Gsoc 2010: My vision about desktop client

[mircea]

Hello,

     I am Mircea and I want to build a desktop client.You are probably asking: "why another post about a desktop client?" ... well, because I think that my proposal is different from those before mine. Many proposals means that community will benefit from a better product. I will describe the features I thought about leaving the most technical details for the eventual application.I have added 3 mockups for the app: MainView , EditView and MiniView .
     First thing first: I will develop the application in Actionscript 3 with Flex framework for Adobe AIR Runtime. AIR is a free cross-platform runtime for Flash, HTML and Javascript. It brings the web experince to the desktop enjoying the latter access to resources. Use of a runtime has the advantage that you write the same code for Win, Linux or Mac. Another advantage of Adobe AIR is the auto-update system for its apps.
     First thing I will focus on is user management. Each user will have one or more "identities", this means one Dreamwidth username and optional Facebook and Twitter accounts. Each "identity" will be assign to a tab (as you can see in MainView). There will be a "user info" one (left side in MainView.png) where the user will found: userpic , website ,location , birthday ,status on Twitter and Facebook, other contact info , bio ,interests. This items will be editable.The user will be able to change his userpics.In Facebook zone you will see your current status, inbox, requests and will have a link to your online page.In Twitter zone you will see your status and last tweets. There will be two modes to use the app: online mode and offline with sync. In online mode any action (change on profile , post entry, etc.) will be performed immediatelly , while in sync mode will be added to a queue and all the action will be performed at sync time (when the app will go in online mode). In online mode you will be able to select posts and messages that will be available offline. To make them available will be saved as files on harddisk.
     The second thing I will focus on is enhanced editing. There will be a separation between reading and editing. The main page is dedicated to reading posts and messages. The reading section will have a search (like that on the website).Any editing will be made in a separate window , one for every edit action. You can have as many edit windows as you want. The mockup for it is EditView. Every draft can be saved separately on a file (probably with a xml structure). You could load any previous draft, modify and then save it again or send it. The formatting options will resemble with those available on website.All drafts and saved posts/messages will form the "archive". Its content could be seen on reading section. Before posting something you can see a preview of how it will look on reading section.
     Third thing I have focused on is efficient use of resources. The app can run in "mini-mode"
(mockup is MiniView) without main window or any edit windows. There the user will see the last posts, messages or tweets (summarized , not the all content). The small sized window is cpu-friendly. To add functionality in "mini-mode" will be a command line like interface. Using this interface the user will be able to open main window , open a edit window or save one message/post to "archive". For example a command like: "new post -as Mircea -to dw_dev" will open an edit window with "Post as" and "Post to" input texts completed with "Mircea" and "dw_dev", and "post" selected in type of edit selector. This command line like interface will be found on main page too (as it can be seen on mockup :D). When new stuff appears in "Latest things" zone a customizable sound will be played.
     Another feature will be a theme editor where the user will modify text fonts , background colors or images. I want to use an agile like development method meaning that I will work in sprints (2-3 weeks). After each sprint there will be an usable app ready to get feedback from the mentor and community.
     This is a looong post ... the reason is that I wanted to describe ,as well as I could, my vision about how the desktop client should look like and how should it work.This is only a draft of my proposal so I am eager to hear your opinions about it. Thank you for reading.

GSoC Application : A Desktop Client for Dreamwidth

[mayank]

Hi,

I am Mayank from India. I am a second year student of M.Sc.(Hons.) Mathematics.

I would like to take up the project of a Desktop Client for Dreamwidth. I have posted my complete proposal at http://mayank.dreamwidth.org/855.html.

A sample client which I wrote to start learning the protocol is posted at http://mayank.dreamwidth.org/580.html.

xmlrpc woes

[tonybaldwin]

hi...
I'm trying to add xmlrpc posting to Xpostulate, not only to work better with LJ, DW and (insert favorite LJ clone), but also to get wordpress crossposting worked in (since that also uses xmlrpc).

I seem to have sorted out my xml, and am certain I am sending a valid postevent, with one exception,
I've been missing something, which, I believe (thanks to catness to be LJ.XMLRPC.getchallenge data
so, I am now requesting a challenge from the server, then using tdom (tcl parser) to parse the response, but I think I'm feeding tdom the wrong data, because it keeps throwing a syntax error, as if I am not feeding it xml
I thought I was feeding it the server response, which, to my knowledge, should be an xml response, giving me some c0:balbalbalba value (which needs parsed out) to use in the postevent to send thereafter

here's my code: http://pastebin.com/ed4cTjaG
the result I get is simply error "syntax error" at line 1 character 0
"o <--Error-- k"
this leads me to believe that neither http::meta nor http::status is the variable I need to feed to the parser to get the challenge variable I need

Google Summer Of Code

[kartik]

For the last few days I was busy with the scratch installation of dreamwidth on fedora. But now when its done so it feels great  to me. I have been there on #dw and the community helped me whenever i needed it. I must say the community is really helpful and supportive. It provides you with the perfect ambience in which you can work and give the best in you. Now I am applying for Production Monitoring which comes under System Administration as my Gsoc project. I am choosing this project as system administration is something which admires me a lot. I feel that this is the backbone for any running website or system. Apart from that I have also cleared Red Hat Certification Engineer Certification Examination in November 2009, and so I am comfortable enough to deal with servers and configuring them. I want to apply my existing knowledge as well as eager and learning new stuffs like cacti and nagios which are the standard industry environment and are used by dreamwidth. As for now that I don't have much idea about them so my approach is to prepare some basic shell scripts and implementing them on cacti.

