BarCamp Boston 3

Shimon Rura’s email today reminded me that BarCamp Boston is fast approaching again. Third week in May we should easily avoid the snowstorm which put something of a crimp in BarCamp Boston 2.

In case you’ve been somehow able to escape the increasing presence of *camps, BarCamp is one of the earliest and one of the best. It was on the occasion of BarCamp Boston (the original) that I started blogging, though to be fair you shouldn’t hold them responsible for that.

Here’s an hCalendar microformat of the event info:

Read more about BarCamp, view schedules, and learn how you can participate, by visiting the wiki at http://2008.barcampboston.org/.

WordPress to Facebook and Back Again

I was really intrigued by Dave Lester‘s WPBook plugin, which lets you bring posts from your wordpress blog into an application in Facebook.

I really wanted, though, for users to be able to comment on blog posts from inside Facebook, with their Facebook identities, and have it work like the OpenID comment plugin (in the sense that the user should not need to provide any authentication info, but it should be derived from their Facebook login).

I think I’ve finally got it it nailed, at least to the point where folks can start testing it.

If you are a Facebook user, go to this application page: http://apps.facebook.com/openparenthesis/

It will require you to log in (or already be logged in) to Facebook, but you don’t have to add the application to your profile or spam all your friends.

What you’ll see is my five most recent blog posts from this blog, inside a Facebook wrapper. (Can’t include embedded videos, the styles are bit wonked, etc – but it is a start. This is basically just Dave Lester’s plugin).

You should also (this is the new part I’ve hacked in) see the ability to comment on posts – without being asked for a name or url or email address.

Please leave me a comment to test it out. It should, if all works according to plan, pull your Facebook profile pic as your avatar for the comment as well – since your facebook profile page is actually an hCard with appropriate markup (go microformats!).

I believe this will work even for folks who are not “friends” of mine in facebook – but let me know if you run into difficulty.

Once I’ve validated that it works I’ll publish the code. It required me to add at least one file to my theme, and relies on the hAvatar plugin to get the profile pic.

Known Issues:

Sometimes the “autoresize iFrame to content size” bit in Facebook fails, and you end up with a fixed size view into longer content, with no scrollbars. Haven’t figured out what triggers that yet – standard facebook javascript api.

Sometimes you’ll get the “You’re entering comments too fast” error – just wait 30 seconds. Unless lots of people are all trying to do it from facebook at once this should go away. I’ll need to figure out how to unthrottle the comment queue in wordpress for this point.

Google OpenID

(via David Recordon)

Ryan Barrett, one of the developers on the Google App Engine team, has released an application which allows you to use your Google Account as an OpenID.

Once you’ve logged in to your Google account, you just use:

http://openid-provider.appspot.com/yourgoogleusername

On any site which relies on OpenID for validation.

So now Yahoo!, AOL, and Google have (direct or indirect) mechanisms for providing OpenID (and Microsoft has committed to doing so in the future).

Combined with all the free, purpose-built OpenID providers (like ClaimID, MyID, MyOpenID, MyVidoop, and Clickpass) and it looks like 2008 could be the tipping point (assuming one hasn’t already occured in 2007).

(See OpenID Status Check for a recent, and more exhaustive list).

Benkler, Jenkins, Sunstein: The good, the bad, the ugly

(Note that the order of names in the title is not meant to imply a specific relationship to the adjectives in the subtitle. I went with alphabetical.)

Last night I grabbed the red line over to MIT after work and saw a wonderful event put on by the MIT Communications Forum, entitled: Our World Digitized: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly.

Audio from the event (Real Audio format) has already been posted, so if you find my chaotic “liveblogging” style notes below interesting, be sure to check it out. (They will post video on the seminar page soon as well).

My *very rough* notes:
———-

Read more…

New Action Stream: TripIt Activity

As regular readers of Open Parenthesis know, I’ve been using Movable Type Open Source (and particularly the Action Streams plugin) on JohnEckman.com to create a life stream of activity.

It’s basically a roll-your-own lifestream, though for now at least it isn’t integrated to anyone else’s streams, as in Friendfeed or Socialthing.

This morning I posted a new plugin which picks up TripIt Activity Streams.

TripIt’s activity stream is a private Atom feed which posts an item whenever you begin a trip, complete a trip, or start planning a trip. For example, here’s a recent entry from my feed:

You can download the plugin from the MTAS page.