Social Igniter

Last weekend on June 25th - 26th was the first annual Indie Web Camp, it was held in Portland Oregon. It was great to experience to be a part of a gathering of people passionate about building the "Indie Web." What is the Indie Web you may be asking? In short their mission is:

p>Rather than posting content on many third-party silos of data, we should all begin owning the data we're creating. Publish short status updates on your own domain, and syndicate to Twitter. Publish photos on your own domain, syndicate to Flickr, etc, etc.

It has been relatively quiet on the Social-Igniter front the last couple months. Work has been getting done. Progress has been getting made. Social-Igniter was used to power a recent consulting project for Nike called Rafa Chant. The project was challenging and fun to build and allowed for a bit of improvement upon a couple SI apps, namely:

YouTube App

Facebook App

Also, in order to have a working demo for Indie Web Camp I finally got the social status posting working for the Twitter and Facebook apps. So, now from your home screen where you see the two checkboxes for the respective networks and you post a status message it will syndicate to which of the two networks you have checked.

The first day of Indie Web Camp was predominantly talks about what things people were working on, their methods of implementation, and other ideas re: the Indie Web. The second day was more focused on hacking and building- this proved to be a wonderful opportunity to work on some SI stuff. Aaron PK and I created the basis of the Flickr App for which there seemed to be much demand. Currently, the Flickr App will archive your photos (on your private server), make them show up in your home feed, and allow other users to comment on them.

Get the code for the Flickr App

This was particularly rad hack session, as Aaron PK was involved with the very first iteration of Social-Igniter over a year ago, so teaming up again with him was pretty neat!

Apologies for being a few days late with this blog post. Fear not dear fans and followers, as i've been putting in a ton of work in the last 1.5 weeks and this blog post offers a glimpse of what some of those exciting things are.

Widgets

What is a widget? In the land of Social Igniter, widgets are regions of a layout which constitutes a how viewing a single page looks. This current page your are reading this post on is a the "sidebar" layout which has a main content region, a sidebar region, and a wide region that spans the width of both. The signup page uses the "wide" layout" and the user profile page uses the "profile" layout. The final touch with the widget editor is that widgets are exclusive to layouts, so therefore a widget (of my personal tweets) in the sidebar region of the profile layout will not show up on the main sites sidebar region. This is a very good thing!

Themes

Themes control a much larger aspect of how a site looks. Most people who've installed Wordpress or Drupal or other quality cms' are familiar with how themes work- normally they display your content in a myriad of stylish ways and allow for ease of visual customization. My one gripe with those platforms is the dashboard (or user signed in area) is usually not a theme and requires some hackage to customize it. Social-Igniter has been designed supporting dashboard themes as well as the public external site theme, we've also baked in basic mobile detection and the ability to do custom mobile themes as well.

We've also made a pact with a swell designer gal named Alicia Nagel who has offered to do 5 custom site themes for Social-Igniter and help with the branding and user experience of this website. We are super excited to have Alicia on board as she is quite talented and excited to be a part of the SI team!

Apps

We've hopped on the band wagon- what used to be "Modules" are now "Apps" but why the sudden name change? Have we jumped the shark and slapped ourselves silly? Nah, the word Apps just makes more sense for what these modules actually do- they are little micro applications within the core application of Social-Igniter. For instance- if you have a cool web app out there like GeoLoqi and want to interact with it from your Social-igniter install get the GeoLoqi app. That makes sense right? Also everyone understands the word "app" these days while module is still confusing, even to me, and it can mean too many things. Considering, we aim to be understood by the common folk, apps it is :)

 Hello Ladies and Gentlemen, my name is @TylerGillies. 

Over these past few days i've been helping Mr. @BrennanNovak implement some goodies into the Social Igniter platform. 

These updates are only a tasty morsel of whats to come in the exciting future. Firstly, I've added Webfinger support. Essentially, Webfinger is a protocol that acts as a virtual business card, it's tied to an identifier very similar to (and could even be) an email address. 

You probably have a Webfinger identifier without even knowing it! (Google attaches one to your gmail account automatically). A website that implements webfinger will allow you to enter in your ID, then it will look up any relevant information it needs about you. 

Over here at Social Igniter, we plan on tying in your Twitter profile and Facebook profile into your identifer, so all you need to do is give them your Social Igniter ID, and they will automatically know your Twitter and Facebook address (this is totally opt-in). Other services are being planned right now.

In addition to Webfinger, I've also implemented PubSubHubBub a.k.a PuSH a.k.a the world's hardest to pronounce protocol spec. This allows someone to subscribe to your updates on any service that supports PuSH (currently: Google Buzz, Identi.ca, Status.net, rstat.us, Cliqset). 

Once you publish an update, your message is automatically pushed to the person who subscribed to you and they receive it in realtime. The location of your PuSH feed is conveniently located in your Webfinger profile, so in addition to getting a lot of other useful information, your subscribers also get the location to your realtime updates.

These protocols lay the foundation for some amazing possibilies. I hope that after studying some of these technologies you'll be as excited as me in exploring the future of the internet.

oh and MONOCL.ES

When to properly launch Social Igniter has been something plaguing me for the last 5 months. I could have launched something 5 months ago, but I didn't. Why? Because I was afraid it wasn't exciting enough or substantial enough or flashy enough (yet) and it would be after I finished just this one more feature or two new features or implemented a whole new authentication setup, etc... the list goes on and on... months have gone by and there are still a few more features I feel are "essential" before I really launch, but thankfully due to the upcoming Open Source Bridge that is happening in my backyard (Portland OR), I kicked my own arse in gear enough push something out. But let me say, it feels dang good to finally start talking about what I'm working on.

What ended up happening? I dug myself into a hole trying to build this huge platform and codebase and ended up in an isolated fortress of perfectionism, which in my mind is not really "open source," as it may as well have been a private codebase- open source means collaboration and collaborating means working with other people! Aside from 1 month of help from the talented front end coder Oscar Godson it has just been me slamming away on this beast of a platform for almost a year and man the late nights with the screen get lonely! It's much for fun working with other people.

So, from now on, any software projects I do will have a super early pre alpha launch as my friend Aaron PK said "Talking about it is just about as important as building it" and I think there is much wisdom in what he says.