Wiki

I recently realised that much of the code I find interesting is about interoperability. That is, I'm interested in making sure we can get at data in a range of formats. Work on libtiff, poppler, okular generators and openchange are all examples of that. I also like Qt as a very nice cross-platform API. The convergence of those interests is having Qt-style libraries and tools that can get access to data, especially data in widely used proprietary formats (e.g. those produced by Microsoft products).

I've set up a gitorious repository (http://gitorious.org/microsoft-qt-interop/microsoft-qt-interop) for some of that stuff.

At the moment, it mainly has a Compound File Binary Format (aka "OLE") parser, written from the MS-CFB specification.

I plan to add an EMF ("Enhanced Metafile") format parser / renderer (already written and currently used in KOffice) at some point too - just need to find some more time.

There are a lot more things that could go in there (e.g. converting the various things in MS-DTYP into Qt equivalents), but I've only implemented those things I actually need.

Contributions are welcome - I'm pretty flexible on format. If you have some suggestions, please add them to the project wiki on gitorious.

As you may have noticed, we’ve given Webmonkey an entirely new coat of paint.

The visual design has been refreshed — something we’ve been doing every couple of years since we launched in 1996 — and we honestly think the site has never looked better. It took a lot of hard work by everyone on the Wired.com technical and design teams to pull it off.

As pretty as it is, there are other changes behind the scenes that we feel are just as important. We simplified the site navigation and upgraded our search tool, making it much easier to find blog posts and tutorials around specific topics. We also upgraded our publishing system, which will allow us to use photos, screenshots and galleries in more interesting ways in our reviews and tutorials.

Most notably, however, this latest redesign of Webmonkey brings to an end a two year experiment. In May of 2008, we moved all of the tutorial content on the site (over 500 articles and reference pages) to a wiki. We asked all of our readers to chip in and help improve our educational content by contributing edits. Many of you jumped in, offering updates, tips, links and corrections. Certain communities really made a difference — in particular, our Django tutorial, our Python tutorial and our series on JavaScript frameworks all benefitted greatly from reader edits. We sincerely appreciate all of the work that everyone put in to improve our content.

But the wiki experiment didn’t pan out. Spam became a huge problem, and despite our best efforts to automate our defenses, keeping spam bots and vandals off the site put serious strain on our small team. Also, while MediaWiki is great software (we’ll continue to use it on Wired’s How-To Wiki), fully incorporating the wiki content into the rest of Webmonkey, which was and still is running WordPress, proved to be a challenge. Search, site navigation and content discovery were suffering because of it.

In February, we froze edits on the wiki and began porting everything into WordPress. All of the legitimate edits and updates that were made by our readers while the wiki pages were open to the public have been preserved in the WordPress versions. We also found some time to update some of the older articles, too.

Now, the tutorials easier to find. They look better (thanks to Alex Gorbatchev’s SyntaxHighlighter) and the multi-page lessons are easier to navigate. And while the spam bot armies are locked out for good, the tutorials are open for comments just like blog posts. So if you spot something that needs updating or fixing, just leave a note and we’ll attend to it.

There’s still some work to be done. Over the next few weeks and months, we’ll continue updating the content library, beefing up the number of templates in the Reference section and building out the directories. In the near future, we’re going to install Disqus to handle comments, so you will be able to log in using OpenID, Facebook Connect, your Twitter or Yahoo credentials, or an existing Disqus login if you want to leave a comment anywhere on the site.

So for now, click around the site. Follow us on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook if you haven’t already. And of course, please let us know what you think of the new Webmonkey in the comments.

What a week for StatusNet, the open-source, microblogging service that serves as the foundation for identi.ca, one of the first services to emerge as a focal player in the movement around the real-time Web.

Last week, the company launched StatusNet Enterprise Network, a microblogging service with a support program for the corporate market. Initial customers include Motorola Corporation and Canonical Ltd.

