Sperrobjekt Weblog

At the moment, a movement gains momentum in Germany that promotes extended user privacy, amongst other things by disabling the logging of IP addresses. This is partly due to a recent judgement pronounced by the Amtsgericht in Berlin that denies the German Federal Ministry of Justice the right to protocol any individual-related data about the visitors of their web site. Add to that the proposal of Minister of the Interior, Wolfgang Schäuble, to introduce a massive data retention legislation, and you know why, two weeks ago, about 15.000 people came together in Berlin to protest against the plans of politicians who, themselves, can hardly use a computer, but try to spread fear amongst the German population. Fear of a terrorist attack, that is.

Many individuals, groups, and parties are fighting back. One of them is the initiative Wir speichern nicht (We do not store) that asks webmasters and providers to abandon IP logging and/or anonymize their log files. They posted some tutorials on how to anonymize apache mod_removeip, WordPress, or MediaWiki (all in German, more here). While there are no instructions for Serendipity, Jens Ferner kindly provides us with directions of how to disable the logging of IP addresses of your visitors: Simply add

to the top of your serendipity_config.inc.php. Although I'm not sure if this covers all possible locations in the code (think of plugins e.g.), this is a first step. I disabled logging your IP for this blog, but I don't have access to the apache log files. Maybe this can be added to Serendipity either directly into the core or by way of a plugin.

Additional info in German (if anyone knows of good English tutorials or sites, please post those in the comments):Wiki des AK Vorrat, Infoseite, Wiki der Piraten-Partei, Pressemitteilung

It's been silent here for too long, but that's because I have a lot of work to do on various projects. Other people are working, too. Two days ago, Dmitry Baranovskiy announced the release of Optimus, an online service that transforms microformatted XHTML pages to nice, clean, easily digestible XML, JSON or JSON-P. This is achieved by the informed and heavy use of XSL Transformations. Optimus currently filters out events (hCalendar), addresses (hCard), blog entries (hAtom), resumes (hResume), reviews (hReview), and many more, so every important Microformat is covered. The great thing is that Dmitry has released all the XSL and XML files required for the transformation (under this Creative Commons license, I figure?). This means that everyone can set up her or his own transformations. I can only start to think of all the good uses we can put this to.

See example Optimus output of the blog entry before this one.

I almost forgot: Today, according to schedule, Garvin released version 1.2 of the world's best blog software, Serendipity. This release features many improvements concerning templating, features, usability, and security. One major step forward is the new bulletproof template that enables us to use Smarty for the backend as well. As you can see, we're on the right track. The upgrade went flawlessly, so I want to say a big thank you to all developers who contributed to this release.

I've fallen deeply in love with JavaScript libraries like jQuery in the past months. There's so much cool stuff you can do by simply including one ore more .js files to your web site. Be it form validation, GUI-like elements, or just toggling the visibility of block elements. Image overlay effects like Lightbox or Thickbox are based on these libraries, too.

So I decided it was about time we had those libs in Serendipity. We need them to create a more intuitive user experience both in the frontend and the backend. Especially in the backend, where other blog tools like Movable Type 4 look much slicker to me. Anyway, I sat down and hacked together a new plugin for S9y that lets you include jQuery and some of its plugins, mootools (including many extensions in one file), and Prototype in your web site. You can choose between frontend and backend display and select single plugins for jQuery (my favorite lib right now). I would really appreciate it if some S9y users/developers would download and install the plugin and give me feedback on it (forum seems to be down, but there's already a thread on this).

To give you an idea of what could be done with it, I edited the default admin templates, got rid of all the tables and exchanged them for divs. Then I added some tabs to the "edit entry" area with the help of the tabs plugin for jQuery. You can see the result if you open the s9y_tabs.ogg of the desktop session I recorded with Istanbul (in Ogg Theora format, no sound).

"jQuery, mootools, Prototype in Serendipity" vollständig lesen

NoseRub is a project started by Dirk Olbertz of Blogscout fame. The idea of NoseRub is that it works as a protocol to aggregate data of decentralized social networks. If you want to check it out, the code of a sample application in its early stages is hosted at Google Code. The goal of NoseRub is that everyone can manage and/or host his/her own social network. By separating the profile, the network, and the data, everything will become portable to a great extent. You stay in control of your data, and if any of your friends update their data, these changes will automagically be incorporated into your app.

NoseRub was shown in public for the first time at BarCamp Cologne 2 (one of the most eagerly awaited sessions), where we could see the sample app on two local webservers. It was built around the CakePHP framework, so the structure of the code is very clearly laid out. Of course, because of its early status, many questions arose at the BarCamp session which need to be clarified and resolved (security concerns, technical specifiations). But all in all, the presentation left most of the participants in awe and/or enthusiasm. And so, like many others might already have done or will do within the next few days, I downloaded and installed NoseRub on my local server. What can I say, it works great even in its raw state. My guess is, that developers will improve it very quickly, add new services along the way, so that by the end of the year we should have a great application that helps us take over control over our social networks. Dirk published a quick tour of the sample app, check it out. I will certainly post more about NoseRub, so stay tuned.