Now I am writing my proposal for Gsoc and will post that soon( as now only 2 days are left :P). I have some small doubt what are the things that I need to cover in the project abstact section. Does that include my working strategy and the overall schedule, actually i am a bit confused that to what extend do i need to mention in this section and to include what else. I am looking forward for the community review so that I shall include those features too. Your suggestions are always welcomed. :)

[GSoC] Yet Another Desktop Client =)

[chopachom]

Hi all, my name is Alexander Petrovich and I'm student from Soviet Russia =), I already have email conversation with Mark where I have discussed some details about my proposal, but I am not revealing it to public yet. Now I want to introduce my proposal, feel free to comment and ask questions.So, here is link to proposal:

http://docs.google.com/View?id=dgj3g7fx_0f34hdrfb

Named Commenting (GSoC 2010)

[onli]

The "Named Guest" comment level should give people from outside of dreamwidth the opportunity to comment on an entry without registering and without remaining completely anonymous. A Specification is already given.

Comparison

A comment on other Blogsystems like Wordpress typically stores following additional information besides the comment-text:

• Name
• Email
• URL
• (Whether to subscribe the entry)

The introduction on the "Summer of Code"-Wikipage speaks only about Name and URL, not about email. It was explained to me that email-addresses should not be stored so that nobody could spam another by entering a foreign email-address on comments to entries.

Necessary changes

Frontend

It's not strictly necessary to add one additional commentform. The current anonymous-commentform could be replaced with a new one having the additional fields, a comment without a chosen name would be a "old" anonymous comment.

Draft:

Note the use of "URL" in the list and "Website" on the label of the inputfield. Website is default on such forms, URL used in the OpenID-form. Which one is better suited? Instead of using Name/"URL/Website" in the list, it could also get called "Named comment".

Also note that "unverified identity" shall be appended to the pseudonym in the commentlist. The presentation of the comment itself aside from that won't differ from the comment of a logged-in commenter.

Database

At the properties associated with a comment, a place for the url has to be created.

Possible Extensions

Settings

A blogowner could get an option to require the commenter to use a pseudonym. This probably isn't a real extension, more a necessary option.
The other way around, to not allow anonymous user to use a pseudonym but to comment anonymously, is possible, but I don't see a usecase for that. Can you think of one?

Saving

It's possible to store in the cookies of a user his data, so he doesn't have to enter his name and url again, the commentform gets prefilled. The specification says it shouldn't be prefilled after a session or on other journals or on other entries. This could made controllable by adding a checkbox to the commentform asking whether or not to save the entered data (maybe instead of the session). It's also quite possible that it'd be useful if this storing of data wasn't per entry, but only per journal.

Email-related

Also storing email-addresses would allow to

1. Subscribe to an entry by just entering an email-address
2. Add suggested support for gravatar.

To prevent the use of this system for spamming, a double-opt-in-system for each subscription on entries could be used. The first email would ask if the owner of that address really wants to subscribe to the entry and only send notifications about follow-up-comments when answered "yes" (by clicking on a link).
Also a checkbox would be needed to activate the subscription in the first place.

Named Commenting (GSoC 2010) Project Proposal/Ideas

[dostieer]

As explained in this spec, the Named commenting level should allow users who do not have an account with Dreamwidth the ability to comment without being anonymous, but without registering.

Most modern blogging sites have some sort of Named Commenting form, usually asking for a Name and a URL to attach to the name.

Basics
The Named commenting level should ask for:

• Name (Pseudonym)
  
• URL
  

The Named commenting level could ask for:

• E-mail (and send direct replies to the Named commenter's email)
  

Frontend
It would be most intuitive for users if the Anonymous commenting level and the Named commenting level were kept separate, to ensure no confusion over whether the user is posting with an entered Name and URL or if they are simply posting anonymously.

Journal Settings
The journal owner must be able to decide on a journal or per-entry basis if they want to force a commentor to provide a pseudonym or prevent pseudonyms from being used. If pseudonyms are prevented from being used, I assume anonymous commenting would also be disallowed on that entry/journal? I'm confused as to when pseudonyms would want to be disallowed but anonymous commenting allowed. Some clarification would be much appreciated.

E-mail System
If the e-mail system is created, it will be important to make sure that a commenter wants to receive e-mail about his/her comment. The e-mail should include a link to subscribe to further e-mails for that entry, and it should provide a link to unsubscribe from receiving e-mails about replies.

Should this unsubscribe them from all e-mails related to Named commenting from Dreamwidth or should it only unsubscribe them from that entry? The system could be abused (if the abuser knew a person's email) if the e-mails are only unsubscribed from that entry. It seems like unsubscribing them from all further e-mails about direct replies would make more sense, but what if they want to resubscribe at a later point?

Possibilities
Depending on how the project wants to advance, an automatically generated icon could be created for a Named commenter as described in the spec, but it would be most important to get everything else working first.

[GSOC 2010] Calendar functionality summary

[panna]

Hello!

Some time ago I posted on dw-dev some words about the calendar functionality (suggested in DwGSoC2010 projects page)(It can be found here:) ).
I'm really sorry for not posting this as I assumed - at least a few days ago:( My family spend Easter (and other holidays) very familial and I malestimated the time I intended to spend on preparing next calendar's outline. I'm very sorry for being imprecise.

I'd be very glad to receive some guidelines and comments and answers for the proposition of Dw calendar and all the below:)

I reconsidered the set of functionalities I've proposed and tried to organize them.

( more...:) )