And yesterday, they announced a significant update that demonstrates they will be an open-source alternative to the proprietary microblogging services that cater to the enterprise.

Sponsor

StatusNet is an exception in the enterprise market. It's an open-source software project, started by members of the open source and wiki communities.

The enterprise service is priced on an annual basis. It ranges in cost from $1,000 to $10,000 per year. Customers get access to different levels of service based on package they choose to purchase. For example, at the $1,000 level package, the service includes access to the forums. It includes email support and response time within one day. A $10,000 package includes six hours of best practice consulting and response within one hour to support requests.

Open-source software is proving to be a winner in the enterprise. As we noted earlier this week, a number of enterprise providers have committed developer communities. Alfresco Software is a shining example. According to Matt Asay, the company has grown every quarter since its launch in 2005, "with its last quarter seeing a 30-percent quarter-over-quarter increase on an already large base."

With a committed developer community, an open-source enterprise provider can show significant improvements in its product. Today, StatusNet released StatusNet 0.9.0, the latest version of its software, representing eight month of development by the StatusNet developer community.

The feature list scrolls down the page. It includes leading edge support for OStatus, the new distributed status update standard based on PubSubHubbub, Salmon, Webfinger, and Activity Streams.

Significant: StatusNet now has no fixed content size. "Notice size is configurable, from 1 to unlimited number of characters. Default is still 140!" This could possibly mean that the service can be similar to Tumblr or Posterous that fits into the enterprise.

Other updates include:

• Support for location using the Geolocation API.


• Support for OAuth authentication in the Twitter API.


• An authentication plugin for LDAP servers.


• Support for Facebook Connect

For once, an advance in Google personalized search I actually like. They’re adding the same stars we’re so used to in Google Reader and Gmail to personalized search results. The starred results let you mark favorite sites to show up at the top of future posts—and it doesn’t appear to affect the rankings of the rest of the organic results.

As Google puts it:

With stars, you can simply click the star marker on any search result or map and the next time you perform a search, that item will appear in a special list right at the top of your results when relevant. That means if you star the official websites for your favorite football teams, you might see those results right at the top of your next search for [nfl].

The stars are replacing an old feature in personalized search: SearchWiki. Says Google, “In our testing, we learned that people really liked the idea of marking a website for future reference, but they didn’t like changing the order of Google’s organic search results.” (Which probably isn’t to say they actually disliked reranking sites, but just that they didn’t do it very much. Seriously, it just wasn’t super useful.)

Any SearchWiki notations you made will be saved in your Google Account. If you want to continue to make notations in SERPs, Google recommends Sidewiki, its browser-based, publicly-edited sidebar wiki for commentary launched back in September. Last we heard, Sidewiki hadn’t really taken off—maybe this is Google’s push to create new, passionate users.

The stars are all set to go and will be rolling out for all signed-in users in the next few days. So far, there’s no indication starred Google Reader items will have any relationship with this effort beyond the passing similarity.

One big drawback for marketers, of course, is that every step forward in personal search may mean we’re less likely to be able to rank a site universally—or even tell if our site is showing up for most signed-in users. Plus, we may have to sign out to get the “neutral” results for reporting (although if you’re starring a client’s competitor in your SERPs, “sumbuddy’s doin it wrong”).

What do you think? Do you like the idea of stars and the simpler interface to mark sites you’d want to see in SERPs again? Or do you worry about personalized search affecting marketing? Would you like to see your Google Reader starred items showing up for relevant searches?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

PubSubHubbub, or PuSH, is now supported on all WordPress.com blogs. For those running sites using the WordPress.org software the PuSHPress plugin is available to do the same thing. The big difference in this plugin compared to the other PuSH WordPress plugins is that it includes a PuSH hub built in.

