NoseRub Blog Blogging about NoseRub and Social Networks

Microbuttons for NoseRub

Are you looking for some buttons that you can use on your website to link to your NoseRub-Profile?

Kosmar added this two beautiful NoseRub microbuttons to his collection:

NoseRub on OpenWeb Southampton

Lance is going to talk about and present NoseRub this thursday (2009/02/09) on OpenWeb Southampton.

Not quite sure if this event has open seats left, but if you are from around that area, try to be there. Lance is a long time supporter of NoseRub and knows a lot about the idea behind this project.

BugFix Release NoseRub 0.8.1

I just had to make this BugFixing Release of NoseRub, as there is a severe error in the 0.8 Release, when you use the cron jobs to refresh your feeds.

I know that this is a major incident, but as NoseRub only fetches RSS-Feeds, there is a good chance that most of the entries can be recovered. Please do the following things in order to update NoseRub and remove the defect entries:

1. Updgrade your NoseRub installation to the 0.8.1 Release (you can also svn update from the trunk)
2. Search the entries table of your NoseRub database for values in the field url that are obvious wrong. On Identoo.com, the URLs looked like http://identoo.com/var/www/identoo/noserub/entry/321
3. If you don’t find those, your NoseRub installation does not suffer from that bug. When in doubt, ask us for help.
4. Run DELETE FROM entries WHERE url LIKE “%select_a_pattern_here%” against your database. In most cases, you will use tools like phpMyAdmin for this. select_a_pattern_here means that you should select a part of the defect urls you found, so that no correct url would match it. It would be a very bad idea to use “http://” as pattern. I used “/var/www/identoo/noserub” as pattern. Ask us for help, if you are unsure about what you are doing! It could happen, that you delete all the entries in the database!
5. When all the entries with defect urls are removed, you’re done. The next refresh of all the feeds will re-fill most of the entries that you just deleted.

Sorry for the hassle. And again: when in doubt, ask us for help.

NoseRub 0.8 released

Yes, we finally did it: NoseRub 0.8 is released and can be downloaded now. If you prefer to use Subversion, make sure to checkout the trunk.

So, what’s new in this Release?

Internationalisation

As you can see on Identoo.com, we have different languages now: English, German, French, Korean, Swedish and Turkish. Not even the german version is 100% complete, so if you would like to help making the translations better, or want to add a whole new language to it, please feel free to use our project on Launchpad.

A big thank you to Ejang (Blog, Twitter) for the Korean translation, David (Blog, Identi.ca) for the translation to Swedish, Hans for the French translation and Nejat for the Translation to Turkish.

Comments and Favorites

You now can comment on any entry and mark entries as favorite. These comments are federated through all NoseRub servers! That means you will receive comments on your entries that people made on their own server, where they added you as contact and had something to say about your entry. This will only work if your server is listed on noserub.com/sites, so make sure to notify my about any NoseRub server that you are running.

Mail notifications

When someone added you as a contact, marks one of your entries as a favorite or comments an entry of yours, you can now get a mail notification about this. When your privacy setting already was every registered user may send me a message/email those mail notifications are now enabled by default. If you want to change this setting, just log in and go to the Privacy section of the Settings.

NoseRub is now a (almost full) Identi.ca server

You can now subscribe to any other Identi.ca/Laconi.ca user out there and receive their updates. And users on Identi.ca or any other Laconi.ca server can now add you as a contact, too.

I hope you all will enjoy the new NoseRub release us much as we do!

NoseRub 0.8 postponed, but translations can be made!

Our plan was to test NoseRub 0.8 on Identoo.com for a week and then build the package for the official release.

The transition went smoothless, new features like internationalization, comments and favorites work great and even the distributed comments work in general.

But the internal structure of how NoseRub manages accounts, feeds, entries and comments needs a major rework. We could apply a quick patch, but this would only mean to have a lot of duplicate data in the database. As we want to be able to scale up and also try to have a clean and good design, we decided to postpone NoseRub 0.8 at least until christmas.

As you all know, the time before x-mas and between the years (as we Germans tend to call the time until new years eve) is pretty busy. Positively pretty with lots of food, familiy and friends, but busy nevertheless. So, please apologize if you won’t be able to upgrade your NoseRub installation while your familiy is sitting by the christmas tree.

