Dented Reality Notes

As you may know, I've been working on a project for a while now, which has finally gone live, with open registrations. That project is My Baby Our Baby.

The idea of the site is to give parents and families a secure place online where they can compile a journal of memories for their children. We're focusing primarily on photos right now, but hope to include video and audio as we progress. Here's a couple of the things that I think make MyBaby unique or worth a look:

• Unlimited uploads (backed by Amazon S3)
• You choose to have your book open to the public (for reading), or completely invite-only.
• Once they join your book via invitation, other people can add their own photos and stories to your book as well
• We have some really beautiful book themes (and more coming) care of Ray Hernandez/Stoodio
• We've created a forum on the site as well to allow people to interact across books (anyone who's a member can post) and ask each other questions etc.
• You can try it out for free!

Right now, people get 3 weeks to try it out for free, after that, if they like it, it's $8 a month to continue using the service. This covers you for as much as you (and all the members of your book) want to upload. You can pay for more than a month at a time and get a discount as well. We're trying out a slightly different method of payment where subscriptions aren't actually available in a traditional set-your-details-and-forget way. What we're doing is allowing anyone who's a member of the book to contribute by paying for as much (or as little) as they like. We're hoping that rather than the parent having to pay every month, other people in the family will chip in and cover the cost of keeping the book running if they see value in it.

Ray and I are really excited now that it's live, and very nervous to see where it goes. We've spent a lot of time working on this and refining things, so it's great to finally have some other people using it.

Now for the real work -- keeping it up and running and constantly improving it for our new users!

I haven't posted actively here about it, but FeedBlendr is the first of a series of "feed power-tools" that I'm developing and will eventually tie together. There is a version live and actively being used already, and I've just put out a beta version for testing with some major upgrades to the core feed engine. People are really loving this sort of thing, and I've got some great plans for more additions to the family soon.

Keep an eye out for more here and also over at the Blendr Blog.

I've just released a project I've been working on, called FeedBlendr. Basically it allows you to create custom feeds by combining any number of existing RSS or Atom files into a single one. It's got some funky AJAX-checking on URLs, and soon it will have some slick integration with FeedBurner which should allow me to do some very cool things with it.

Check it out and see if it's useful - hopefully when combined with some other things I'm working on it'll allow you to mash feeds up just the way you want them.

As soon as I posted details of my new Atom API library to the SixApart ProNet mailing list, I got an email from their Manager of PLatform Technology, and then another one from Anil Dash, both with hopes that I could include LiveJournal support.

I'm now in touch with one of their people who's handling the actual implementation of their APIs, so hopefully I'll be able to work out what's going on and add LJ support to the code library soon. At the moment, my WSSE authentication is failing on the second request to their API, even though it's working on the first one... curious.

I've finally packaged up and released the PHP Atom API code I wrote as part of webpad. You can download it now and go crazy.

With a little prompting from someone who needed to known what license the PHP Blogger API code was available under so he could develop something based on it, I've finally added a license in with all 3 downloads available. With confirmation from the other 2 authors involved, all 3 packages are now available under a BSD-style license. Enjoy.

Now that I have a new Atom API library to play with (thanks to the development of webpad), I threw together a new copy of AvantBlog in about 40 minutes.

This version supports titles (so everyone can stop asking now!) and I improved some of the messages a little as well. There is also a new feature which allows you to specify the size of the edit fields so that you can maximize the use of your device's screen-size.

To specify a custom size, add ?w=XX&h=YY to the end of the URL in AvantGo (or your handheld's bookmark), where XX is the width of the main post body (and title field) and YY is the height. These values should be somewhere in the range of 10 - 30 each. You will need to play around to see what's right for your device, but as a hint; my old Palm Vx used 17 and 6, my HP iPAQ uses 20 and 11 to get the biggest space available.

Happy Posting!

PS: For those who are interested, I'm also putting together a new 'AvantType' that will operate exactly as AvantBlog does, but post to a TypePad blog!

Well, at long long last, webpad 3.0 Personal Edition is finally released!

I'm writing this very post in webpad, and I think this is by far the best release of the program, with some cool new features, much better stability, and compatibility with more browsers than ever. Jump on over to the webpad Project Page to see what all the fuss is about, or you can just go ahead and download webpad now.

Tonight I have a few more things to polish off (including writing the installation documentation), and then I will start going through my suite of tests for webpad. Once my round of pretty intesive tests are done, I have a couple people who are going to be helping me out with some beta testing. I'm really glad they are able to do this, because it means I can test webpad out on some other server installations before releasing it into the wild, and hopefully sort out any potential problems before anyone else has to deal with them.

I'm expecting to release webpad next week, if not this weekend!

Tonight I secured webpad a little more heavily, standardised some more of the operations across different sections and generally tidied things up. I also added 'delete post' functionality to the currently supported blog systems (blosxom, Blogger.com, TypePad and LiveJournal), and that's looking pretty slick.

Part of add the delete functionality required me to write out the (very, very simple) plugin API for adding and removing tools to the toolbar. I may be a little biased (and not at all modest), but I think it's pretty cool :) More about plugins later - but basically webpad 3.0 supports plugins through a "My Plugins" section, so hopefully people might even write some new features for it, allowing access to more external sources of text to edit!

So, I can hear you asking; what's left? Well:

1. MovableType Support (open, edit, create, delete)
2. WordPress Support (ditto)
3. Update a few interface niceties (like the 'About webpad' dialog)
4. Write the new Help Manual, which is a lot different to the last version, and will be a lot bigger
5. Update the webpad project page
6. Fix a scrolling bug in Mozilla (fixed on PC, needs a tweak for Mac)
7. Pretty up some of the error messages
8. Thorough system testing before release
9. Packaging up with some instructions on installation

Oh yeah, and of course, I'm doing the whole dog-food eating thing and as usual, this is posted with the very latest version of webpad (from FireFox), using a couple of the tools and bits and pieces and it's all looking good.