This is something to hear and talk about it but this is something totally different to experience it, it’s thrilling, even on modest scales.
Since my LibraryThing application for Facebook is out it has clearly had a viral growth curve. So far there are only 435 users and every week I am looking for an inflection of this tendency. I know there will be one because there is a limited number of LibraryThing users on Facebook. My goal, right now, is to attract as many of them as possible on this application.
The next step will be to attract Facebook users to LibraryThing. But I know that for this I will need help from Tim Spalding and the LibraryThing team. I have always been grateful for their work but I must admit that I have been quite disappointed recently as I was trying to contact them and they constantly ignored me.
I am also thinking about open-sourcing the application, because I think it is both a good use case for people who are developing Python/Django applications on Google AppEngine and those who are developing for the Facebook platform. I still have to choose a license but the GNU Affero General Public License seems like a good match.
Anyway, if you love books, got plenty of them and want to share your readings, do not forget to give LibraryThing a try and once your are convinced, join the Facebook application, with this application you can:
- Add a tab and a box to your profile, listing your most recent books
- Choose the number of books to display in your profile tab
- Choose whether you want to display them with covers only or as a list which will include your ratings and reviews
- If you grant the application the right to publish to your stream it will publish books you add to LibraryThing on your wall
- It will also publish reviews as you write them on LibraryThing
You can also:
- Browse your Facebook friend’s books
- Find books on the search page
- Share a book you like or comment on it (those are Facebook only features and will not appear in LibraryThing)
- Add a book to your LibraryThing collection with a single click
Enjoy :)
For those of you who were at the Lift conference 2008 you might remember of Fontself. Franz Hoffman and Marc Escher, the two founders of the company, were there to offer everyone the opportunity to fill in a grid with their own hand writing, scan it, and use it on the Lift website.
Today, the Fontself team has grown and is celebrating their first release of a product. Together with Netlog, the european online social portal, they are now giving the opportunity to the Netlog community members to send messages, post blog entries or post comments using personalized character fonts.
Congratulation to them, they have been working long and hard for their ideas to come out and I am proud I helped them make their dream come true.
And this also gives me some advantages, like being able to use a Fontself font on my own blog and give you a glimpse at what the future of web fonts might be!
Among other things, you will appreciate the ability to select, copy and paste the text :P
For now, the feature is only available to the french version of the platform but there is no doubt that it will rapidly extend to the rest of the 35 million Netlog members throughout Europe and that the Fontself team will continue to develop their technology and enhance the web.
If you want to stay informed about Fontself and their technology you can either subscribe to their newsletter, become a friend of their Netlog page, follow them on twitter or keep following this blog…
As you might have noticed already, Facebook as been on vedovini.net since last December. To this purpose I have been using the Sociable! fbConnect plugin for Wordpress that enables visitors to login using their Facebook credentials and later comment using their Facebook identity and feature those comments on their Facebook stream.
However, I wanted a deeper integration between this blog and my Facebook profile. Here is what I have done.
In the process of installing the fbConnect plugin you have to create a Facebook application and, among other things, Facebook applications feature a canvas page and an application tab. The canvas page is the main application page, the tab can be added to any user’s or page’s profiles.
To setup the canvas page you specify an URL that will either serve FBML (Facebook markup) or pure HTML. In the latter case the page is displayed in an IFRAME.
Initially, I used the IFRAME version to display the home page but I found awkward to have my blog design mixed with the Facebook design. Additionally this technique cannot be used for tabs, that only support FBML.
Finally, I crafted special pages on this blog that serves only FBML with a special Facebook styling extracted from Foxini’s Facebook wordpress theme. The resulting canvas page can bee seen here and the corresponding profile tab is now featured on my own Facebook profile, here (you may not be able to see this one because of Facebook privacy control so I inserted a screenshot below).
If this is getting enough interest I might package it as a Wordpress plugin. Leave a comment if you are interested or if you have additional ideas.
I am pleased to announce the first milestone of the DITA Open Platform version 1.0.0
http://www.dita-op.org/
This milestone is a test release in order to see if there is interest in the DITA community for what the DITA Open Platform project plans to offer. It is also a mean to collect suggestions and ideas from the community.
The goal of this project is to provide the DITA community with a free and easy-to-deploy DITA oriented production platform. It is targeted at small companies or teams that do not need a complete CMS solution.
This the first open-source project I launch and I hope the DITA community members will find interest in the initiative.
This is something to hear and talk about it but this is something totally different to experience it, it’s thrilling, even on modest scales.
