Laconica

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The Microblog as an Information Hub

March 31, 2009 in Laconica, Software, StatusNet, XMPP by CiaranG | 2 comments

Something that’s becoming obvious to me lately is the unintended suitability of a microblog to act as an information hub. To clarify the term microblog here, many may understand that as Twitter, but that would be a bad example because a) it’s both a single public instance of a microblog, and b) it doesn’t have all the capabilities that make this so interesting.

Therefore a good example of what I’m talking about would be a private instance of Laconica running on a local network, or perhaps in a private setup on the public internet. I say private because some of the examples I’m going to give are most appropriate for a private setup.

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Lacon-iCal – a Laconica plugin for iCalendar feeds

March 4, 2009 in Laconica, Software, StatusNet, Web Development by CiaranG | 2 comments

Lacon-iCal is a plugin for the Laconica microblogging platform that provides an iCalendar (RFC 2445) feed for each user’s notices. This initial release makes use of the new plugin system, and therefore requires Laconica version 0.7.2 or higher.

The project repository is hosted at Gitorious and currently consists of a single file. Installation is simple – first, place that file in Laconica’s plugins directory, and then add the following to the end of config.php:

addPlugin('ICal', array('limit' => 20));

The 20 is the maximum number of notices that will be present in a feed – set this to a value that suits your installation.

Once the above is done, the plugin is installed, and you can access a user’s iCalendar feed by appending /ical to their profile url, so http://example.com/bob/ical would be bob’s iCalendar feed, assuming that example.com was running Laconica, and bob was a user there, neither of which is true.

feed2omb – A feed to microblog posting tool

August 31, 2008 in Laconica, Software, StatusNet by CiaranG | 29 comments

Update: For the latest version and up to date documentation, please see the project page.

feed2omb is a simple tool that takes input from Atom or RSS feeds and posts updates to the open microblogging service of your choice. It should also (though I’m not going to try it) quite happily post to Twitter.

The feed reading is handled by Mark Pilgrim’s excellent Universal Feed Parser so it should be able to deal with any feed you throw at it. On the posting side, you can send the updates to open microblogging services such as those based on Laconica – this includes Identica.

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