But we will try to give you something to play around, when all the other new gadgets loose their excitment

In other good news, I finally set up translations with Launchpad. A big “thank you” to Stefan Haab for originally setting up the account.

Everyone now can add a translation for NoseRub or add missing phrases. You just need to register and set your own languages. After that, you can start contributing. Launchpad is hosted by the people that do Ubuntu Linux, so don’t be afraid that your data is used against your will - at least I’m not afraid! And you can log in via OpenID, so go ahead and use your NoseRub ID to start translating NoseRub to your favorite language.

Whenever you have questions regarding a phrase, please ask the in discussion group, so that others can profit from these questions and answers.

Attention! If you want to translate into French or Turkish, please wait a few days, as importing the already available translations takes some time to process by Launchpad.

NoseRub goes multilingual!

When you’re browsing to preview.noserub.com and your browser’s language is set to german you will see the first results of our i18n affords.

As soon, as our uploads to Launchpad.net are approved, we will use that platform to translate NoseRub.

But if you want to give it a head start, please contact me and tell me which language you would like to translate NoseRub to.

Not all things are translateable right now and some things need to be figured out in the next weeks, but I guess that more than 90% of all texte we have right now, will remain. That means: any help is appreciated and the good thing is: if you don’t translate it, the english version will be used. So every translated phrase makes the platform more usable for non english speakers.

All translations will be part of the whole downloadable package, so everyone can use them. A switch between languages will be built into the application. I guess this will be a per-user setting, where you select your preferred language.

So, if you can spare the time, download PoEdit and contact me. We plan a new release by the end of this month and it would be great to have as many languages supported by than, as possible.

Thanks for your support!

Nominate NoseRub at the Mashable Open Web Awards

I just nominated NoseRub.com to the 2nd Annual Open Web Awards.

You can help NoseRub, by just nominating it through this widget:

Mashable Open Web Awards

You will receive an E-Mail to verify it is a valid nomination.

Favorites and Comments on their way - distributed of course!

The ones who follow me on Twitter - I’m sorry for not so often use the NoseRub Twitter Account - already read, that we added favorites to NoseRub:

http://preview.noserub.com/entry/1627398/

You can access the permalink of an entry by just clicking on the time in the right column. Having permalinks also means that you now can delete entries from your own social stream - a not so unimportant feature, as we just learned, when Twitter removed if for a day.

You can also see the favorites a user made:
http://preview.noserub.com/dirk.olbertz/favorites/

There is currently no official link from a user’s profile to his/her favorites, but that’s just an issue of design/layout. You now can always access your own favorites from the My Favorites menu item.

When looking at any social stream, we now also display who marked the item as favorite, so you can discover interesting entries more easily.

The next step will be to add comments to any entry. This is under way, as we speak, so be prepared for more news in the next couple of days.

Comments and favorites will be made available across NoseRub instances to have the experience of a real distributed social network. On each NoseRub instance, there will be a RSS-Feed of comments and newly marked favorites that will be exchanged across all NoseRub instances that are listed on noserub.com/sites.

That feature might not work 100% from the beginning, as we want to make a new release soon - expect it to be by the end of this month.

We hope you like this feature!

How to make your Wordpress blog NoseRub compatible?

NoseRub is all about decentralisation and therefore we are not afraid someone does not use the examplesoftware, but trie sto make existing sites work with NoseRub.

Sebastian Küpers / Pixelsebi just did that and shares this step by step example with you: How-To: Make Your Wordpress-Blog NoseRub Compatible

He explains how to add links to your contacts from within Wordpress and how to add information about your other social networks accounts. Now everyone can add his blog URL (this is just an example which he created) pixelsebi.wordpress.com as a contact in NoseRub.

The How-Tow is much worth reading, as it explains the reasons behind all this and also gives us even more work, when he suggests to support XRDS

GoDaddy.com patenting NoseRub?

I just learned, that US hoster GoDaddy.com wants to patent a social network technologie:

The company filed three patents this year, published last month, that describe a web portal that aggregates a person’s social networks. For example, you may register your name as a domain name at GoDaddy, and GoDaddy’s product would generate a web portal that has links to all of your social networking pages (e.g. MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn). Public profiles from social networks may be part of the domain as well, rather than simply sending visitors to the social networks themselves.

The patent filings suggest this data could be aggregated onto the portal using common login systems such as OpenID.

That sounds a lot like NoseRub, don’t you think?

[via ReadWriteWeb.com]