Archive - Jul 2008
July 13th
Our camp site
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 07/13/2008 - 07:43
This is a picture of our camp site on Cape Cod. The weather is great wish you were here
July 12th
Playing with Laconi.ca Federation
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 07/12/2008 - 08:21Over 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.
EntreCard Highwater mark
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 07/12/2008 - 07:33Okay, I did it. I dropped 300 EntreCards each day for 30 days.
July 11th
Quick Laconi.ca update
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 07/11/2008 - 14:51dewaldp 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.
July 10th
Upgrading to Laconi.ca 0.4.3
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 07/10/2008 - 22:37The 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.
