Projects

When I’m not working for other people, I often get carried away with side projects and experiments. This category will include all posts related to those projects. Most of them are technical or web-related, but once in a while I’ll even do things IRL!

Jetpack

For the past few months, my team at Automattic (Team Social FTW!) has been working on a super-secret project. Today, almost perfectly synchronized with the NASA space shuttle landing (total fluke, but awesome regardless) we launched Jetpack!

Jetpack is a new plugin that delivers a bunch of popular features from WordPress.com (the hosted site, which Automattic runs) to self-hosted installs of WordPress (such as the one that runs Dented Reality). Once you install Jetpack, you get some of the cooler things available on WordPress.com, automatically enabled on your own WordPress site. The modules you get today are just the beginning though, there are a lot more planned for future releases. We’re going to be targeting some of the biggest features that are easier for us to do on our massive grid/cloud infrastructure, but harder for folks to do on their own shared-hosting accounts.

We also managed to partner with a bunch of leading web hosts, so if you’re doing a one-click install on Bluehost, DreamHost, Go Daddy, HostGator, Media Temple, or Network Solutions, you’ll get Jetpack as part of your install. This is huge for people installing their own WordPress.

This has been the coolest thing I’ve worked on at Automattic so far, and it’s been awesome to be involved in a project that has seen so many contributions internally (over 40 people were involved in everything from UX to design to internationalization to testing and debugging) and so many iterations since its inception. I’m really proud of what we’ve created, and hope that it sets a new bar for the design of WordPress plugins (I really think Jetpack is beautiful, amazing work Joen, Hugo and MT!).

So – check out Jetpack if you’re running WordPress on your own server, and let us know what you think!

Which features would you most like to see in Jetpack? Let me know in the comments and I’ll see what I can do 😉

PS: This post proudly proof-read by After The Deadline, as delivered via Jetpack 😉

New Project: ListML

If you’re anything like me, you write a lot of lists. I use lists for pretty much everything — note taking, planning my day, managing projects, shopping, organization, etc etc etc. I have lists of lists. It’s a bit out of control. Over the years, I’ve coalesced on a simple, basic format, where I write things using indented (tabbed) lists of plain text (in TextMate). I kept finding myself converting some of these lists to HTML, so I’ve written something up that will take a plain text list and reformat it as HTML, given a simple set of formatting rules.

That project is available for download now, under the name ListML. Check it out, I use it all the time, so will probably continue developing it. At the moment it’s just a simple script that you drop into a directory, then drop other TXT files in there to view them as HTML. We’ll see where it ends up. If you’ve got any suggestions or find any bugs, feel free to post them as a comment here and I’ll fix things up. I already have some ideas on new features:

  • Ability to load external files (from URL)
  • List files in the current directory if none specified
  • Cut out the parsing engine properly to make it more portable
  • Make the HTML view (optionally) into a lightweight editor as well
  • Quick UI for grabbing the HTML snippet of just the list (sans CSS/extras)

Slinky, a PHP class for URL shortening/lengthening

A few weeks ago, I tweeted that I was writing a PHP library for shortening/lengthening URLs using some of the common/popular services. I said it was going to be called Slinky, and that it’d support a bunch of different services. Well, it’s now available for download and I think it’s pretty cool, even if I do say so myself 😉

Please grab a copy, try it out and let me know what you think. It hasn’t actually been used for anything useful yet, so I’m also interested to hear what you’re using it for!

microformatsDevCamp

Over the weekend, I attended microformatsDevCamp here in San Francisco. It was a chance for a bunch of people who are interested in microformats to get together and hack on some projects that used microformats to Do Cool Things. I ended up being the instigator of one of the projects we worked on, because I had a concrete “system” in mind that would leverage microformats to meet a real need.

The project was to create a web service that would scrape URLs and pull out any content marked up in hCard content (e.g. my contact page) and would then load that content into an LDAP directory. The reason for this is that most Address Book/Contact applications can plug into an LDAP directory to populate their details, so this would provide a direct pipe between client-side contact storage and web-based, decentralized information. The web service would periodically check the URLs it knew about for updates and update LDAP appropriately. If people update their hCard-based information, the LDAP directory would automatically pick up that change and update itself. I’ve talked about this idea before.

