#indiewebcamp 2011-07-17
2011-07-17 UTC
aaronpk and neophiliac joined the channel
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brennannovak heya neophiliac: I'm just pushing up a readme file regarding my idea Later.js
# neophiliac brennannovak: c'mon, man, I'm aging! (what movie is that from?)
# brennannovak hmm... maybe "come on man, I'm f***in dying over here" from Resevoir Dogs?
# brennannovak Ok here is my rough repo for Later.js https://github.com/brennannovak/Later.js
# neophiliac brennannovak: Nope, Americathon with John Ritter as POTUS.
# brennannovak hehe
# neophiliac brennannovak: It's VERY old, and was bad (in a good way) when it was new. It might not be so entertaining now.
# neophiliac Or it might be better, who knows?
# brennannovak kinda like Airplane?
# neophiliac brennannovak: I like the idea, but I'm still not getting my head fully wrapped around the use cases.
# neophiliac brennannovak: Wait, what if the client pulled your connections (or whatever) from all CDNs, and made the connections (and drew the graph) locally?
# neophiliac No, it was much worse than Airplane.
# brennannovak so in my current implementation of SocialIgniter when i post content my server install will syndicate content to other networks (some with proprietary API's like Facebook, Twitter...) and others installs of the same app (Social Igniter)
# brennannovak but the problem is the amount of time it will take to syndicate to other networks as the number of N networks scales to high levels
# brennannovak also availability of said network
# brennannovak status updates I try to post to Twitter are constantly not properly syndicating cause their api is down
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singpolyma brennannovak: the real solution is NNTP (or something similar)
# singpolyma instead of this broadcast-to-everyone model
# brennannovak NNTP ?
# neophiliac brennannovak: OK. I can see that. So e.g. I publish a blog post and the response is some JS that tells my browser to post notifications to twitter, FB, G+. etc?
# singpolyma The Usenet protocol. It was built for massive federation over unreliable nodes
# neophiliac singpolyma: yeah, NNTP is an old P2P protocol, right?
# singpolyma well, he seems to be suggesting farming that out to users' browsers as well
# neophiliac Haven't read the RFCs for a lot of years...
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# singpolyma neophiliac: yes. just after UUCP ;)
# brennannovak yes, farming it out to the browser
# singpolyma but it still solve the blog/microblog protocol problem very well, beacuse that's exactly what Usenet is/was: lots of little pubsub groups
# singpolyma brennannovak: if you're farming out anything that needs auths (like syndicating to Twitter) then you're exposing your credentials to random users
# neophiliac Moving the intelligence to the edges...
# singpolyma Also, the processing/bandwidth it takes to get this to the user seems like it would be the same or more than just doing it yourself, no?
# neophiliac singpolyma: except that the user's browser is already authenticated, so the notifications it sends will include the locally-stored auth.
# brennannovak yes precisely, the auth tokens would only be the user in question who's content is being syndicated
# neophiliac singpolyma: that is, the web app doesn't have to send that, only the list of places to notify
# singpolyma neophiliac: if we're talking about the posting user's browser federating only his posts, but that doesn't seem likely to be useful at all. since that's just one machine
# singpolyma Hmm... maybe. I'm not sure the user's DSL connection on his netbook is more reliable that the real server on a good internet line that the requests starts on ;)
# brennannovak no it's just a matter of reducing load on the server
# neophiliac singpolyma: if the user can click the 'publish' button and get a response, then the internet connection is probably good enough. :)
# singpolyma It seems like you're preoptomizing. Is there any evidence that this sort of microoptomization will matter on any real-world servers?
# neophiliac brennannovak: so this is going to benefit servers that have a lot of outgoing connections as a result of a user's request. And a lot of traffic.
# brennannovak if I setup a social site and it starts to get a fair amount of concurrent users posting content, the syndication of that content could become quite hairy if the follower count of those users (on said network) increases. The goal is to offset some of that work to each users browsers
# neophiliac singpolyma: I agree, but it's an interesting exercise, and could be fun to test.
# singpolyma oh, sure. I'm all for building things just because they're interesting :)
# brennannovak hehe
# neophiliac brennannovak: Now you need a cool acronym, preferably a cleaning compound. I suggest making MRCLEAN fit, because the logo would be so awesome.
# brennannovak on my personal node of Social-igniter my messages to Twitter sometimes don't go through, the goal is build a job que so that those messages will get syndicated at a later date when the API is up
# brennannovak neophilac: how about Borax
# brennannovak ;)
# neophiliac Isn't borax an ingredient in flubber?
# brennannovak yes
# neophiliac brennannovak: you'd need a way to persist the job list, because the user might shut down or sleep the laptop before all messages are sent. JS doesn't make that easy.
