OpenIDMore home improvements
I’ve had an offline Christmas, not entirely through choice (broadband at my Dad’s new place in rural France isn’t working yet) but welcome. I did have my laptop with me, and I’m using Bazaar for version control so being offline isn’t a barrier to checking in code. I’ve just rolled out a bunch of new features that I put together over the past few days.
Comments watchlist
A long-running problem with weblogs is that if you post a comment somewhere it’s easy to lose track of that thread and miss any replies that other people might post. If you log in to this site with an OpenID you now have access to a watchlist. You can add any post on the site to your watchlist and follow new comments on one page. More importantly, you can subscribe to an atom feed of comments posted to items on your watchlist.
When you post a comment, the item you are commenting on is automatically added to your watchlist. This means you can subscribe to your watchlist feed and automatically follow threads that you have contributed to.
The downside is that you still have to subscribe to a feed just to follow comments on this site. If more sites adopted a similar feature it’s possible that something a bit less time consuming could emerge—after all, your OpenID is the same on every site you comment on so given the right standard it could be possible to automatically create a “global” watchlist for any site you have commented on.
New talks section
I’ve done quite a lot of public speaking over the past 18 months, and I’ve put together a new section with details of talks I’ve given and links to supporting material. The material is a bit thin at the moment but I hope to add more over the next few weeks.
Style changes
Comments now have pretty pseudo-bubbles around them (thanks for the help, Nat) with different coloured borders for comments posted by OpenID users (orange) or myself (purple). I’ve made some tweaks to the design elsewhere as well, the most obvious of which is the purple divider line between the two columns used on pages other than the homepage.
Colophon enhancements
I always enjoy reading the colophon in O’Reilly books, which is hidden away at the back and describes the typefaces and processes used to publish the book (and the characteristics of the animal on the front). I added a colophon to my about page a few weeks ago; I’ve updated it and added a feed of the last few changelog messages checked in to Bazaar.
Bazaar is written in Python, so I can pull data from it using the bzrlib module directly in my Django view:
# This import prevents later ImportErrors
from bzrlib.branch import BzrBranch
from bzrlib.bzrdir import BzrDir
repo = BzrDir.open(BZRDIR).open_repository()
revisions = repo.get_revisions(
repo.all_revision_ids()[-8:]
)
I’m using similar code to append a revision number to my CSS and JavaScript links, busting the cache in stubborn browsers such as IE and Safari.
Very nice! The comments watchlist is a great idea!
I have been using http://cocomment.com/ to mitigate the comment issues a bit. They build bridges to various blog sites and engines, and watch comment threads you post in through a Firefox extension, bookmarklet, or greasemonkey script.
I really don't like that they're yet another third party web services provider, but that's mitigated somewhat by the fact that I only use and archive their RSS feeds.
Nato Welch - 7th January 2007 22:25 - #
I like the new colophon! Recent code changes on the About page are also very nice.
There is an project for aggregating Trac tickets with Django ( http://trac.ambitone.com/ambidjangolib/wiki/djac ), which could maybe be used to provide some changeset data too. If this should work some day, I'll definitely steal this code changes idea to my site :)
Simon, what was the impetus for Bazaar? I'm an old CVS hack and have just started using Subversion. I'm still not so invested in subversion that I can't switch, so if Bazaar is better I can still jump ship. What were you using before Bazaar, and why did you switch?
Parand - 8th January 2007 05:44 - #
Love it.
There are three main reasons I've started using Bazaar:
I'm really happy with it - this weblog is the first time I've used it in anger and it certainly hasn't let me down.
You may want to also have a look at Mercurial:
http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/
It's a little Python jewel, compact, simple, complete, and very fast:
Bazaar vs. Mercurial : An unscientific comparison
http://sayspy.blogspot.com/2006/11/bazaar-vs-mercu rial-unscientific.html
bzr/hg performance comparison with newest versions
http://sayspy.blogspot.com/2007/01/bzrhg-performan ce-comparison-with.html
P.S.: the colour border while previewing a comment is gray, even though I'm signed in with my LiveJournal URL.
By the way, great job on the instant-preview-update while writing the comment, no need to again press the Preview button, it's a first. :-)
I'd be very interested in a more detailed post on using bazaar for managed a Django site.
Hey Simon,
First of all, thanks for linking to DjangoID, I hope to get some community input soon :-)
About the commenting thing: I was thinking to pop up some new "standard" which enables you to keep track of comments you posted elsewhere, when you were logged in using your OpenID.
It'd be some sort of extension to OpenID servers: when you're logged in using your OpenID on some website, and post a comment, the blog engine accepting this comment would retrieve your OpenID server URI (or some other server URI, using the same method as OpenID server URI retrieval). When it got that, it'd POST a message to this URI, providing your OpenID delegate URI (or, once more, this might be another URI, but you get the point), the permalink to the commented post, URI('s) of this post's comment feed(s), and a unique comment ID: this should be the ID used in http://my.tld/2007/Jan/some_post/#comment123 (ie comment123), which is most likely also used as the ID of the comment in MicroFormat markup (although afaik there is no standard comment MF yet).
This would allow your "MyComments" server (which could be DjangoID, once implemented) to track things you posted elsewhere, make it possible for you to browse new comments (because it got the comment feed URI), allows you to have a (public) global 'Things I said elsewhere' feed,...
Of course this'd require integration of the system in existing blog platforms, but I think that'd happen soon enough, just like OpenID integration is coming along nicely.
Thanks,
Nicolas
The watchlist is pretty darned nice. I may have to steal that if/when I get around to setting up the other half of OpenID support on my site (thanks to Sam Ruby's writeup, I've now got lovely OpenID delegation so I can sign in with my actual domain).
Nicolas: that kind of thing is exactly why I'm so keen on OpenID taking off. Once it gets more widespread there are a huge number of smart decentralised services you can build on top of it.
Simon: I'd say, let's get things started? :-)
I like the comments watchlist very much.
I'm not sure I like the style changes - is there any way the bubbles could have a full border all the way around them? Short comments look kinda weird. I guess I could get used to it though :)
Nicolas: you stole my idea ;) I started scribbling these ideas when I read Simon's post this morning and was writing a blog entry on the very subject when I thought I'd better check the comments first...
One problem is that it isn't part of any standard, and so these 'smart decentralises services' as Simon put it could end up the equivalent of proprietory incompatible gunk.
What's a nice in-between?
Peter: I got some more "real" ideas on it by now, I'll write a blog entry on it (on my tech blog, http://blog.eikke.com/ikke), but I got my first exam tomorrow, so time is lacking a bit :(
Anyway, if any interest: I created a wiki page in DjangoID's Trac to be able to get some things written down, please dump any ideas over there!
There are a few things I'd love to hear more about (future blog posts?)...
1. More elaboration on the "global" features that could work on top of OpenID systems. Where could it be taken?
2. Using bazaar (is that bazaar-ng?). What server configuration do you have? General setup (server and client). I've been watching bazaar-ng for awhile but recently lost track of it. It looks like there's been a big push. Nice.
I've been planning the front-end for the decentralised callback service, but having read (ok skimmed!) the OpenID spec I can't see any way to implement the callbacks/trackbacks.
So, do we just go for a proprietory system on top? Should any system using the callbacks cache the URL for them, or visit the OpenID page every time to find it? (inefficient, but allows change of URL)
Nice Site !
流水线 - 26th July 2007 02:51 - #