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Whoops – Linkback Feedback

September 15, 2009 in Software, StatusNet by CiaranG | No comments

I inadvertently created a feedback loop where every blog post subscribed to via Planet Ciaran got an instant trackback/pingback as soon as it was posted. Here’s how:

Feedback loop

  1. Blog post is made and picked up via RSS/Atom by my Planet Venus (Sam Ruby’s reworking of Planet) installation
  2. Excerpt of post gets added to Planet Ciaran
  3. Feed2omb picks up the new post via Atom and posts it to the @planetciaran account on my StatusNet installation.
  4. The StatusNet (formerly called Laconica, how long do I keep saying that?) Linkback plugin sends a trackback/pingback notification to the original blog
  5. The blog adds an irritating and pointless trackback link to the original post.

Needless to say I’ve turned off the Linkback plugin until I can hack in a way to exclude that particular account. (Currently the plugin applies linkback logic globally, across the entire StatusNet installation.)

As a side issue, before anyone else asks why I bother with all the above anyway, there are two answers. One – because it’s there. Two, it provides useful ways of reading stuff. Planet Ciaran is subscribed to most of the stuff I read on a regular basis. The above setup gets me a) XMPP notifications, b) a web page to browse if I want to read it that way, and c) an aggregated sanitised Atom feed to subscribe to. If that doesn’t answer your question, and I suspect it probably doesn’t, then nothing will.

Commit Visualisation Revisited

September 3, 2009 in Git, Laconica, Software, StatusNet, Uncategorized by CiaranG | No comments

I wrote briefly about code_swarm last year – a tool to generate visualisations of a project’s commit history. Today, via Brenda Wallace, I found out about a new variation on the same theme – so new it hasn’t been released or even named yet. Apparently though the author, Andrew Caudwell, is planning to release the source in the very near future.

The following video, also courtesy of Brenda Wallace, shows the output generated from the StatusNet (formerly Laconica) git repository:

Get the Flash Player to see this content.

I think this is really impressive stuff, and not just because I’m in it. There’s a better quality version on YouTube.

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.

Laconica on Debian Etch with PostgreSQL

September 24, 2008 in Laconica, Software, StatusNet, Web Development by CiaranG | 17 comments

A quick guide to getting Laconica up and running on Debian Etch using PostgreSQL as the database. The starting point for all this is a clean install of the netinst version, with no additional software selected during the install. Everything here is done as the root user.

If this all seems a bit long-winded, that’s because it is, but I thought it was better to cover everything from a clean install. In theory you should be able to follow this to the letter and end up with a working Laconica. Corrections will be gratefully received.

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feed2omb – A feed to microblog posting tool

August 31, 2008 in Laconica, Software, StatusNet by CiaranG | 18 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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