A little bit of PubSubHubbub background

Like rssCloud, PuSH adds a line to your feed to let clients know where they can send PuSH subscription requests. In the RSS2 feed this looks like:

<atom:link rel="hub" href="http://josephscott.org/?pushpress=hub">

and in Atom looks like:

<link rel="hub" href="http://josephscott.org/?pushpress=hub">

The href attribute contains the URL that subscribers can send requests to. Details on what that request looks like are in the PubSubHubbub Spec. The short version, it’s a simple HTTP POST call with some specific field names.

Here’s an example PHP subscription request asking that updates to http://example.com/feed/ be sent to http://example.com/push/ via the hub at http://example.com/?pushpress=hub

$curl = curl_init( );

curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://example.com/?pushpress=hub' );
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, 'hub.callback=http://example.com/push/&hub.mode=subscribe&hub.secret=not-telling-you&hub.verify=sync&hub.topic=http://example.com/feed/&hub.verify_token=133t-$7r1n9' );
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, 1 );
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_POST, 1 );

curl_exec( $curl );
print_r( curl_getinfo( $curl ) );
curl_close( $curl );

The hub at example.com will then send new content (in feed format) right after it’s published to URL provided in hub.callback.

Why the PuSHPress plugin?

I love that there are large, open PuSH hubs available for anyone to use. There’s a list at http://code.google.com/p/pubsubhubbub/wiki/Hubs. In PuSH since most of the hard work (figuring out what’s new in a feed and sending that out to subscribers) is done via the hub this is very handy and really great for testing.

I also think there’s a role for a readily available simple hub that anyone can put up and use, in this case built on top of WordPress. And by leveraging WordPress the hub part can be greatly simplified. The real bonus for users is choice, they can relay the updates through 3rd party hubs, or use the built in hub in PuSHPress.

It’s worth noting that PuSHPress has a WordPress filter on the array of hubs; pushpress_hubs. This allows other plugins to easily add to or replace the hubs mentioned in the feeds by PuSHPress.

To help keep things simple and limit potential abuse the PuSHPress plugin will only allow subscriptions for the RSS2 and Atom feeds of the WordPress blog that it is installed on.

My thanks to Brett Slatkin for helping test PuSHPress. His tests revealed a few bugs that were quickly addressed.

How fast?

When talking about these realtime-ish update features this question often comes up. Fair enough, I’d want to know too :-)

The PuSHPress plugin schedules pings to go out right away via the wp_schedule_single_event function in WordPress. I suspect for most people this will be quite fast. If your server is under tremendous load and really slow, then this will be really slow too, just like the rest of the server ;-)

On WordPress.com the details are a bit different. Instead of scheduling pings to be sent out with wp_schedule_single_event it adds them to our asynchronous jobs system ( more info available at http://code.trac.wordpress.org/ ). The jobs system is setup to do exactly these kinds of tasks really, really fast. Don’t be surprised if the ping shows up before you get a chance to finish the first Mississippi.

The future

So where is all this going? Who knows, but it is fun to watch! :-)

Further reading

If you have an interest in this area there are plenty of resources:

• PubSubHubbub project site
• Google Group
• Spec

The spec is a quick read and to the point, worth reading.

And there you have it, a little more in-depth discussion of PuSHPress.

Related posts:

1. RSSCloud For WordPress
2. rssCloud WordPress Plugin Update – 0.4.1
3. WordPress Plugin Update: LibXML2 Fix

If you’re frequently asked the same questions by friends and family — perhaps you’re a digital photography whiz, and they call you all the time about their photography woes — you might take on Lisa Hoover’s suggestion of creating an FAQ page that you can point people to, so that they can solve those problems at their leisure.

Of course, FAQ pages aren’t just handy in a social sense. Web workers can also gain time and reduce frustration by creating FAQ pages for their colleagues, team members or clients.

For those of us who work remotely, suffer connection outages or are offline periodically (perhaps you’re in a part-time role) or communicate with those in different timezones, publishing a work-related FAQ page on the company wiki or your own web site is worth considering.

