Weblog: Archive

While not everybody agrees, it really feels like the Midgard Wiki way of generating documentation is working. The idea was to make the documentation more consistent, and to lower the barrier of submitting new content.

The feedback we've got about using Markdown as the wiki authoring format with some extended linking syntax has been very positive. Besides the main wiki, Aegir 2 development notes are now also using the same model.

Examples of completely new documentation areas submitted thanks to the wiki include:

• Midgard Query Builder API
• Midgard superglobals for PHP
• MgdSchema API for PHP

I was initially very skeptical about wikis, but Wikipedia really opened my eyes to the opportunities of the model. It is far more important to have easily updated and cross-linked documentation available than to fret about semantics or different publishing formats.

Before wikis we went the route of DocBook SGML - DocBook XML - XHTML, and none of the formats really met our requirements. DocBook produced very controlled documentation, but since contributing content for it was difficult most developers simply didn't document their changes.

For Midgard documentation the wiki format also makes sense because we can use our own wiki software for it. Jarkko seems to agree:

jval: the wiki is nice - it supports normal midgard owner permissions, right? - if yes, it is possible to use n.n.wiki even for "normal" site content - think how easy it is to edit compared to ais :)

I had another solo travel flight last weekend, this time with Cessna 152 OH-CWM on route Helsinki - Hanko - Turku - Helsinki. Especially the flight over the Turku archipelago was really nice.

Helsinki south harbor:

The island fortress of Suomenlinna:

The village of Rosala, with the Viking Centre in the bottom-right corner:

The island of Lövö with Kasnäs on the foreground:

More pictures in my gallery. See also some old Viking re-enactment photos from Rosala in 1997 and 1998.

AIS, the Authoring Interface System in Midgard CMS is now getting a new look. The tables and old HTML are now gone, replaced by much more streamlined XHTML and CSS.

Technology is not the only change, however. We've now recognized the two different uses of the system, and provide different UI styles for them. A button for switching between them is available, and the interface remembers the user's preference

• Aegir style is a comprehensive content and site administration tool used by administrators. It will contain both the authoring features and the administrative capabilities of old Aegir CMS

• Simple style is a further simplification of the current AIS targeted mainly at users who are hopping in and out of the administrative mode using the Edit this page links on their MidCOM site

I did some basic CSS work for the Simple version of AIS today.

The main view of AIS now combines the different toolbars into a unified item, and hides the navigation by default to give more room for the content being edited. Typography comes from the site style.

To go to manage another part of the MidCOM site, user can expand the navigation by clicking the "location arrow".

Get the new AIS from MidCOM CVS.

Our development server just died today. This will mean all OpenPsa development is stalled until Rambo gets the new hard drive and Debian installed.

This will mean some delays in Campaigns component development, as we have to rebuild the testing environment. Luckily all relevant code was in CVS. Lesson from this is: "Commit early, commit often".

Updated 11:20: It seems the problem is actually with the motherboard, so we're off to get a new box. From #midgard:

rambo is just about ready to burn the devel box in a big thermite fire

(Ed. note: Rambo is a licensed pyrotechnician, and really does things like thermite fires as a hobby.)

Updated 2005-08-05 12:35: All systems are finally go, and the full development and testing environment is operational. Balance is that we lost slightly over a working day in the crash.

Because of the dead development server I had a bit of downtime today. To compensate for it, I decided to finally port the elegant Kubrick template to Midgard CMS.

Kubrick is a style template designed by Michael Heilemann for the WordPress weblog system. While Midgard's range of functionalities is much wider than those of a blog system, the template still fit quite well:

To make the template work more nicely out-of-the-box, I'm utilizing the new midcom_helper_find_node_by_component() helper function from MidCOM to automatically populate designated places in the layout with things like latest news items or photos.

This level of component integration is acceptable, but in the future it would be very good to also include component-specific CSS rules into the templates to make the components fit the layout even better. This is made easier as more and more components are embracing standard microformat class semantics.

