Disqus - Latest Comments for ringmaster

Re: I’ve been watching sports

ringmaster — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 07:54:10 -0000

Conversely, you don't see people wearing t-shirts for the great things people in Philly are doing that aren't sports. It helps to have billion-dollar business driving the influx of licensed (and grossly unlicensed, from what I saw in the stadium parking lot) sports merchandise.

Would that we spent so much and valued so much the arts and science.

Concerning street cred, I doubt the realization that you enjoy the rush of feeling with the crowd and having a common thread with people outside your usual crowd is anything to be worrying about. I believe that the adage - friends who would dismiss you for your differing beliefs weren't your friends to begin with - also applies here.

Re: http://twofishcreative.com/michael/blog/2009/06/05/emusic-how-to-piss-people-off

ringmaster — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 14:24:00 -0000

I have an amiestreet.com membership. It's not the same as eMusic, but it gets you into new, cheap, independent, yet worthwhile artists, which I think is a great way to spend money, rather than wasting it on licensing fees to Sony. It'll also import your iTunes and Last.fm profiles to get an instant idea of the kind of music you like.

Re: New Habari release adds access control - echo "hey, it works" > /dev/null

ringmaster — Thu, 07 May 2009 21:16:53 -0000

I'm anxious to see practical applications of ACL in the wild beyond simple privacy.

One thing I think we'll need to do before that happens is extend ACL to cover what we currently do with post statuses. Then you could implement a permission-based workflow system pretty elegantly, entirely with core settings, but controlled by a pluggable interface.

Re: Registration plugin for Habari - echo "hey, it works" > /dev/null

ringmaster — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 13:44:29 -0000

Nice!

One thing you might consider is that the FormUI object you create and pass around is the actual original FormUI object, and the full instance is passed to register_user() (your on_success() callback function) when the form succeeds at submission. If you set options on the form when you create it, you should be able to recall them from your success callback, since that's the same form object. For example, setting the group into the object in the get_form() method:

$form->set_option('my_group', $group);

And then calling it back out from inside the register_user() on_success method:

$group = $form->get_option('my_group');

No encryption required, no hacker tampering possible, because it all passes behind the curtain.

I can also see this easily having an option added to let you select the group that a user would be added to by default if the group parameter was omitted from the call to $theme->registration(). It would be pretty trivial to add.

Re: Should Habari themes use HTML5? - Fun with Habari

ringmaster — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 18:23:27 -0000

I'm not sure there is an immediate benefit to using HTML5, since as you pointed out, it's not completely supported by all of the browsers (at least, not as well as browsers support HTML4).

That said, we're going to be working on theme support in 0.7, which should start development reasonably soon. And we can give some more thought to how themers can support HTML 4 and 5, and perhaps even XHTML for those who want to render real XML-valid markup or simply want to output the same old potentially invalid XHTML on HTML that WordPress does (for whatever insane reason that might be).

So in my mind, it's not so much a choice to use and endorse HTML5 as it is making sure that Habari users can render the format of output that they think is best for their own site.

Re: Six million ways to die: choose one

ringmaster — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 16:33:00 -0000

TBPTSNBN strikes again!

Re: echo "hey, it works" > /dev/null

ringmaster — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 12:15:53 -0000

The Twitter silo should implement search.

Re: Habari: You Know You Wanna

ringmaster — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 13:28:57 -0000

Wow, where'd you dig up this old video? There are a couple other more recent videos on the Habari site here: http://habariproject.org/en/screencasts

Re: Google converters: garden path or path to glory?

ringmaster — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 10:33:24 -0000

I also don't understand WXR extending RSS. Extending Atom makes more sense because it's transactional -- if you HTTP GET an Atom document, make changes to it and then POST it back to the same URL (with the proper credentials) it should cause the system to update with those changes. That's a nice feature. It uses actual HTTP verbs. Imagine an export format that also allowed for that, but could be used for author data and other site metadata. That's actually one thing that we were thinking of doing with Habari early on; building the admin as an Atom front-end that worked transactionally with any number of compatible back-ends.

Also a benefit of using an existing format is that there are a lot of people working on the standard, and extending it is more trivial than building something from scratch. Take a look at the work that went into the Atom spec to get an idea of what it takes to build something that will work just that well.

Simple would be nice, although in that case I'd emphasize the need to have someplace to collaborate on how extensions to that simple baseline work. You definitely don't want it to be difficult for developers from any platform to join the effort and exchange ideas.

Re: Google converters: garden path or path to glory?

ringmaster — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 15:45:18 -0000

Well that's always been the problem with efforts like these before. Someone steps up and says they want interchange and selects one or two formats and is done.

I'm not suggesting that's the extent of your approach, but my major complaint in a discussion with one of the BlogML developers recently was that their .net world is so insular, they've not made any inroads with the likes of the 95% share OSS blog market. Did it never occur to them to publish in a clear, obvious, findable location the schema for their format? I guess not.

