Blogging Roller

Worth a read:

Understanding Google's new privacy policy: When Google changed its privacy policy last week, they made a strong effort to ensure that everyone knew that a change had occurred, but if you tried to figure out what had actually changed, you had to wade through a lot of buzzwords and legalese. Now the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Rainey Reitman explains it in simple language.

I'm going to break blog silence now to tell you about Apache Roller and Google Summer of Code 2011, which just wrapped up about a week ago.

This year we were very fortunate to get a another highly motivated and smart student, Shelan Perera, and an good proposal as well: Mobile-enabled Templates. Over the summer Shelan designed and implemented a new feature for the Roller blog server, one that enables theme authors to provide an alternative "mobile" template for each page template in a Roller blog theme. You can see a screenshot of the new Edit Template page in Shelan's blog How to change template codes in Roller.

Now, when a page request comes into Roller, Shelan's code determines if it's from a mobile device and, if it is, switches to a mobile template, if one is available. There's also an easy way for template authors to create a button to allow users to switch to the "Standard" site instead of the mobile version. The screenshot on the right, of Roller with a mobile theme comes from Shelan's most recent blog.

It was an honor to act as mentor for this project, and fun talking to Shelan via Skype most Fridays. I'm looking forward to getting this on my blog, and getting this cool new feature into an Apache Roller 5.1 release sometime soon. Thanks, Shelan! And, thanks to Google for running the most excellent Summer of Code program.

Lot's of activity in the OpenID and OAuth space recently. Both OAuth and OpenID have suffered from bad user experience, bad developer experience and low adoption. Now they're in the process of re-invention and folks from both Google and Facebook are involved. Here's my reading list so far on the topic:

• IETF OAuth working group - The OAuth 2.0 Protocol - draft-ietf-oauth-v2-05 is the latest draft of OAuth 2.0, published about two weeks ago.
• Eran Hammer-Lahav - Introducing OAuth 2.0 is an excellent overview of what's different and new about OAuth 2.0, listing the six new flows that are supported including a username/password flow.
• David Recordon (Facebook) - OpenID Connect: A strawman... is a proposal for "OpenID Connect" a standard way to do what Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect today, allow users to login sites with either their Facebook, Google or other identity provider credentials.
• Chris Messina (Google) - Combining OpenID and OAuth with OpenID Connect covers the thinking behind OpenID Connect and the expansion of the "OpenID brand."
• Michael Calore (WebMonkey) - New ‘OpenID Connect’ Proposal Could Solve Many of the Social Web’s Woes covers motivations behind OpenID Connect, problems with OAuth and OpenID.
• Joseph Holsten - Your New New Web Identity another nice overview of the new OpenID and OAuth ideas, pushes back against dropping/reinventing of OpenID Attribute Exchange.
• Tantek Celic - I'm calling bullshit on #OpenID Connect. Still too complex, ... is about one run-on tweet's worth of contructive criticism

IBM is going to be at Google I/O again this year, talking about OpenSocial and giving demos of new OpenSocial features in IBM products. Randy Hudson of IBM/Rational will be there to show how OpenSocial Gadgets can be used in Jazz-based product dashboards (introduced in Jazz Foundation 3.0 Milestone 5).

And IBM's Mark Weitzel, who happens to be an officer of the OpenSocial Foundation, will participate in panel discussion on Best practices for implementing OpenSocial in the Enterprise.

Best practices for implementing OpenSocial in the Enterprise

Social Web, Enterprise - Mark Weitzel, Matt Tucker, Mark Halvorson, Helen Chen, Chris Schalk

Enterprise deployments of OpenSocial technologies brings an additional set of considerations that may not be apparent in a traditional social network implementation. In this session, several enterprise vendors will demonstrate how they've been working together to address these issues in a collection of "Best Practices". This session will also provide a review of existing challenges for enterprise implementations of OpenSocial.

Session type: 201
Attendee requirements: General understanding of OpenSocial technologies. Some Enterprise experience is also recommended.
Tags: OpenSocial, Enterprise
Hashtag: #socialweb7

Date: Thursday May 20
Time: 1:00pm-2:00pm
Room: 9

I started a new blog on this site to explore what's possible with Google Friend Connect (GFC). It's called the G Friend Connect blog. I've added the GFC Members Gadget and I replaced Roller's built-in comment macro with the GFC Wall Gadget. In theory, if you have a Google, Yahoo or Open ID account, you should be able to login via a gadget, make friends with other site members and leave comments. If you have a minute or two, try it out. Join the site and leave a comment. That will give me (and you) a better idea of how things work.

