A big Thank you goes to Björn Acker, who provided the Flash module for enabling NoseRub to directly upload photos taken with your Webcam.

This works for your own Lifestream, but also for the new Group-Feature. It still will take some time until we can release NoseRub 0.9, but with the upcoming next NoseRub DevNights, we hopefully will get some work done.

This is mainly because we underestimated the amount of work that needs to be done for introducing the new theme. And of course, because NoseRub is driven by people who do this in their spare time.

All this resulted in even less work, as everyone is frustated, that nothing is really going on.

So, I decided to introduce the NoseRub DevNights from today on: every Wednesday and Thursday, between 8:00 pm and 0:00 am (CEST), the NoseRub team wants to get together virtually to spend some time on the project.

We will be available on Chat (that somehow does not work on Safari, try Firefox instead) to communicate within the team, but also with everyone externally who wants to add new services, polish the documentation, etc.

We probably will not be there all the time and probably not everyone will attend all the time. The main goal for us is to have a steady development, even if it happens in small increments.

So, please bear with us - we still think that NoseRub is a very important project and we’re looking forward evolving it into an even better project.

I hope to find some of the old articles somewhere in the deepest corners of the internet and will add them once I found them…

As your NoseRub profile URL (eg. http://identoo.com/dirk.olbertz is an OpenID, you now can log in with that OpenID on every NoseRub installation. One step more towards a distributed social network…

The other bigger change, although this is more of an internal thing, is the new admin area. Make sure to read the INSTALL.txt in order to know how to access this admin area.

Right now, you can only change some of the settings that previously have been in /app/config/noserub.php. As they become obsolete now, make sure to call /system/update/ twice in order to get a list of all the obsolete settings.

This admin area will be enhanced in future releases and then include user management and even more settings.

NoseRub 0.8.2 will be the last update for the 0.8 release and also includes various new services (thx Lance!). Works on the upcoming NoseRub 0.9 have already begun and we now will be able to remove all the code that we needed to maintain for the current 0.8.x release.

NoseRub 0.9 will be a huge update and we’re all looking forward to it!

Poolie just published a nice preview of the upcoming design changes for NoseRub. Beside the beautiful design, the underlying theme system will be the biggest change.

There is no detailed roadmap for that release, but it pretty much will be the 0.9 version and it is very likely we will have at least one 0.8.x version with bugfixes and minor enhancements online.

Let us know, what you think about the new design!

(Click on the screenshot for a bigger version to see more details.)

Kosmar added this two beautiful NoseRub microbuttons to his collection:

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.

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.

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!

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.