Besides that, it IS hard. Looking at the BlogML spec (when you're able to locate it), it's got a few things that make sense, and some stuff that could use revision. For example, in all of the blog platforms I know, comments and trackbacks are the same core thing, but of different types. Perhaps this is different for the .net language blog softwares. It seems to me that there is no need for first-order elements for both of these comment types. Also, the category system in the format wouldn't seem to support anything but the most rudimentary systems before needing completely replaced to house tag or taxonomy information.

What would also be helpful for BlogML, as would for any universal format, is a document describing what to do if your blog supports data that is not covered by the format. Habari, for example, stores open-ended metadata about comments and users. This isn't standard among blog software. So how should that be acounted for in the export format? Is there a place to publish and collaborate on extensions to the base format? Perhaps by slightly tweaking what extension your platform requires, you can gain two other platforms in the bargain, rather than have two additional, incompatible export format extensions and a reason for Google Converters to exist at all.

Being more open about the format would be useful, too. There were a couple of interchange formats that came and went without ever being used because the author wanted to retain some kind of rights over the process. If you're developing an interchange format between open source platforms, expect them to want it to be open, both in documentation and in compatible licensing. There's nothing like documenting a useful interchange format by writing a proprietary-licensed library to implement it that none of your target platforms can embed.

As far as the format itself, it should build on existing standards. This is one place where WXR tries and fails, in that it's kind of RSS, but it's not technically valid XML, which paradoxically RSS has to be. Atom might be a good place to start, although its usefulness in blogging has been somewhat abstracted out. That draft element still bugs me. What the heck does it MEAN? Maybe RDF? Maybe just valid XML would be good.

Re: http://twofishcreative.com/michael/blog/2008/12/22/a-year-on-habari

ringmaster — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 09:38:04 -0000

It's been fun having you on board!

Re: What’s the point of community

ringmaster — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 18:00:25 -0000

"I think premium theme authors, [...] deserve to be compensated for that effort above and beyond the content that the community provides"

I agree completely, and I largely agree with many of your other impressions. It's simply a shame that premium theme developers chose to participate in a community where the necessary licensing of their themes would not only exclude them from profit in the way they typically seek it, but exclude them from being listed due to policies in how the wordpress.org site is run.

Whether it's in the best interest for the community or not might factor into the decision, but ultimately what is allowed in the repository should ultimately be decided by the site owner, not the community. What would be ideal is if the community owned the site and, perhaps more importantly, the brand, which it most certainly does not. In either case, I'd still argue that omitting non-GPL plugins/themes from the repo is good for the project. Leading by example is always best.

Re: Careful, I’m licensed to thrill

ringmaster — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 22:25:08 -0000

Your idea to remove the code bits from the HTML files is intriguing, although thinking some more about it, I wonder if even that is possible. I've been playing a bit with different style theme construction for Habari lately that leads me to think that it would be a lot harder than it sounds.

WordPress theme construction is such that you have a specific file for a specific type of request. For example, you may have a template file that represents the response to give when requesting a single post: single.php. In Habari, this file is named something else, but it exists (if you don't look any deeper).

To give a counter-example, in Drupal you produce a single page.tpl.php wrapper template, which would be like a WordPress template with the header and footer includes built in, but in place of the content area you simply (to simplify) output the "$content" variable. When you make requests for specific types of things, Drupal fills in that content variable with the type of thing your requested based on templates specific to the things you request. So if you request a post (which in Drupal is a "node" of type "blog") it gets the node.tpl.php template file (or the node-blog.tpl.php file if that exists), uses it to build that node's output, then inserts it in the page.tpl.php's content spot. It does this if there is one post or many posts, using the same two templates, just repeating the one in a loop if there are multiple posts to display.

As you can see, Drupal's is radically different from WordPress' template model. Interestingly, with not too much additional work - and soon to be much less, I think - Habari can work this way too. (But you were expecting me to say that, weren't you?)

My question: Is there another blog package that is sufficiently the same in its theme structure but not also GPL-licensed that you could reasonably say that your output is platform-neutral, not WordPress-specific, thus able to use a non-GPL license?

I'm not sure of the answer, but it's an interesting intellectual puzzle.

Obviously, I'm on the side of creating and distributing themes for Habari under the ASL. Since the ASL is GPL-compatible, that means that someone (or you) can take the code you produce for Habari and make a WordPress or Drupal theme out of it. And since Habari itself is ASL, you can create a theme under any license you want, and do whatever you want with it, including charging for commercial/premium themes and restricting their redistribution or freely releasing your own theme under an appropriate OSI-approved license. It's a win for themers, it's a win for users, it's a win for free software.

Re: Is Oxite the future of blogging?

ringmaster — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 14:21:24 -0000

I agree that there are good and valid reasons to use .net, though I wish that .net developers would focus on ultimate results more than creating tools. As you concluded, "the interesting thing is the approach and the underlying code, not the actual platform," it would be great if some of these open .net projects would result in applications that are out-of-the-box useful.

I don't doubt that Oxite will evolve into such a platform, especially having seen how it's applied to good effect on the Mix site and Microsoft blogs. It's just interesting to me how open .net code seems to evolve downward from high-concept approach to pragmatic implementation.

Look at .text as an example. It was completely unusable when it was released. I had trouble figuring out even how to obtain it because it was mired in then arcane .net repositories, just for the sake of using these new .net resources, not because they were useful for deployment.

