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