WPBook 1.5 Released – Let the Streaming begin!

WPBook

So for a while I’ve been working on and beta testing the next version of WPBook. Tonight I’ve just tagged it for release, so it will be available for download shortly. (I’ve already been running it here for a while and testing it on a few other test blogs).

The main improvement in WPBook 1.5 is that it now knows how to use stream.publish, meaning that it will automatically post to your wall in Facebook when you publish a post in WordPress. Your friends should see that notification as well in their streams. (We’re not, however, sending application updates or tracking all users’ user id’s – instead you enter your own userid into the settings and it uses that to post to your wall). Included are attachments (first image attached to the post is used) and excerpts (if you hand craft excerpts they will be used in the wall post).

The other main improvement is that WPBook now requires PHP5, and as such can wrap Facebook calls in Try/Catch blocks. For the non-programmer, this means those awful, dramatic “fatal uncaught exception” error screens are gone. WPBook isn’t doing anything terribly meaningful with those errors yet – still working on that- but at least it traps them.
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WPBook 1.4 Released

(Update 1/14 – now 1.4.2. Fixes detailed in readme – Admin side javascript issue, issue with submitting comments for folks who install wordpress files in a subdirectory different than their root URL)

(Updated 1/5 – it’s actually 1.4.1 now, as there was a typo in the theme/index.php file – get_exteral_url should be get_external_url).

Last night I packaged and released version 1.4 of WPBook, the plugin I maintain which creates a view of your WordPress blog as a Facebook application.

(For example, see Open Parenthesis as a blog, and then Open Parenthesis as a Facebook app).

Highlights of this release

• Fixed bug which made invite friends link only work on the home page
• Fixed bug in setting for custom/header footer which included a permalink
  (WordPress support topic 306263)
• Added Gravatar support
• Added (experimentally) a list of “pages” as well – this means you should able to use WPBook even if you have a static homepage set in WordPress – just use the url of your home page as the “Canvas Callback URL”
• Removed hard coded references to wp-content and plugins directories
  (See http://willnorris.com/2009/05/wordpress-plugin-pet-peeve-hardcoding-wp-content)
• Removed hard coded reference to config.php, routing Facebook comment submission through WordPress’ built in query parser instead
  (See http://willnorris.com/2009/06/wordpress-plugin-pet-peeve-2-direct-calls-to-plugin-files)

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Lifestreaming: Open Source Platforms and Hosted Options

For a while now I’ve been testing out a few lifestreaming platform options. My current shortlist includes four open source approaches / platforms and two hosted offerings.

I think ultimately I’ll want to keep an open source (LAMP) platform because I want to own the data in my lifestream, have backups of it, and be able to move it around as I please. This leaves me choosing between a platform linked to a blog (WordPress or MovableType) or a standalone one (Sweetcron, Storytlr or similar) that just powers the lifestream. Originally I created JohnEckman.com as a standalone lifestream, thinking that the various blogs I wrote for around the web could be aggregated there – but there’s no reason why that couldn’t be a WordPress install as well.

Anyway, what follows are my notes / first impressions – not an exhaustive evaluation certainly but a good shortlist to start with if you’re thinking of running a lifestream.

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WordCamp NYC, WPBook, WordCamp Boston

Here’s the slides from my presentation this morning at WordCamp NYC. It was in the “beginning developer” track so I tried to focus on the overall structure of how the plugin does what it does and the hooks/actions/filters used.

Hard to fit the talk into 30 minutes with time for questions and roadmap – there’s so much more I want WPBook to do – hopefully I can find the time soon.
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Free as in What, Exactly?

Free Software advocates have for a long time worked to draw a distinction between free of cost (“Free as in Beer”) and free of restrictions (“Free as in Speech” or as I prefer “Free as in Freedom”). The challenge stems from the fact that we use, in idiomatic English, the same word “Free” to refer to both concepts, whereas in romance languages (based on latin) there’s a clearer distinction between gratis and libre.

Optaros Beer, which was free as in freedom but not as in beer

Of course, as r0ml pointed out in a masterful OSCON presentation in 2008, we do have a corresponding word in English to libre – Liberal, or Liberty. Maybe if we’d been calling it “Liberty Software” or “Freedom Software” all these years there’d be less FUD.

Two recent posts crossed my blog reader on the challenge of value versus cost. Now that so many content creators are taking approaches similar to free software via unconferences and creative commons licenses, we need to remember that “free” in these case does not mean without value and does not have to mean without cost.
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