I’ve found work-related FAQ pages really helpful. Not only can they reduce the time you spend explaining a process, responsibility or task over and over to team members, they may also help someone who’s filling your shoes (if you’re sick, or on vacation) to complete aspects of your job as simply and quickly as possible.

Who Needs an FAQ Page?

A work-related FAQ page could prove handy for a web worker who:

• finds themselves answering the same questions repeatedly
• works in a different timezone to others who need to know how their work is progressing
• manages an otherwise undocumented process or product independently
• works part-time, job-shares, or is offline or out of reach for given periods of time

Whether you work on- or off-site, for one employer or many clients, you can probably think of a least a few questions you could include on an FAQ page.

What’s an FAQ Page For?

First of all, don’t go thinking that an FAQ page is a means by which you can fob off your colleagues or reduce tedious interactions with clients.

A good FAQ page helps the people you work with as much as it helps you: it’ll provide them with the details they need, whether you’re around or not. It also allows them to digest potentially complex information at their own pace. Finally, it can enable colleagues to ask the right questions of you, reducing the time they need to spend solving a problem or obtaining information.

Though it may sound counter-intuitive, your FAQ page needn’t be restricted to Frequently Asked Questions. The whole point of FAQs is that they allow the questioner to obtain information without your having to be present: they ask the question, you send the link to the FAQ, and they get the answers.

So your FAQ page may also:

• anticipate questions from colleagues
• explain important information that people need to know about how you do your job (including essential process documentation, the details of external contacts you may deal with, and other information as appropriate)
• provide status updates for projects you’re working on
• identify the deadlines you’re working to
• pre-empt your absences from work (including vacations, conferences, etc.)

Obviously, in preparing an FAQ page, you’ll need to consider the audiences who’ll use it, and shape the content accordingly. You don’t want external parties to be able to access information about your processes, or to allow clients to see the details of your work schedules on other projects. So be careful about choosing the information you’ll include, and tailor it to specific groups.

The FAQ page I developed for one of my roles was internally directed at on- and off-site colleagues employed by the company I worked for, which made it fairly easy to work out what content I could and should include. Once you define your FAQ page audience, you should be able to identify which  content is appropriate for the page.

How Do You Use It?

Depending on your role, your colleagues (are they internal or external, or clients?), your company culture, and what you’ve included in your FAQ page itself, your FAQ may be useful in a range of situations.

• If it’s a purely role-related FAQ page, you might send the link to people who ask you a question that it answers.
• If the page contains information about your work processes and external contacts, you might send it to relevant colleagues before you go on leave.
• If it’s a detailed account of your working processes, status, FAQs and more, you might include it alongside your listing in your company’s internal staff directory.
• If your page relates to your work as an independent contractor, you might include it in your email signature, your web site’s navigation, or within a restricted client area on your web site.

An FAQ page can help you reduce the frequency with which you provide the same information to different people. It can also help you to remain productive and focused on tasks that actually require your expertise.

Have you ever used a professional FAQ page at work?

Image by stock.xchng user EdwinP.

In the past few months, I’ve been working with a lot of start-ups looking to spread the word about what they’re doing. Given the continuing decline of traditional media coverage, blogs are taking a more important role.

In Canada, however, it can be difficult to identify and target bloggers because there doesn’t seem to be a good, user-friendly directory to discover the most interesting, relevant or popular blogs. There have been some attempts to build a directory in the past but some of them have disappeared, or the directories don’t work well because they are hard to use, or the blog database leaves much to be desired.

So, how do you launch a valuable and useful Canadian blog directory that makes it easy to find the best, relevant, most interesting, most commented on or most active blogs? At the same time, how do new blogs that have great content capture the spotlight?

One of the challenges is that defining “best”, “most interesting” and “relevant” is difficult because they mean difficult things to different people. What’s “best” for one person may be completely unappealing to someone else.

