#indiewebcamp 2012-10-07
2012-10-07 UTC
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# 
barnabywalters morning tommorris
# barnabywalters been reading some of your new posts
# barnabywalters +1 for the thoughts on API providers
# barnabywalters I packaged up the php µf-2 parser and released it: https://github.com/indieweb/php-mf2
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# barnabywalters tommorris: brilliant! so you get to resurrect a little bit of the web
# barnabywalters what was the shortener?
# barnabywalters wow
# barnabywalters heh
# barnabywalters I usually let phpmyadmin do that for me, 'cos I’m such a script kiddie ;)
# barnabywalters hah — postgres is another thing on my long list of "stuff I need to learn ’cos I’ve heard it’s great"
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# 
tommorris I'm not a big fan of RDBMSes (the inner RDFer rebels: the problem with relational databases is they kind of suck at representing relations) but Postgres is the best you can get without spending any money. and even lined up against commercial databases like MS-SQL and Oracle, it rocks hard.
# barnabywalters tommorris: just looking at the list of types has pretty much converted me already
# barnabywalters moves postgres several places up in his list of cool things to learn
# barnabywalters yep
# barnabywalters my current cool thing to learn is unit/integration testing, which is what I’m doing now for php-mf2
# barnabywalters downloading
# tommorris some people are also using http://inductionapp.com/
# barnabywalters worse than sqlitemanager?
# barnabywalters tommorris: tempted to borrow my dad’s GPS this afternoon and map somewhere round here
# barnabywalters looks on OSM for things not yet mapped around Buckfastleigh
# barnabywalters damn, OSM fails when I try to login using openid
# barnabywalters so when I’m writing tests for php-mf2 and I’m doing multiple tests on multiple files, is having a test file per input file likely to be the best way to organise stuff?
# barnabywalters or one test suite to do sanity checks of the individual property parsing methods, then a test suite for each input file
# barnabywalters I don’t really understand the way his tests are presented — I did manage to get the unit test runner to work once, but no more
# barnabywalters I’m going for one suite to do basic checks, one for dt-* value class (seeing as there are so many to test) and then a separate suite for each real-world input file
# barnabywalters Loved that post. It’s comforting to know there are others who get annoyed over having an entirely separate URL scheme which requires auth and only serves content in one format
# barnabywalters so, I went through the posts => articles + notes thing a while back
# barnabywalters I started out with everything under one endpoint, differentiating notes from articles by a type field in the db
# barnabywalters I ended up getting irritated with it and splitting them out into /articles and /notes, with /activity as well
# barnabywalters with /activity being a resource full of activities (e.g. post, update, share, like) and /articles and /notes being endpoints full of objects, where object-type = the endpoint dirname
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# 
aaronpk tommorris: wow quite a comment thread on your API rant! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4622973
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# barnabywalters evening aaronpk
# barnabywalters in reply to your reply to tommorris’ post, my approach to content negotiation is (soon to be) to use Accept headers, falling back to tacking an extension onto the end of the URL
# barnabywalters my main reasons for implementing extensions before Accept header negotiation were simplicity for me and ease of preliminary use for everyone else
# barnabywalters nope, at the moment the JSON is pretty much just a dump of what’s in my db
# barnabywalters I may change that to make it valid activitystreams objects in the future
# barnabywalters btw, turns out the Livefyre commenting system (like Disqus) uses styling v. similar to your inline h-cards, aaronpk
# barnabywalters demo here (scroll to comments, then find one which is a reply) http://wow.joystiq.com/2012/10/07/reports-entire-cities-dead-on-certain-realms/#continued
# barnabywalters they all have the same image, which is a bit rubbish, but the reply arrow is nice
# aaronpk hey you guys should upvote this so we get more people talking about it! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4624105
# barnabywalters upvoted. I should braindump now the topic is trendy :)
# barnabywalters tommorris: that’s an interesting design challenge
# barnabywalters okay, livefyre has the best autosuggest UI I’ve seen so far
# barnabywalters add in profile pics and it’s near-perfect
# barnabywalters tommorris: I was referring to having a way of styling jokes
# barnabywalters tommorris: well, can you think of any services which offer THE OPTIMAL HTTP experience, e.g. real content negotiation, HTTP localisation, **actual** REST?
# barnabywalters I can’t, which is why I’m trying to build one
# barnabywalters tommorris: I just get tired of people claiming "RESTful HTTP APIs" which aren’t remotely RESTful and usually don’t return HTML
# barnabywalters *H*TTP — transferring *hypertext*
# barnabywalters how about blogging about what you consider to be the best bits?
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# barnabywalters oh, cool
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# 
sandeepshetty barnabywalters: got quite a lot done with pingback.converspace.com
# barnabywalters sandeepshetty: I had a look — looks good going
# barnabywalters I notice Content-type: application/stream+json
# sandeepshetty Follow ups that haven't gone through yet:
# barnabywalters wow, I didn’t realise there was a delay with google groups
# sandeepshetty it takes a couple of hrs.. maybe its moderation?
# sandeepshetty haven't checked.. but its irritating and a big barrier to communicate/collaborate
# barnabywalters sandeepshetty: I gave up on email lists a while ago. The only one I use now is freecycle
# barnabywalters looks at pastebin
# barnabywalters IMO "stream" is a bit generic, but if it’s been used before…
# barnabywalters isn’t there some process for new content types? a vnd- prefix?
# sandeepshetty I'm guessing the vnd is for app specific stuff..
# sandeepshetty Next up, check content-type and if it's html get the AS microformat..
# sandeepshetty I might go with what the Flattr guys have done..
# sandeepshetty I've only taken a cursory looks at microformats in the past... so all this is new to me.. need to read the wiki thoroughly...
