Blog posts

cfis : Resurrecting libxml-ruby Ruby’s XML handling has been lacking and until recently showed little sign of life. This may be just the news we were waiting for. Anyone know if it just drops into rails or if more work is needed? (tags: libxml ruby rubyonrails xml parsing) /Message: XMPP As A Key Component Of The Social Web Stowe Boyd pulls together some highlights from the increasing chatter about XMPP/jabber (tags: xmpp jabber queueing scaling rest webservices) history.forward() - Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft ...

A little over a year ago I wrote up some instructions for deploying drupal sites using capistrano. It’s proved a popular entry, still getting a good bit of traffic, but in the time since I wrote it Capistrano 2 has joined us and my techniques have moved on, so it seemed high time I updated the instructions with some new ones. As before, I’m going to presume that anyone reading this already has capistrano installed and has shell access to their server. If you need help with the former, I’d recommend stopping by the Capistrano website, and for the latter you should probably talk to your hosting company. ...

It’s always fascinating to see how applying good practice in one area can lead to unforeseen benefits. The article on version control with subversion in the latest issue of A List Apart is a fine example of just that. Not only is the use of version control a good way to manage your own projects, it’s a vital enabler for significant shifts in working practices and management styles. ...

Meerkat | Code Sorcery Workshop “Meerkat is an easy to use SSH tunnel manager built specifically for the Mac.” (tags: mac software ssh tunnel) bkkeepr | Track your reading and bookmark on the go A nice little reading tracker service. You send them a message on twitter with the ISBN number of the book you’re reading, and they do the rest. (tags: books library reading twitter) mySociety » TheyWorkForYou video - seeking One of a series of blog entries from MySociety about their great new video features on TheyWorkForYou. Not only can you track what’s going on in parliament, you can watch very specific parts of the proceedings thanks to some clever work on their part ...

I knew when I emailed the editor of Matthew’s House Project with a fairly strongly worded response to one of their recent articles that there was a good chance I’d be asked to write something as a follow-up. And that’s exactly what happened. So a piece I wrote on identity and immigration is now available for reading over there.

I was pleased a few months back to see Calvin College sign up for twiter. A small college in the Michigan town where I lived for three years up until last summer, the college is my wife’s former employer, a previous client of mine, and a place that dominated quite a bit of our social life in Grand Rapids. Twitter seemed a simple way to keep up with what was going on without much effort. But within a couple of months I stopped following them, partly out of frustration with some recent political developments on the campus but primarily because their twitter presence felt far too much like an anonymous broadcast, and close to an abuse of the medium. ...

Conversations about privacy are an increasingly vital part of any planning process for a membership-driven website. Having been engaged in such a conversation for a new project and fielding support emails for an existing one, it’s been on my mind quite a bit lately. We’re all managing a lot of personal data, whether we’re running sites that might be described as “social networks” or simply a blog that provides a way to connect up a commenters contributions. On any new project questions inevitably come up about whether or not users should be able to hide their profiles or specific pieces of information, often influenced by the way facebook’s closed walls give a sense of privacy by not letting google index profile data. I’m given to thinking that facebook’s approach has actually hurt such discussions, by implying a level of privacy they don’t really offer. ...

Reading Stowe Boyd’s thoughts on plurk and writing my own post on the topic I began to wonder how much work it would really be to add a timeline view using something like the Simile Timeline library. As a quick proof of concept I saved my twitter homepage to my laptop and added a little javascript. As well as calling in the timeline library from http://simile.mit.edu/timeline/api/timeline-api.js and using the first javascript iso8601 code I found through google, I added: ...

Along with many others I’ve been responding to the recent unreliability of twitter by checking out a few of the alternatives that are out there, particularly the dreadfully named but fairly cute plurk. Plurk has quickly gained quite a few users but didn’t make a good first impression with me. The first thing that I was asked after signing up was to hand over my IM username and password to allow them to import my contacts. Being asked for passwords for such a purpose isn’t rare, but as Jeremy Keith so eloquently noted, it’s a very bad idea and— as dopplr show—increasingly unnecessary. That the developers ignored those sorts of details in an attempt to quickly build critical mass for their service makes me wonder how in step they are with other ideas of best practice on today’s web. ...

On Friday 13th June it’d be great to see those of you within reach of North London at a little get together Iain Archer and I are putting on as part of the Breathing Space series. From 8pm at St. Luke’s Church, West Holloway, Iain and his band will be hosting an evening of music featuring Julie McKee, Burning Codes and Foreign Slippers. Each artist will perform a selection of their songs, and then they’ll all gather to chat about their music and perform a few “in the round.” ...