temp_dir if it doesn’t exist. Since I am running it as a subdirectory of my Drupal based site, which uses other rewriting rules, I ran into trouble with the rewriting, so I’ve left the ‘fancy’ mode (aka, use rewriting) turned off.
Later, I hope to tweak theme so it will look more like my Orient Lodge theme.
With this, I will have my own microblogging site, white labeled to look like part of Orient Lodge. I can still subscribe to microblogging posts over at identi.ca or other laconi.ca based sites. All of this on a shared hosting account. Note to the wise: This is all well and good for a small site, but I wouldn’t recommend running a large microblogging site, like identi.ca on a shared host. You’d be bound to run out of resources before you know it.
|
|
Rate on NewsTrust
