On Friday I had a quick Twit with Uno on why the adoption of OpenID is soooo slow. We were limited by time and Twitter’s word count so it did not go on for too long. I was actually wrong in that conversation. I stated that it was being overcomplicated and thats the reason why non-technical people don’t use it.
Later on I thought, what a “twit”! The main reason for its slow adoption is due to limited support in online services. If more big sites support it, more people will start implementing it. There is currently little value for users to use OpenID, since 9 out of 10 times they will have to sign up at a web site with a normal username and password anyway since that site does not support OpenID. Simple as that. Technical folks all have an OpenID because they see the future value of it and they like the concept.
What we must look at is why so many sites are not implementing it. When I implemented it for Afrigator I found that there is very little support or examples of how others before me have done it and I had to go very much into the technicalities of how the protocol actually works. There was at that stage 2 libraries for PHP that one could re-use for your own apps. There might be more now, but not sure. I think Python has a little more libraries, but not to sure about that fact.
Our very own Armand du Plessis is involved in a very, very interesting project which allows people to use their Facebook logins as an OpenID provider. It is called Identitude. I applaude this effort as it not only is extremely useful, but it also creates a great awareness of the OpenID technology. Great job Armand! Here is a great post explaining most of it.
Found this over at Justin’s. Who knew that Paint was such a brilliant piece of software?! What a huge development team and who knew there went so much into Paint?! I’m quite frankly quite flabbergasted that there is no lawsuits flying! Microsoft should definitely sue Adobe due to all the features Adobe stole from them and implemented without royalties in Photoshop…
I showed Charl this schweet new plugin of Tyler’s and he asks me: “What is all those UGLY tags?!”.
Dammit man! Its about the rel-tags! Thanks for the idea Charl! So I changed it so that you can click this little icon and it will toggle the tags to show and hide them instead of labelling them out all over your post.
Click the link or icon underneath the post title to see it in action. looking much betterder. If its not working for you, please leave me a comment and tell me what browser it is not working in so I can investigate!
Oh, I’ll let you know when its live and available for download as soon as Tyler approved it!
Okay, I have to admit I was doing my damndest best not to get sucked into Twittering. Really I was. I failed when I saw this little kick-assFlock/Firefox extenstion!
Introducing Twitterbar! Go here. Install the extenstion. Restart Flock. You are ready to Twit when you see this little icon in your address bar: (the little grey circle with the small white plus!)
When you hover over the little grey icon, it tells you how much characters you’ve got left.
So here is the low-down! Your browser’s address bar becomes your Twitter updater! Really, how much simpler can it get! What is really nifty is that when you are on a site and want to update twitter that you are checking out this site, you simply enter –post after the URL and it post it to twitter!
And here it is on twitter:
You can type your normal messages and do the same:
Getting and setting up the extension:
First, go and install the twitterbar extension. You can find it here:
While Ruby on Rails and Python is way ahead in the parsing of HTML for microformats, PHP is trailing behind it seems. We have found a couple of classes that can do it, but none without some quirks.
The one option was hKit which is a PHP 5.x parser. The problem with this parser is that it only works on PHP 5.x since it requires the SimpleXML PHP extension. Our problem is that not all PHP developed sites are running on PHP 5.x. That is not an ideal solution then.
The other option we found was the Microformats Parser over at PHPClasses developed by Ve Bailovity. This is an award winning class and is dependant of the xArray class also found there and also developed by Ve. This opion is much better since it works on PHP 4.3 or better and requires the DOM XML extension. The issue is that it does not work “out-of-the-box”. It worked beautifully when tested with the HTML file that accompanies the classes, but as soon as I tried it with some “real-world” microformat implementations (tried on http://corkd.com and http://www.thinkvitamin.com/), it failed. Sad, since it is a beautiful script!
So what do we need? We need a class that works on ALL versions of PHP and that can process ANY form of HTML or XHTML. We all know not everyone cares much for their mark-up and therefor you will find all kinds of funny and weird issues, so it must be extremely forgiving when parsing the HTML document. It must also have some proper security and anti-spam checks built in, since this could end up being a SPAMMERS dream if not properly protected! We’re on it.
We have started to develop our own parser class for kupa, aptly named kupaParser and will release it under the GPL for anyone who would like to take advantage of microformats on PHP. Will keep you updated on the progress as we go along.
I’m still a bit old fashioned. I love reading magazines and newspapers. Why? Simply put, carrying your laptop everywhere is not always so comfortable. PDA would be a good other option, the problem is that its display is a bit too small.
So last night I was laying in bed reading an old Intelligence magazine (the April 2006 issue to be exact) in which they featured e-ink and e-ink devices. Now this looks like a nice alternative!
Imagine that you don’t have to go to the store to buy today’s paper. You simply download today’s edition and save it on your Sony Reader for example, and there you go! In a nice 600×800 display with clear contrast so your eyes don’t get too strained reading it. And to top it all, you could actually have a couple of past editions saved on your reader. So if you don’t get everything read today, you can always read it tomorrow.
Same with novels. Store a couple on there and as you finish reading them in the most obscure places (always happen then) you won’t be stuck without another one to read.
For me a biggy is technical documents and guides. If I develop it is not always so nice to minimize my editor to read about something then go back and maximize the editor again to try it. Its a lot simpler to simply have a book next to you and read what you need and do what you must simutaniosly.
Problem is that these e-ink devices are still a bit pricy and that is only for the paper. Then you will still need to pay for the content/text! Never simple, eh?
I spent a lot of the weekend looking into the Cherrypy framework. At first I found it very confusing. I was looking at it from a PHP and MVC framework perspective and could not exactly grasp why it is so popular and great as it claims to be!
Only after looking at the API and thinking about the first two lines on their home page, I realised what Cherrypy is exactly about.
From the home page:
CherryPy is a pythonic, object-oriented HTTP framework.
CherryPy
allows developers to build web applications in much the same way they
would build any other object-oriented Python program. This usually
results in smaller source code developed in less time.
You have to remember that PHP is a web development language. That was what PHP was developed for. Although you can manipulate the server and run commandline commands with PHP, it was not meant for that. Python on the other hand is exactly the opposite. It was meant to be a scripting language to manipulate the server and not exclusively meant for the internet. Python do have some great support for building web applications, but unlike PHP was not written exclusively for that.
So what is Cherrypy built for? Simple. It allows you to easily take your Python code and publish it to the web. You could do it without Cherrypy, sure! Using Python and CGI you can write kick-ass Python web applications. (Or mod_python if you use Apache) You will however need to know a bit of the HTTP protocol to do that. However, if you use Cherrypy, you don’t need to worry about any of the daunting HTTP protocol. Cherrypy will handle all that for you. All you need to do is write your kick-ass software!
Cherrypy is NOT a MVC (Model-View-Controller) Framework! That was the mistake I made when looking into Cherrypy. The MVC part of your application you will have to design and develop yourself. Python does make it easy for you, due to its Object Orientated nature!
That being said, Cherrypy does have a set of good tools. For example, it has tools to easily and without effort build in session management, build XMLRPC functions and a couple more!
Thanks for the idea Charl! So I changed it so that you can click this little icon and it will toggle the tags to show and hide them instead of labelling them out all over your post. 