Perhaps it's not fair to judge this new project by those old standards, but I see this phenomenon happening to many coders even these days. Ruby devs also have this problem. Lots of cool stuff in the language, but mostly only usable by people familiar with the tech to begin with, and not for the masses.

Re: Is Oxite the future of blogging?

ringmaster — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 10:33:46 -0000

As with most things in the .net world, the developers seem more interested in the neat-factor of .net than they do in producing practical working applications.

Windows Server users whose administrators won't install PHP or Apache would otherwise have suffered with a larger packages that don't do blogging specifically well at all. There's little doubt in my mind that Oxite will be a big player in the blog world for corporate users who can't (for whatever stupid reason) run a LAMP stack.

Re: Converting WordPress themes to Habari: Reference - Fun with Habari

ringmaster — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 12:57:52 -0000

Wow. This is fairly comprehensive. Nice!

I'm curious, now that you've done this, which of this could be made part of Habari core to make themer's lives easier? For example, would it be appropriate to have the core theme.php set the value of a $page_title variable so that you didn't have to include the the_title() function above?

Re: iPhone app video review: Trapster, find the locations of police speed traps

ringmaster — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 13:30:55 -0000

Do they have an app that notifies you when you forget to use your hands to drive?

Re: Perfcast Habari Love Day - Fun with Habari

ringmaster — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 13:13:52 -0000

That's funny. Everyone else so often gets the invites that I just assumed it wasn't me! What sane person would invite me anyway?

Re: Perfcast Habari Love Day - Fun with Habari

ringmaster — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 12:55:00 -0000

"one of the key Habari members" Who be dat?

Re: Stand out sites - Fun with Habari

ringmaster — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 11:40:42 -0000

It would be interesting if you could come up with a search that works. One thing we thought at Habari's conception was that your blog is about you, not your blog software. If you love it, you'll say so. If you don't say so, who are we to shove identifying marks onto your site? I won't say that it was explicitly by design to make Habari sites difficult to identify, but we have gone a bit farther to make your blog yours and not one of ours.

That said, 44 forks is a great-looking site, and I do hope that more Habari sites like it spring up with fantastic themes and content.

Re: Moving Domains - Fun with Habari

ringmaster — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 21:26:10 -0000

I was just thinking... This could be an interesting additional feature for the importer. Check a box, provide your old domain name, and then click Import. It could do the replaces as it imports the posts, and only invoke a single ->update()

Re: Plugins with Templates - Fun with Habari

ringmaster — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 21:09:16 -0000

The cool thing to mention is that when you register a template like this, themes can override the template if the theme provides a file with the same name. So if somebody creates a theme that uses your plugin, but they want to construct the output differently to fit better with their theme, they just include a funwiththemes.php file with the theme and it can use all of the same data that your plugin provides to your original template.

Calling the add_template() method with a third parameter of true/false allows you to control whether the theme is allowed to do this. In most cases, allowing the theme to override the output is the most flexible option.

Re: Chyrp vs. Habari showdown

ringmaster — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 17:47:43 -0000

We just had a reasonably long discussion about what Habari's bookmarklet would look and act like. I think there are some good ideas there. This would bring it more along to "nu-skool" folks, while still retaining the power of the full-on blog package.

Also, you might be interested in the newly added HiEngine, which uses a syntax like Tumblr for templates. Since Habari has pluggable template engines, you should have no trouble switching to the HiEngine-style of tags.

Re: echo "hey, it works" > /dev/null

ringmaster — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 20:20:16 -0000

That's great! I love it when themes go ASL2. It makes me feel good.

Disqus - Latest Comments for ringmaster

Re: I’ve been watching sports

Re: http://twofishcreative.com/michael/blog/2009/06/05/emusic-how-to-piss-people-off

Re: New Habari release adds access control - echo &quot;hey, it works&quot; &gt; /dev/null

Re: Registration plugin for Habari - echo &quot;hey, it works&quot; > /dev/null

Re: Should Habari themes use HTML5? - Fun with Habari

Re: Six million ways to die: choose one

Re: echo "hey, it works" > /dev/null

Re: Habari: You Know You Wanna

Re: Google converters: garden path or path to glory?

Re: Google converters: garden path or path to glory?

Re: http://twofishcreative.com/michael/blog/2008/12/22/a-year-on-habari

Re: What’s the point of community

Re: Careful, I’m licensed to thrill

Re: Is Oxite the future of blogging?

Re: Is Oxite the future of blogging?

Re: Converting WordPress themes to Habari: Reference - Fun with Habari

Re: iPhone app video review: Trapster, find the locations of police speed traps

Re: Perfcast Habari Love Day - Fun with Habari

Re: Perfcast Habari Love Day - Fun with Habari

Re: Stand out sites - Fun with Habari

Re: Moving Domains - Fun with Habari

Re: Plugins with Templates - Fun with Habari

Re: Chyrp vs. Habari showdown

Re: echo "hey, it works" > /dev/null

Re: New Habari release adds access control - echo "hey, it works" > /dev/null

Re: Registration plugin for Habari - echo "hey, it works" > /dev/null