Laconi.ca hacking
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 07/07/2008 - 12:02So, 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
RIP, Lori Bonatakis, a Grassroots Hero
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 07/06/2008 - 12:48I believe it was the summer of 2003 when I first met Lori. It was probably on the Dean for America blog, or one mailing list or another where we first met. I was living in Stamford, CT and she was living somewhere around Springfield, MA. We became close friends as we shared our hopes and dreams for Gov. Dean becoming President. We discussed ideas of getting Gov. Dean’s message out.
After Gov. Dean’s campaign was over, we stayed in touch. She came down to events at our house in Stamford. She kept me informed of what was going on in her life, and encouraged me to get involved with Deval Patrick’s campaign.
Our common interests went beyond politics. She worked in information technology and we often compared notes. We hadn’t been in touch a lot after Deval Patrick’s campaign. She had moved for a while down to North Carolina. We were both going through our share of difficulties. So, it is particularly shocking and saddening to hear of her passing.
There is a post about Lori on BlueMassGroup and on Ryan’s Take.
I’ve looked through old emails and posts on different blogs. I wish I could find some special words to sum it all up. I wish I could find some magic words to make it all better, but I can’t. I am shocked. I am saddened. Lori will be deeply missed.
White Labeled Microblogging for Dummies: Laconica on a Shared Host
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 07/05/2008 - 12:34Yesterday, 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.
Fourth of July and More Updates
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 07/04/2008 - 13:01Well, it has been difficult staying on top of the various online communities that I’m part of during the past few days, but last night, I did manage to finish off dropping my 300 EntreCards for the day. Today has been a quiet day getting going, and I’ve easily met my quota.
Many of the blogs that I visited today have various things up to celebrate Independence Day. There are pictures of flags and fireworks, many of them sparkly. Quite a few blogs have posted the Declaration of Independence. I really like that, and have been talking about Independence Day with Fiona a bit today and Kim is showing Fiona a Schoolhouse Rock video about the forming of our country. Other folks have been talking about Canada Day, which was on the First. Many of my ancestors come from Canada, so it is great to be in touch with a little of their history.
I stumble across a lot of Philippino blogs and everyone there is talking about the Manny Pacquiao David Diaz fight. Other blogs are still chattering about Spain’s victory in Euro 08.
On my own blog, I’ve been continuing to add tweaks since upgrading to Drupal 6.2. I’ve mostly swapped content from the left column and the right column. The layout looks better that way. However, it makes the ads load faster but my content load more slowly. Oh well.
I also found the bug with OpenID. It should be working now, however, if you’ve signed up before, it may have lost your information and may add you as a new user.
You now have three different ways of adding comments. You can add them via Disqus, FriendFeed or directly to the site. What are the advantages? Well, FriendFeed ties in nicely to all kinds of other content, but can lag a little bit. Disqus seems like a good shared comment system. However, like with FriendFeed, the comments reside elsewhere. I have some control over the comments, but if FriendFeed or Disqus go away, so does the content.
In terms of Microblogging, I’m still very interested in identi.ca. I haven’t made any more progress is setting up my own site based on their software, but I’ll get back to that. I was pleased to see that ping.fm added the ability to feed identi.ca. However, it requires that you use a userid and password. However, I use OpenID to authenticate with identi.ca, so I don’t have a password to give to ping.fm I’ve tried a few things to tweak that, but no luck yet. Ideally, ping.fm should start supporting OpenID, both for logging in as well as for authentication with sites like Identi.ca. Somewhere in there OAuth fits in, but I haven’t looked at OAuth closely enough yet.
With all of that, I am managing to spend time with family and friends. Last night we went to see fireworks. Today, we’re going visiting, and I’ll be back online sometime much later.
Drupal Upgrade
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 07/03/2008 - 15:16Okay. So, I finally got around to upgrading Orient Lodge to Drupal 6.2. The migration went fairly well, however the theme got a little messed up and I still need to tweak that. I had to make a few changes to a few blocks, change a little specialized PHP code I had written and so on.
Right now, the OpenID module doesn’t seem to be working right. I’ll try a few more things on that as I have time. The FriendFeed functionality that I added needed a little tweaking, but still seems to work. However, you should be able to add comments in FriendFeed and see them here. Unfortunately, it sometimes takes a little time.
I’ve added Disqus comments. They seem to be working. I haven’t done a lot with Discus, so it will be interesting to see how that works.
The Spam module that I was using for Drupal 4 does not seem to be working for Drupal 6, so I’m going to have to be a little more vigilant than I had been. However, I have added Captcha and we’ll see how well that works.
With Captcha added, I’ve also opened things up for anonymous comments. We’ll see how it goes. I expect people to comment, the way they would comment if they were sitting with me in my living room. If anonymous people cannot respect that, I will turn anonymous comments back off.
I’ve also turned on the Service Links module so you can recommend my blog posts on various sites. The Service Links module supports lots of services. I’ve only turned on the few that I’m most interested. However, if there are other services that you really like, let me know.
With all of that, I never did get back to working on laconi.ca That will have to wait for another day, since now, I need to get offline for a little family time.
