MediaWiki Plugin for Laconica v0.1

I’ve been playing with Laconica for a while now, mostly on Identi.ca but also on some self-hosted sites for various projects. For the Grantsfire project, we thought that Laconica would be a great way to keep others updated without flooding our inboxes, so I installed the latest version. I noticed that there’s now a plugin API, so — with encouragement from Evan Prodromou — I decided to scratch an itch I’ve had for a while and write a Link As You Think Mediawiki plugin.    (N5W)

It wasn’t too bad. My main challenge was figuring out PHP. I’ve looked at a lot of PHP code in my day, but I’ve never written a line of it until today. I thought I could skate by without spending too much time understanding PHP’s idioms and idiosyncracies, but — as is often the case — trying to skate by ended up taking more time than learning how PHP worked. The Laconica codebase is relatively clean, and I learned a lot by reading it.    (N5X)

Many, many thanks to Evan Prodromou and all the Laconica hackers out there. It’s an awesome tool, and it’s enabling me to do some cool stuff that wouldn’t otherwise be possible.    (N5Y)

barx: A Ruby XRI Resolver

Last month, Victor Grey and Kermit Snelson announced barx, the first full implementation of the XRI 2.0 draft specification (working draft 11, for those of you keeping track). I finally downloaded and started playing with it tonight; it’s very nice. Most OpenID implementations are using a proxy hack to support i-names, but as real XRI implementations start to come out, we’ll start seeing many more interesting applications.    (MS5)

I’ve started to port barx over to Perl and will hopefully have it completed by IIW next week. Yes, I’m coding again. I’ve been sitting on a slew of year-old ideas that need to get implemented, and I’m tired of being a preacher instead of a do-er (at least when it comes to code). It’s against my instincts, and I don’t have enough of an audience to leverage the Lazy Web.    (MS6)

Besides, I was starting to miss it. Over the last few years, I’ve built a reputation as someone who knows a bit about collaboration, not just about tools, and that’s been really gratifying. It’s also helped me feel okay about reminding people that I still know a bit about tools as well. Plus, a lot of things have been stoking the fire recently. I was managing the HyperScope project last year and the Grantsfire project this year, both of which are conceptually and technically interesting. I never stopped reading code, and a lot of my friends are developers. What really kicked things into gear for me, though, was stepping in as an emergency developer for Grantsfire and watching Linus Torvalds‘s git talk.    (MS7)

I started playing with a bunch of ideas at once, but I’m focusing on Grantsfire and the Digital Identity stuff now. Stay tuned, and if you want to hack with me over the next few weeks, either face-to-face or remotely, ping me.    (MS8)

February 2007 Update

A month has passed, and the blog has been silent, but the brain has not. Time to start dumping again. But before I begin, a quick synopsis:    (LR8)

  • The month started off inauspiciously, with a catastrophic system failure that occurred over the holidays. Quite the story. I hope to tell it someday.    (LR9)
  • Last year, I joined the board of the Leadership Learning Community (LLC). It was an unusual move on my part, since I was also in the process of clearing commitments off my list in order to focus more on my higher-level goals. In the midst of saying no to many, many people, I found myself saying yes to LLC. We had our first 2007 board meeting earlier this month, and I participated in their subsequent learning circles. Let’s just say I have no regrets. A week with these folks generated enough thoughts to fill a thousand blog posts.    (LRA)
  • This past week, I co-facilitated a three day Lunar Dust Workshop for NASA, using Dialogue Mapping and Compendium. It was an unbelievable experience, also worth a thousand blog posts. For now, check out some pictures.    (LRB)
  • For the past few months, I’ve been actively involved with a project called Grantsfire. The project’s goal is modest: Make foundations and nonprofits more transparent and collaborative. How? For starters, by getting foundations to publish their grants as microformats. I’ve hinted about the project before, and I’ll have much more to say soon.    (LRC)
  • For the past year, I’ve been helping reinvent Identity Commons. Again, I haven’t blogged much about it, but I’ve certainly talked a lot about it. Not only are we playing an important role in the increasingly hot Internet identity space, we’re also embodying a lot of important ideas about facilitating networks and catalyzing collaboration.    (LRD)

In addition to a flood of blog posts, other things to look forward to this month include:    (LRE)