As a result, a useful blog directory may involve different approaches. These could include:

1. Listing blogs based on things such as the number of RSS subscribers, how often content is posted, how many in-bound links they’ve attracted, or a ranking such as Quantcast or Compete.

2. A Wiki structure in which blogs could be added to the directory based on what people think of them. The Wiki could include rankings or thumbs/thumbs down voting to provide scoring. Of course, blogs could also be removed or edited by Wiki members.

3. A curated directory in which blogs would have to be nominated to be included. This would clearly involve subjectivity but it may be a solid approach in the short-term to establish a firm foothold.

At the same time, interesting new blogs would also be put into the spotlight to encourage people to visit the directory on a regular basis. It would also give bloggers some encouragement that their efforts are being recognized.

So, what approach do you think would work best? Is there a directory already out that there has potential?

As excited as I am about the slew of Android-driven tablets and other non-phone devices coming out in the new few weeks and months, the lack of the official Android Market on the majority of them is dampening my enthusiasm. Android is a great OS, but without apps it’s pretty limited. The manufacturers behind these devices usually offer their own app stores, but it takes time to build numbers. Just ask Palm.

So what’s an Android-lover to do? Don’t despair, there are ways to install your favorite apps on your tablet, eReader, or other large-screen device. You just need to find the app’s APK (installation) file. Once you have it, you can just click to install and you’re set. No promises that the app will install or work, but at least you can try.

Here are 5 easy ways to find your favorite Android apps:

1. Download the APK from the developer’s website. Some developers allow users to download the file from their websites even if they’re available through the Android Market. Depending on the developer, you may also find versions of the app optimized for larger screens.
   

2. Search third-party app stores. No, the official Google market isn’t the only one. Many are independent repositories such as AndAppStore, SlideME, AndroidFreeware.org, Brothersoft, and Androlib. You should also check out the app stores created for specific devices, as they may allow you to search and download from a web browser, like the Camangi Marketplace. Some of these markets have a store app that works similarly to the Android Market, installing the apps for you.

3. Haunt device-specific forums and websites. If an Android gadget is lucky enough to have gathered a fanbase, those dedicated users are likely on the hunt for their favorite apps, too. You may be able to find a forum topic, FAQ, or a wiki with links to APK files for popular free apps or repositories. The users at ArchosFans have had months to find and test a variety of apps they can’t find in Archos’ app library. They’ve even created a dedicated wiki page for them with download links.

4. Google It. Sometimes the easiest thing to do is simply search for [app name] APK and see what comes up. You might find it on a buried page on the developer’s website or repository. Be careful, though, because many hits will come from anonymous uploads on file storage or torrent sites. Don’t download a virus in your zeal to obtain your favorite note-taking app.

5. Get them from your Android phone. If you have access to the official market then you can grab almost any APK from your phone. First, download something that will allow you to make backups of your apps. I like Astro File Manager because it allows me to choose which apps to back up. Once that’s done, connect your phone to your PC, find the backup folder, then copy the APK files to your computer or storage device, then transfer them to your Android device. You may not be able to make copies of every app, and transferring paid ones may break the TOS or EULA, so be mindful.

Using your favorite apps on all of your Android devices is the first step to Android bliss. If there’s one you can’t find or discover doesn’t work with your gadget, drop a line to the developers. The tablets are coming fast and furious this year, and Android’s life outside of phones may be more robust and rewarding than they realize.

As a followup to our post a couple days ago, this morning Facebook has posted a few updates to the Developer Roadmap regarding upcoming changes to the ways Platform applications integrate with Facebook’s core “viral” communication channels.

First, Facebook has now given a specific hour for the deprecation of notifications: 10:00 AM US Pacific Time on Monday 1 March. We’re seeing a lot of developers blasting out notifications in one last go before Facebook turns off the channel.

Second, Facebook has pushed back the dates on changes to invitations and requests. Before this morning, Facebook’s roadmap said that changes to the ways users could access invitations and requests would be going live in February. However, now the timing for moving invitations to a new tab in the Inbox has been changed to “March,” and the timing for deprecating other requests has been changed to “Early/mid 2010″ (still 30 days after launching changes to the Share dialogs).