# brennannovak true
# singpolyma offline storage
# singpolyma but that's not reliable
# brennannovak I was planning on using Local Storage
# singpolyma yeah. but then you're relying on them using the same browser next time they go to the site where the JS is
# singpolyma which may be fine for you use case
# brennannovak I rarely switch browsers and visit the same site
# singpolyma tantek: normally. normally the server should handle everything :)
# singpolyma brennannovak: interesting. I often do, but that's because I use 4 devices
# brennannovak signpolyma: I wasn't taking into account multiple devices
# brennannovak sooo... Local Storage for the job que (and handling of jobs) and a backup of that que stored in users profile data if the user opens the site on more than one device, but that's getting a bit hairy
# singpolyma aaronpk: for fun
# brennannovak aaronpk: to offset server load & handle failure to syndicate occurrences
# singpolyma I'm still unconvinced of the "offset server load" argument. It's a bit like a MacTruck saying to a Prius "here, take some of my stuff because I have a lot of it"
# neophiliac singpolyma: more like the truck saying that to 1000 priuses...
# brennannovak also, for environments and user cases where users have no idea how to setup cron jobs
# neophiliac If you have one client per server, you have bigger problems...
# singpolyma neophiliac: I'm confused. I thought the idea was for just the posting user's browser to do this? and that's why it wasn't a security issue ...?
# singpolyma brennannovak: you can always use wordpress-style fake cron
# brennannovak how do they do fake cron jobs?
# brennannovak s/do they/does wordpress
# singpolyma Every time a user hits the page they open a socket to the wp-cron.php script, and it decides if stuff needs to be run right now and does so (server side)
# neophiliac singpolyma: assume that the cargo on the truck belongs to the Prius drivers anyway. :)
# singpolyma neophiliac: Sure. But if I have a truck, a Prius, and some cargo, I don't say to myself "hmm, I wonder how much I can stuff into the Prius... don't wanna overload the poor truck"
# neophiliac singpolyma: the truck is just giving some of it back when the hill gets steep. :)
# brennannovak yes, it's a matter of the size of the load
# neophiliac singpolyma: OK, this might be ridiculous, but the truck has a fixed capacity. As it accepts more loads from Prius drivers, it sends a little bit of the load back so that it doesn't exceed its capacity.
# brennannovak small networks, with a few users with a few followers, no biggy, the truck can handle
# brennannovak I love neophiliac analogies, I think he gets where I'm going with this :)
# singpolyma big networks with many users with many followers... get bigger servers. I mean, I'm all for swarm, and for trying stuff, I'm just unconvinced that delegating tasks for one user to that user's browser will get you much, if anything
# brennannovak I wanna solve the issue of my messages syndicating to twitter even when their api craps out... and for some reason I wanna attempt to do it in local storage and JS rather mysql and php and cron job
# neophiliac brennannovak: I didn't come up with this analogy, I'm just running with it. :)
# neophiliac singpolyma: my servers are on a 100M drop, 1 hop from a 10G connection to PAIX and MAE-WEST.
# singpolyma neophiliac: sounds pretty good
# neophiliac singpolyma: not many broadband connections can handle as much load. But this is interesting, and offloading some of the joins could be a fun test.
# brennannovak aaronpk: yah, that wp-cron is a nifty solution and sort of how I was seeing this idea working
# neophiliac I'm thinking of FB's eventual consistency... some of the joins could be done in the browser. Maybe a multi-browser vote?
# brennannovak interesting
# neophiliac singpolyma: With FB's load, this could reduce their server load measurably. Lots of risk, but hey, it's an experiment.
# singpolyma neophiliac: Like I said, not convinced, but I'm willing to be wrong :)
# neophiliac singpolyma: I'm not saying I'm convinced of anything more than it would be fun to build and play with. :)
# singpolyma for sure :)
# brennannovak coolio, thanks y'all :)
# brennannovak I'll start tinkering with it soonish at https://github.com/brennannovak/Later.js
# neophiliac brennannovak: cool. I'll watch it.
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Loqi [http://twitter.com/gazoombo] .@t Do you know of any #indieweb servers that consume data from last.fm clients? I wish I had a pass-through. cc: @mxcl @singpolyma
# gazoombo hey, that's a cool trick. I was about the cross-post here too.
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# wchulseiee hi all
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# gazoombo tantek: exactly. scrobbles could also be syndicated out as Activity Streams and you could even filter it first. For example you could run each item through a check 'if x not in guilty_pleasures' or what have you
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tantek gazoombo - could you copy your brief thoughts (like even just a sentence or too) on that to http://indiewebcamp.com/scrobbling
# gazoombo because maybe I want to someday generate a chart of how often I indulge in guilty pleasures, but I don't want the world to know what they are
# gazoombo certainly
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# gazoombo edited /scrobbling (+403) "Add ideas for advanced features: alt. syndication & filtering" (view diff)
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