# barnabywalters sandeepshetty: that post is interesting. I can think of several disadvantages to the methods tantek and pelle are using
# barnabywalters and microformats are awesome :)
# sandeepshetty Or I could just wait till more work is done on this by people more smarter than me :) and just go with the stream+json for now
# barnabywalters sandeepshetty: that is my default approach too :) Hack out the dumbest thing which works and wait for someone more intelligent to fix it!
# barnabywalters stream+json works.
# barnabywalters looks to see if there’s some official process for content types
# sandeepshetty In which case my next step is just to persist the activity and create a stream for a given resource..
# tommorris oh crap, I'm back on Hacker News again: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4624378
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# barnabywalters sandeepshetty: okay, it’s the IANA who organise MIME types
# sandeepshetty yeah.. you need to fill out a form and send to them I think..
# barnabywalters or x-* can be used for non standard types
# sandeepshetty barnabywalters: Thinking of writing a bookmarklet that I click on my blog posts that will use my blog/twitter/fb post url as source and let me cycle through all URLs in the post to send an activity pingback to them... but since they don't support AP, pingback.converspace.com will save it instead..
# sandeepshetty x-* has been deprecated
# barnabywalters oh, has it? hm, the wikipedia article needs updating
# barnabywalters well, no problems with sticking with application/stream+json anyway
# sandeepshetty barnabywalters: the bookmarklets approach, will give me all my activities at pingback.converspace.com/activity/by/http://sandeep.shetty.in
# sandeepshetty Which I can feed into the AS of my blog
# sandeepshetty as an iframe to start with till I have converspace doing this natively
# barnabywalters sandeepshetty: sounds like a good approach
# sandeepshetty Will you update the wikipedia article about the x-* headers or should I?
# sandeepshetty If you want me to do it, just send me the link :)
# barnabywalters I’ll give it a go, it’s a while since I edited wikipedia
# barnabywalters wow, those RFCs are horrible
# barnabywalters extremely long HTML styled to look like plaintext for some reason
# sandeepshetty I don't open them unless I have to implement them.. so i haven't looked into it..
# sandeepshetty thats the common format you see..
# barnabywalters yeah
# sandeepshetty I think they are written in xml and them converted using some tool
# barnabywalters apart from when they’re completely plaintext (I’m assuming they’re the old ones)
# sandeepshetty Can't believe they are written in xml :) could drive anyone crazy
# sandeepshetty even those are written in xml and them converted to plain text
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# barnabywalters XML=>plaintext? WTF?
# sandeepshetty I think it's about hte flexibility to convert to different formats..
# barnabywalters tommorris: I have nothing particularly against XML
# barnabywalters converting XML to plaintext just feels so wrong
# sandeepshetty me too... but it drives me crazy... I've written some of them in xml and its crazy..
# sandeepshetty used to write internal spec docs a long time ago using the similar tools
# barnabywalters the only time XML has ever really, really irritated me is queries to CardDAV servers. It returned VCard syntax (lots of uppercase letters) inside XML and was horrible to parse
# sandeepshetty wonders if there is a market for a WYSIWYG editor for RFCs
# sandeepshetty BTW, I'm hosting all my new stuff on appfog.com
# tommorris barnabywalters: trust me, if there's a reason to hate XML, I've experienced it. Double encoded HTML inside XML attributes. Done. Storing RDF/XML inside XQuery servers. Done. And I still have a certain amount of affection for it. The job it does, it does pretty well. The problem was everyone decided that it should do a different job than the job it is actually good for.
# sandeepshetty the free tier is awesome and because they use cloudfoundry you can move beetween IaaS vendors
# barnabywalters strongly dislikes double encoded *anything* , let alone HTML inside attributes :-S
# tommorris I once wrote a scathing takedown of one of these: https://gist.github.com/223649
# barnabywalters tommorris: wow, tweepML looks nasty. Are underscores in element names frowned upon?
# sandeepshetty barnabywalters: the bookmarklet approach is what I want to start off with for Activity Dialog as well..
# barnabywalters sandeepshetty: give me a minute to finalise this wp edit and move my computer, then I’m up for disucssion about activity dialog
# sandeepshetty I visit a website... click on my bookmarklets.. which pick up the current URL as object, me as actor and presents a drop down of verbs.. like, read, etc..
# sandeepshetty and publish that to my activitystream... so I get a lifestream of what I've been upto...
# sandeepshetty the activity will in turn send a pingback to the source.. and like before it will get saved on pingback.converspace.comn
# barnabywalters sandeepshetty: be with you in a sec, having some printer problems :(
# sandeepshetty is shocked that ppl still use printers :)
# barnabywalters sandeepshetty: printing stuff for my mum, who works at a school
# sandeepshetty Most printouts that I take are for my parents too :)
# sandeepshetty very rare these days though..
# barnabywalters *sigh* third time lucky
# barnabywalters aaand the printer is broken. what a surprise. So, activity dialog. What you’re proposing sounds great
# sandeepshetty Do you want to discuss the web actions stuff now? I have about 15 min.. before I crash...
# barnabywalters sandeepshetty: I should go to bed now really as well. By the sound of it neither of us are in optimum discussion mode :)
# sandeepshetty ok. GN.
# barnabywalters goodnight all
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