So far I'm not particularly impressed with the Wall Gadget as a comments replacement. Here is an example. It doesn't support rich-text editing, no HTML is allowed, the comment area is too small and there's no preview button. Maybe that's why it's called a Wall Gadget rather than a Comments Gadget. Or maybe I'm just not doing it right.

Thanks to one hard working student and the Google Summer of Code, we now have a patch for OpenID support in Roller and its ready to commit to trunk. Here's a teaser screenshot:

If you want to know more, the proposal for OpenID support is on our wiki and the patch is attached to issue ROL-1733 in our bug tracking system.

• Placating people with options [dive into mark]
  "Google Project Hosting is and has always been a tool to fight license proliferation. It is only incidentally useful"
• tecosystems - Google Code vs License Proliferation
  "There is room in my philosophy for file based reciprocal licenses such as the CDDL, EPL, and MPL. While they may create islands of code, some of those islands are very large indeed"
• Launchpad, by Canonical
  Speaking of FOSS project hosting, LaunchPad looks very cool. Take the tour.
• JavaFX, are we there yet? [kirk.blog-city.com]
  "With this in mind, I'm pretty optimistic that JavaFX, being free and open, will become the preferred choice for building rich clients if..."
• OpenJFX: Open Source sidebar
  "Sun is committed to delivering enhancements to the JavaFX platform and to this end will continue internal development -- hmm... I don't understand the logic here
• Open Source and Cloud Computing - O'Reilly Radar
  "almost all of the software stacks running on cloud computing platforms are open source, for the simple reason that proprietary software licenses have no provisions for cloud deployment"
• Patent Law Blog (Patently-O): The Death of Google's Patents?
  "The Patent and Trademark Office has now made clear that its newly developed position on patentable subject matter will invalidate many and perhaps most software patents"

• InfoWorld 2008-07-07 Lab test: Climb aboard Ruby on Rails
  Interesting that the best rated Ruby-on-Rails IDE is the one that is free & opensource. Go Netbeans!
• ongoin · Atomic Monday
  "Herewith some evidence, for the general tech public, that Atompub is a big deal"
• InfoQ: AtomServer – The Power of Publishing for Data Distribution
  "a distributed, publish-subscribe service is a great way to address resiliency and loose coupling of subsystems"
• blog.reddit -- what's new on reddit: reddit goes open source
  "Until now, the only portion of reddit that wasn't freely available is reddit itself"
• OAuth for Google Data APIs
  "we're proud to announce that all of the Google Data APIs support OAuth"
• Google Code Blog: Protocol Buffers released as Open Source
  "think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler"


• Daily Kos: Cars After The Age of Oil
  "We can switch to a new tech that is older and simpler than the Internal Combustion Engine - the electric horseless carriage was first created in 1830"
• Wired.com: Laugh at High Gas Prices With a 282-MPG VW
  "VW has approved a plan to build a limited number of One-Liters in 2010"
• SAS Solar Farm | New Raleigh, NC
  "Our local 500 pound software gorilla is building a five acre, one megawatt photovoltaic solar farm"

There will be a OpenSocial Summit: May 14th, at the Googleplex covering the new v0.8 spec changes and all sorts of other interesting things. Wish I could make it, but I'll be happily back home in the old north state. Hopefully, somebody from the SocialSite team will be able to attend.

I asked for Google Summer of Code (GSOC) ideas for Roller a couple of days ago. Below are links to the proposals I thought were good enough to volunteer as possible mentor for and to submit. The deadline is tomorrow, so you've still got time to suggest additions to the list.

• Roller OpenID: Open ID support for Roller blog server, for user accounts and comments
• Roller Mobile: Mobile interface for Roller blog server
• Roller Activities: Simple Social Networking for Roller blog server, Twitter-like activities
• Roller Abdera: Abdera-based AtomPub implementation for Roller blog server
• AtomPub Export: AtomPub Export for Roller blog server, export all!
• Roller Shindig: Google Gadget support in Roller blog server themes via Shindig
• Roller Photo Gallery: Better photo and file upload features in Roller blog server

Here's the full list of Apache GSOC proposals.