To get the new Kubrick template for Midgard download it from CVS, and install via datagard. Once this has been done it should appear in the style selection dialog of your Site Wizard:

Next up would be to make the Site Wizard actually create MidCOM site structures based on user-selected "site type". This way user could say "I want a blog", and automatically get newsticker with comments enabled, etc. The feature was in original Site Wizard specs but hasn't quite been designed yet.

Now a blank Kubrick-powered site created by Site Wizard looks like this.

Despite some schedule setbacks, we've been recently working on a new component to handle direct marketing in OpenPsa. Previously the Campaigns mass mailer was integrated in the contact manager, and was used with some large campaigns including the Telvis awards.

The old mass mailer was functional, but a bit difficult to maintain and extend, especially with its HTML mail templating. With the new component, org.openpsa.directmarketing, we've been able to learn the lessons from the old system and utilize Datamanager and MidCOM templating to provide a customizable and user-friendly templating and content selection system.

The idea with the new component is that mailing lists are collected as Campaigns that can be either generated by hand-picking members to them, or by making queries to the Contacts component. If the campaigns have been populated by a query, they can also be made as a Smart Campaign where the members are automatically updated when query results change.

When campaign has been populated, its member contact list can be downloaded in CSV or vCard (and of course hCard) format for making regular postal campaigns. In addition, the system enables regular emails, HTML emails, customized newsletters, and SMS and MMS messages to be sent to the campaign members.

The mailing functionality uses Datamanager schemas for different types of content input, enabling developers to easily create new message templates. SMS and MMS messages will be sent using the Tambur HTTP API.

I'm going to a friend's wedding in St. Petersburg today, and will head toward the Budapest Red Bull Air Race afterwards, but Rambo will be working on the component. Commits can be watched in the CVS repository.

After returning from the wedding at 5am this morning and a brief nap I went to the Helsinki-Malmi airport to do the check flight for my Private Pilot's License. After waiting the morning for VFR conditions we were finally able to depart at 11:30am amid rather low and rainy clouds.

The check flight took hour and half, during which we did some navigation and stall practices, as well as simulated forced landing and engine malfunction. The result of all this was that the check flight passed. Now the Flight Safety Authority will analyze my papers, and if everything is OK I should have my license within next two weeks.

I'll post more about my path to becoming a pilot later.

Unfortunately I got ill after returning from the wedding in St. Petersburg, and so can't make it to Budapest for 20th.

This means I'll work still couple of days next week before heading for Poland with my motorcycle. And hopefully there will be another air race in Hungary next year.

2005-08-24: My saddlebags were packed, and I was about to leave yesterday morning, when I got the message that my mother had suffered a subarachnoid hemorrhage at night. This is a very serious condition, and so I'm staying here. She will be operated tomorrow, with all wishes for her recovery...

The Mac OS X packages of Midgard made by Robert Guerra were released on August 15th. Since then it has been listed by both VersionTracker and Download Squad. Six hundred people have already downloaded the 500 meg disk image containing both Midgard CMS 1.7 and Fink.

This is very good start for introducing Midgard to the Mac world, especially as the installer is so smooth:

The obvious next step will be to complete the Fink packaging so that the installer will be smaller and fit right together with the regular Fink installation.

I can really recommend OS X users to try the packages out. The installation experience is even nicer than with Jarkko's excellent Fedora packages. Once the installer has been run, simply create a site with the Site Wizard and start entering your content.

Download Squad writes:

The real news is that they finally released a slick OS X installer for Midgard. In case you've never heard of it, Midgard is a great (open source) CMS that runs on Linux, or many UNIX systems. The OS X installer is brand new, so expect some potential bugs. Midgard boasts a feature set you'd expect from any decent CMS: web-based authoring, image asset management, clean URL's, roll-back, and a built-in search engine. Midgard only recently came to OS X and I'm glad they finally released an easy installer.

Updated 2005-08-22: Updated download count from 300 to 600.

