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...

Sevenload.de just started to put the sessions from last weekend's BarCamp online. Both are only available in german, but if you missed it, you might want to see it.

Here is mine, about "NoseRub - dezentrale soziale Netzwerke":

Link: sevenload.com
You can skip the first 5m:30s of my session, as nothing really happens :-) The main part of the presentation is a demo of the NoseRub application.

You also might want to see the session right before mine, called "The future of private data" and was held by Sebastian "pixelsebi" Küpers. His session contains a lot of motivation for my project:

Link: sevenload.com

The current version is not so clean, that I would let anyone try it. But those who already downloaded it, might need some help. This walkthrough will also show all others, how NoseRub works, what it currently is capeable of and what's so special about it.

Registering and Login

Everything starts with a registration, of course. The username will then be part of your NoseRub-ID, very similar to an OpenID. If you register on noserub.com and you enter 'dirk.olbertz' as username, your NoseRub-ID will be dirk.olbertz@noserub.com.


After the registration, you will get a mail with your verification code. Just click on the link and after that, you can log in with you username and the chosen password. If you have difficulties sending out the mail and thus are not able to click the verification link, just go to your database (phpMyAdmin most probably) and remove the value of the field hash for the username you just created.

Adding accounts

After successfully logging in, you will see your NoseRub profile page. This page is also viewable by everyone else who knows your NoseRub-ID. Privacy features will be introduced in further releases. The NoseRub profile page for the example above would be at http://noserub.com/noserub/dirk.olbertz


Right now, there is not much to see, so we click on Add new account to tell NoseRub which other social network accounts we use. This page needs a lot of work and will be replaced by a wizard to make it as easy as possible. In the example above, Ijust select del.ico.us as the service I want to add and the name of my account at del.ico.us.


When I did that, this new account is displayed at the accounts overview page and my profile page.



As you can see at the bottom of my NoseRub profile page, two items are shown. They are the last links I added at del.icio.us. Currently, only the items from the last 7 days, but never more than 5 are shown - for each account. You should be able to config and alter that, of course.

So, let's add another account. This time, I add this blog here. After submitting the form, the new account is shown next to the previously created.



It is also shown on the profile page and the latest blog entries are inserted at items to the bottom of the page.

Adding Contacts

It's nice to have all your own accounts aggregates, but this is about social networks, so it's time to add some friends.

Unlike other social networks, you don't need to force your friends to join NoseRub. You can just add them and add accounts to this created contacts. Let's see that in an example:



On the profile page, we just click on Add new Contact and afterwards enter the desired username. You can choose the name as you like. Once you did so, the new contact ("poolie" in this case) is shown in your list of contacts. It's type local indicates, that you created that contact.

When clicking on Add new account next to your contact's name, you can tell NoseRub, which social networks your contact is using. This works exactly as with your own contacts. We add a flickr account and his blog.



When clicking on the contact's name in our contact overview, we will see his NoseRub profile page. Similar to our own, we can see his accounts and also a list of items at the bottom. Here his lates flickr photos and blog posts.


All accounts are internally marked with a so-called service type. Currently NoseRub knows media, text, links and event. The output on each profile page can be filtered by using this service type. In the next screenshot, you'll see poolie's profile page, filtered so that only media items are shown.

The network view

I also added another account and will now show the network view:


You see a timeline of all the items of people in my network (without my own items at this time. there might be an option to include them, too). You may notice, that there are also some Twitter items there. Twitter is one of the accounts right now, that are integrated with NoseRub. Adding all the others will not take much time. All they need is an RSS-Feed for the things you do there.

The ability to filter by service type is also possible in the network view. This way, you can have a similar output to flickr's contact overview.

Where is the decentralisation?

NoseRub is not only a social network aggregator, but claims to be decentralised. What does this mean? You can install NoseRub on your own server and let it connect with your friends NoseRub server, or with hosted NoseRub servers. A good similarity is wordpress. You can either host your blog at wordpress.com, or install the software from wordpress.org on your own server.

The next screenshot shows a NoseRub profile page on another server - yes, I can not proof it to you, but it really works. For this demo, all is running locally on my computer and this second server is called server2>. The username of that NoseRub profile is don, therefor his NoseRub-ID is don@server2. As we can see from the screenshot, don has added two photo accounts (hq23.com and ipernity.com) and his twitter account.


Back on my server, I want to add don as a contact. I therefore use the same form as previously, when I added local contacts. This time, I enter not only a username to add, but don's NoseRub-ID.


My server now adds don as a contact and looks at don's NoseRub profile page to gather information about the accounts he has added. This information is stored in the FOAF format and thus can easily be read by my server. NoseRub on my server also adds this accounts to my local database. Because of this, I can see don's photos in my network view. In this screenshot, I filtered it for showing media only.


Now, I have something like flickr's contact overview, but also with photos that are stored at ipernity.com and 23hq.com!

In my contact overview, don is marked as NoseRub to distinguish him from my local contacts.


The nice thing is, that whenever don adds a new account, my NoseRub server will display this items in my network view, too. Becase NoseRub frequently looks at don's NoseRub profile page and looks for new and updated accounts. So, when he starts a new blog, I will see that once he adds it to his NoseRub profile.

As I wrote before, privacy issues will be addressed in further releases, so you can decide who will get which updates of your profile.

I hope this walkthrouh helped you in understanding what NoseRub is and should become.

I just released NoseRub 0.2a. It runs a little smoother, but I forgot something, again... So, check in the NoseRub discussino group for the little addition.

I'm starting on a little walk through right now and will hopefully be able to publish it tomorrow.

I just packed and uploaded NoseRub 0.1alpha. If you rather would like to access the data through SVN, make sure you either get the latest branch (branches will always be stable), or the trunk. The trunk might be unstable. I just fixed some bugs and added a view of all "items" for each user - up to now, a list of items (photos, texts, links, etc.) were only shown in the network view. You could see that at this two screenshots.

In all cases, read and follow the install instructions. The main page for all code relevant information can be found under noserub.com/code.

You probably want to look into the frameworks project page, too: CakePHP.org

There is no fast track into that framework, you probably want read through the tutorials. One advice from my side: look into /app/config/routes.php to see which controller is connected with an url and what action is called in that controller. And always keep in mind, that if no $this->render('...') or is called, the view with the same name as the action is rendered. And you will find this view in the views subdirectory with the name of the controller.

I hope this helps in getting a bit into the code. Questions regarding the code are best placed in noserub.com/discuss/.

Important:
If you want to try the branch, please make sure to the read noserub.com/code, as there might be a problem with registering and login.