From the Graphing Social Patterns 2008 conference, a sweet OpenSocial presentation with a nice overview of the emerging standard, status of the Apache Shindig project, details of the Hi5 implementation, some cute pictures of my buddy Pat Chanezon's kids and some very fine art (I think Pat forgot to credit the artist).

I was pretty impressed how quickly Google was able to help my brother out when his Gmail account apparently disappeared. That makes me feel a lot better about trusting Google to manage my precious data.

Another reason to trust in Google is that they make good stuff. I decided to try Google Reader for a couple of days. I figured I'd be back to NetNewsWire after a couple of days, but now I'm hooked and I'm not sure I'll ever go back. The only things I miss are hierarchical folders and smart-subscriptions, which I was using to subscribe to a search within my subscriptions, e.g. alert me when any of the feeds I'm reading mention "roller". I'd like to see better blog-search integration in Reader and features like FeedDemon's popular topics.

My brother's popular film blog FilmBabble, hosted on Google's Blogspot site, is now dead in the water and he cannot find any way to get help from Blogspot or Google. He's followed the help links to send support requests to both Google and Blogger.com last week, but Gmail tells him that his email address does not exist!

Could this be another case of <a href= "http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/12/28/gmail-disaster-reports-of-mass-email-deletions/">mass email deletions at Gmail.com? Personally, I wouldn't trust Google to host my blog or my email; I only use Gmail for mailing lists that are archived elsewhere. Seems like my caution might be well justified.

So please help, Google folks. Please tell us: how do you get help from Google when your email address and therefore your Google identity is apparently deleted?

Update 1: apparently Dan filled out this help request form on Friday. I wonder what kind of turn around time they have for this type of issue. Guess we'll find out.

Update 2: Google responded today and restored Dan's account, after only two business days. I must say, that's pretty damn good for a free service. Still, the "that email address does not exist" message is pretty damn scary. It's pretty nerve wracking to get locked out of your blog.

I was playing around with the new <a href= "http://earth.google.com/intl/en/userguide/v4/flightsim/index.html">flight simulator in Google Earth and flying over Raleigh when I noticed the extensive and very detailed set of 3D models for the NCSU campus. Here's an overview that shows the brickyard, D.H. Hill library and Harrelson Hall:

The details are pretty amazing, with signage and steps and hand-rails. Here's an example that shows the stairs on the side of Reynolds the old basketball coliseum:

The work was done by <a href= "http://delta.ncsu.edu/news/announcements/item.php?id=40">students competing in Google's Build Your Campus in 3D competition. Follow that link for a (tiny) video and you can also find a <a href= "http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/search?uq=01632339457160731034&start=60">catalog of all the student's work on the Google Earth site.

Congrats to Mark Pilgrim on his new job at Google, where he'll be working on the "right" vision for the future of the web. I assume the "wrong" vision, in Mark's mind, comes from the W3C and specifically the W3C's semantic web activities. Mark's comment pointing to his earlier The Overton Window post seems to back that up. I think it's interesting that Mark will be working remotely; that's a rare thing at Google.

And congrats to Debian Linux co-founder Ian Murdock on his new job at Sun, where he'll be working on all things OpenSolaris and, I hope, helping to make it as easy and fun to use as Debian or even Ubuntu.

Ian Kallen: I'm not condemning AdSense per se, it's a great service and revitalized web advertising after the flame-out a few years ago. But black-hat SEO's have definitely cranked up the game over the last year or so and are putting the whole market at risk again. Google may not be particularly motivated to go out and find the abuse but they have to act against it when you bring it to their attention. Watch this video.

Andy Oliver: For all I know Google is search, email, maps and a large experiment where programmers who do cool things are bought, frozen and put in a crate after having all of their spinal fluid removed. Why spinal fluid? Well just like most of Google's betas it might be useful someday.

Jason Caplain, a VC here in Raleigh, posted a rumor about Google to open RTP office. The story also made the Raleigh paper. The News and Observer story Google Looks for Local Offices quotes Andy Beal, who speculates that Google may be considering aquisition of local startups ChannelAdvisor or Motricity. Or perhaps they just want to syphon off some talented but bored IBM and SAS employees.

Bravo to Google Talk for using Jabber an open standard for instant messaging. Seems to work fine with GAIM. I'm 'snoopdave' if you want to say hi and verify that I am indeed connected.

Joe Gregorio:

This is just like WinFS.

Except that it is shipping today.

And it just works.

And it doesn't require an upgrade to your operating system.

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