I've posted thoughts about using location information on the web and my blog has been associating position information and weather on city level into all documents there since last December. However, this data isn't very useful yet as such. As the city-level information doesn't contain coordinates, I can't:

• Find blog entries or photos from nearby
• Make the blog entries searchable by systems like GeoURL
• Place the photos on a map

To fix these problems I need to switch to storing locations based on coordinates, and make the positions more accurate than just the city. This brings me to the big problem location information, just like all metadata has: cost of producing it. If I need to figure out and manually type the current location every time I post an entry, I won't do it. So, the procedure has to be more automated than that.

I think the approach I've been taking so far with location information of entries is pretty good, as the information is stored centrally (I was in Helsinki from July 17th to 21st), and then entries get their position by matching my track to their creation timestamp. Now my system does this only on per-day level, but it would be easy to match on actual timestamps.

As a person can be only in one place at a time, this system should be quite foolproof. Also, it makes it easy to "mass-locate" data, and to correct location information afterwards.

Currently I maintain the position information via SMS. But for more accurate reporting, this would obviously become expensive and bothersome. When we were in Moscow Rich Bowen had an idea about getting the location information based on current network, and now there actually is a service for doing this. Plazes uses a small desktop applet called Launcher for storing current network identifier, which then is connected to a location. As your Plazes information can be queried via a WhereAmI web service, it would be easy to set up a cron job to update the position data in Midgard using this information:

While Plazes can solve the problem of positioning entries made when in normal network or office environments, for more adventurous locations importing GPX logs from a GPS device might be optimal.

Updated 16:42: One point to consider however, is that this approach just marks items posted from a location, not necessarily about a location.

After a bit of thought we've returned the Group Calendar module of OpenPsa 2 to using horizontal layout for days. The earlier versions used a vertical layout designed with Tigert that proved to be a problem with larger number of resources. This should solve the scalability issue:

In addition to being more flexible, the new calendar layout provides the events in the hCalendar microformat. The vertical layout of org.openpsa.calendarwidget will be modernized into similar state and made into a configuration option useful for small organizations. Alan's XUL calendar interfaces could also be useful although OpenPsa already integrates with desktop calendars and mobile phones.

Besides regular group calendar usage, OpenPsa Calendar is being used for things like airplane reservations and work shift planning of medical staff.

Photon, Jonathan Younger's nice photoblogging plugin for iPhoto was released under LGPL last thursday. The tool officially supports Wordpress, MT, TypePad and Blojsom, but actually posts using the standard MetaWeblog API that Midgard also supports.

Here's how to use it with Midgard:

Install the plugin

Check the MetaWeblog URL of your blog

MidCOM's blog component supports MetaWeblog API by default. The URL for it is the blog's URL, with rpc/metaweblog/. So in my case when the blog URL is http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/, the RPC URL is http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/rpc/metaweblog/.

Edit the Photon settings

Photo's settings can be found in the Share menu item in iPhoto. In addition to the regular items like File Export and Web Page, there should be a new Weblog tab.

Here you should select the Weblog Settings... to add your Midgard-powered blog into the list.

Unfortunately since Midgard is not yet an officially supported blogging system in Photon, the Autodiscover feature does not work an so you need to input your blog's information manually. Blog ID doesn't matter with Midgard, but the Access Point should point to your blog's RPC URL. Select Blojsom as the Platform, as that makes Photon use standard MetaWeblog API instead of Movable Type API.

Entry creation preferences

Photon allows you to configure what information is stored into what standard Metaweblog entry field. The selections here depend on how you have configured your content schema, but these are fairly good defaults:

Posting photos

After the setup has been done, simply select a photo in iPhoto, possibly write title and keywords for it, and select Share-Export (Shift-Command-E). If you are using categories with your blog you can select them here:

And that's it. Now your photo should appear in the blog:

While this is already nice, it would be even nicer to be able to add Photon support into MidCOM's photo gallery component. Since Photon source is now open and it is easy to see what it actually does this should be fairly simple and require only porting the MetaWeblog handlers from newsticker.

Thanks to Daikini Software for Open Sourcing this great tool!