Facebook has often pushed back items on the Developer Roadmap since announcing it last fall, usually to give everyone involved more time to prepare. When the company only lists a month, and not a specific day, on the Roadmap, it can imply that the launch timing is softer (we could have been clearer about that in our last post, but we wouldn’t suggest assuming that will be the case in your product roadmaps).

Here’s the latest info from the Developer Wiki on Facebook’s plans for the changes to requests and invitations – and below, a mock of a potential implementation of invites in the Inbox.

Regarding Requests:

Today requests fall into two broad categories: “invite” requests (where a user can encourage their friend to check out an application), and “share” requests (when a user is sharing content within an app that is interesting). We’re going to separate these actions more clearly in the future.

Users will still be able to intentionally share stories into the stream.

To enable users to invite their friends to use an application, you will use invites which will be aggregated in a special filter within the Inbox. We will create a new API for this, which is still in development.

To enable users to share information with each other from within an application, you will use our improved Share dialogs (still in development), which will be sent via the Inbox.

The existing request functionality will be deprecated. Requests sent via the existing request forms will be displayed as invites (not as Inbox messages).

And here’s the Invitations mockup:

They're after $20K, to pay for the servers, a site redesign, and a new back-end, and they say it'll last them for three years. I love the Librivox catalog, and this sounds like a good investment in its future. I kicked in $100.

We're asking for donations for the following:

• to cover hosting costs for our website (about $5,000/year)*, which includes:
  • the site you are reading now;
  • the forum;
  • the wiki;
  • the catalog;
  • a whole lot of back-end software to host and process audio before it goes to the Internet Archive
  • but does NOT include hosting audio files which is done by Archive.org
• to redesign the site and improve its accessibility
• to make the LibriVox catalog easier for listeners to use
• to make the management software easier for admins to use

We expect this fund-raising drive to sustain us for three years at least.

I highly recommend the MakerBot Cupcake CNC, a very cool tool! I’m an engineering student and worked as an intern for MakerBot last summer, which gave me the opportunity to play around with their bots a lot. I got one for myself, and am very happy with it. For those unfamiliar with the MakerBot Cupcake CNC, it’s a desktop 3D printer that takes digital design files and builds objects up to approximately the size of a large cupcake by laying down many minute layers of ABS plastic.

The MakerBot comes as a kit requiring assembly. All you need to put one together are some basic tool skills, and a few days of work. It took me a weekend of on-and-off work to get mine from boxed-up to printing. The most complex, and definitely the process requiring the most adjustments, and a little bit of basic soldering, is the construction of the extruder. Once your bot is built, it shouldn't take you more than an hour to get it printing.

Since building a MakerBot is a large DIY project, some things will not be perfect and will require some tinkering on the builder's part. You might come across some problems such as loud, shaky X- and Y-stages, an angled Z-stage, or an extruder that clogs, but MakerBot has lots of solutions to the most common problems on their wiki.

There’s nothing else similar that’s readily available for purchase. The RepRap is in many ways the antecedent of the MakerBot, but it’s not for sale as a kit, as is the MakerBot. Since the RepRap project and all of MakerBot Industries are completely open-source, they have worked together. All the boards used to run MakerBots are actually used to run RepRaps, and many of the parts sold in the MakerBot store, such as motors and electronics, can be used to build a RepRap.

I’ve used my MakerBot to build a 7-piece block puzzle and Owl Headphone Wraps (pictured), and in the future I plan to build a refrigerator clip and a small puzzle box with my MakerBot, among other things.

I would also highly recommend looking at all the cool stuff on Thingiverse.com. It has a lot of free design files of things you can print with your MakerBot. The website was created by Bre Pettis and Zach Hoeken, two of the three MakerBot co-founders.