Building (or even tinkering with) this system required that we learned about LDAP, and as it turned out, none of us knew much more than the very basic concepts involved with LDAP, so we had a lot of learning to do. I’m putting together a list of LDAP basics that I’ll publish once they’re straightened out a bit. In the meantime, a specifically big thank you to Tantek for organizing ufDevCamp, to Stephen Weber for working with me on the LDAP/code side of things (and showing me how to get started on github.com, and to Mark Ng for setting up an OpenLDAP server for us to play with, and for helping figure out some of the configuration options etc required to get it all working.

Oh, and there’s some code over here if you’re interested, and we made a page on the microformats wiki with some info on our progress.

KRead: a simple feed reader for the Kindle 2

It’s Saturday, and I just got a Kindle 2 this week. I’ve been thinking it’d be neat to be able to read feeds on the Kindle (since it has a built in Web Browser and internet connection), so I whipped up KRead. It’s a super-simple, mostly-text-only feed reader for the Kindle which just requires you to enter the URL of a single feed (or a website, it supports auto-discovery) and it’ll give you the content of the feed in a simply-formatted list so that you can read through it.

Check out the KRead project page for some more details or jump over to http://kread.beaulebens.com/ and try it out.

The All-New LiveJournal Importer for WordPress

Over the past few weeks, I have been working on a new importer for people who use LiveJournal, but would like to switch over to WordPress. With LiveJournal laying off a bunch of employees, it seemed like some people might prefer to move to a platform where they had a bit more control over their own content, rather than relying on another company to handle it for them. I decided that my measure of success would be that it needed to be capable of importing Guav’s entire journal — comments and all, without error.

As it turns out, it’s been quite a project. LiveJournal’s API is, shall we say, “challenging” to work with, and the sheer size of Guav’s journal (over 3,700 posts and nearly 200,000 comments) meant that I kept running into time, memory and database limits that would crash the importer. After a lot of back and forth with Guav though, I’m happy to present the new importer (find it under Tools > Import > LiveJournal), sporting the following features:

  • Just enter your LiveJournal username and password and you’re ready to go
  • Via the API, it connects directly to LiveJournal and imports all of your posts,
    • Posts marked as “Friends Only” are assigned a password within WordPress,
    • Posts marked as “Private (you only)” are marked as Private within WordPress, which means that only authors on your new blog can read them,
    • lj-cut tags are converted to the WordPress equivalent, the <! — more — > tag,
    • lj-user tags are converted to normal links, and have class=”lj-user” attached to them to make it easier to style them if you like,
    • Tags are imported properly,
    • If you closed the comments on a post in LiveJournal, then they’ll be closed in WordPress as well,
    • Lots of the “meta” information related to posts is also imported using WordPress’ Custom Fields feature. You could then use these values to reproduce some of LiveJournal’s functionality within your new theme if you like. The fields imported are:
      • If your post contains adult content (lj_adult_content),
      • Your current co-ordinates and location (lj_current_coords and lj_current_location),
      • Your current mood (lj_current_mood),
      • Current music (lj_current_music),
      • Your userpic keyword (lj_picture_keyword)
  • Next up, all of your comments are also imported,
    • Threading is preserved, so replies to other comments show up successfully (provided you enable that feature in WordPress),
    • The “subject” of each comment is included as the first line of the comment itself, because WordPress doesn’t have a comment title/subject value,
    • LiveJournal users get links back to their LiveJournals,
    • Your own comments are linked to your WordPress account, and are linked back to your new WordPress blog,
    • Anonymous users are labeled as “Anonymous”,
    • “Screened” comments on LiveJournal are imported as “Unapproved” within WordPress, so you can decide what to do with them

So there you have it, a brand new, shiny LiveJournal importer. This should be bundled with the 2.8 release of WordPress (it’s available right now on WordPress.com), and will be available for everyone. As I mentioned, it’s been tested with one single, very large blog (and a few smaller test ones), but if you find anything wrong with it, please file a bug on the WordPress Trac!

Huge thanks again to Guav for helping with the testing of this thing (maybe now he can migrate over to WordPress as well)!

FeedGrowler update: Custom icons

I’ve just updated the code for FeedGrowler so that it supports custom icons for each feed that you are monitoring. All you need to do is include the full path to an icon/image file as the second argument when you call feedgrowler.php (or in your crontab).

Custom icons for a WordPress feed, and a Twitter search.

Custom icons for a WordPress feed, and a Twitter search.

This version also supports Atom feeds (in addition to previous RSS 2.0 support).

Check out the latest FeedGrowler.