NoseRub

I promised to deliver a NoseRub service online by the end of August and I'm eager to keep that promise, although you folks may have to wait for a couple of more days, but I come to that at the end of this blog entry.

Right now, I would like to give you a preview on the new Account Wizard. Although it's not shinier (Poolie is working on that...), it's more intuitive and comes with a very cool new feature: Contact Import

But first things first. This is how it looks like, when you click on "Add account...":

You can either select one of the already supported services (no news here: flickr, del.icio.us, twitter, ipernity, hq23, pownce and upcoming), or just add a rss-feed.


I choose del.icio.us and now just give my username on the second screen. For Upcoming, that is the user id everyone gets after registering there.


Now I get a preview of what NoseRub found. You can now decide, wether this was OK, or you may need to change something.

If you added the account for a contact of your's, you're done now. But if you added it for your profile and happen to have choosen one of the two currently working services with Contact Import (flickr and del.icio.us), you will now see the following screen:


NoseRub looks for all your contacts and displays them, so you now can decide what to do with them. You can either ignore this contact for now, add it as a new one, or assign it an already existing contact of your's. When adding as a new contact, NoseRub gives you the ability to either use the contact name from the current service, or just use another one.

If you already have that contact, you can assign him/her by just selecting from the drop down list. Either way, your new or existing contacts then automatically have this account (here their del.icio.us account) assigned, so you can see them in their profile, or in your network view.

That, of course, only works when building up your own contacts. When you contacts already have a NoseRub-ID, you wouldn't have to assign accounts to them, at all.

And just for the record, here is what it looks like, if you selected to add a RSS-Feed at the beginning:

As you can see, you're able to set the type of that feed. This way, you could add your own photo blog and set its type to Photos and from that on, your contacts will get your images from the photo blog and they are shown right next to their others contact's photos from Flickr...

And because NoseRub uses SimplePie for processing RSS-Feeds, you can also let NoseRub guess the RSS-Feed and just enter the URL of a page. But I would recommend selecting the RSS-Feed on your own.

So, after all this exciting news, now for the probably delay I mentioned at the beginning. I always wanted a NoseRub-ID to be an OpenID. That means every NoseRub service should also be an OpenID server. I have to admit, that I barely knew how OpenID works. Thus, I did not really think about how the NoseRub-ID should look like. dirk.olbertz@noserub.com seemed to look nice and maked sense. But an OpenID would be noserub.com/dirk.olbertz. And as I don't want to introduce two different concepts for the same thing, I will get rid of the old NoseRub-ID format and will use the OpenID style.

Naturally, the current NoseRub-ID is an important part and so I will need to re-check the whole application, so I can make sure it really works with new ID.

Those of the 29 people how did not only download NoseRub but also tried to install it, might also have encountered some difficulties regarding the document root for the webserver. I started NoseRub with the purpose to install it parallel to something else. For instance: http://olbertz.de/noserub/dirk should contain my NoseRub profile (with dirk@olbertz.de beeing my NoseRub ID), so I could have my blog at http://olbertz.de/blog. The reason for that was, that not everyone is able or capable of creating subdomains and I wanted to make it as easy as it is.

Just in the past few days, I learned that the PHP Framework I was using (CakePHP), provides both ways: having NoseRub at http://olbertz.de/noserub, or directly at eg. http://myserver.com. I just needed (and probably still need) to adjust a few places in the code, where the URLs were built. So, this also needs some carefull looks.

And finally, I do not want to introduce a NoseRub service, without being able to at least protect username and password. Therefore, I installed SSL on the server and already integrated a SSL-Certificate from CAcert. I don't want the complete application running on SSL, because then there is no caching and you would see slower responses.

And this also results in some more tests - I think yout get the idea: everything is about to be complete, but before going online, I just want to make sure that it at least works basically.

The version in the trunk already contains part of the stuff mentioned here, but please do not check it out / use it, as the database migrations aren't checked in yet. So, please bear with me a few more days. Maybe everything runs smoothly and the first NoseRub service is about to be launched this weekend...