More ocPortal Thoughts

I’ve just finished a 0.1 version of my Flattr addon for ocPortal, which means that I’m looking for a new project to hack on. I’ve created a list of ideas in Basket, which includes many of the things I mentioned in my last post. Since I’ve taken some time off over Christmas I thought I’d try and make a start on getting ocPortal integrated with the Federated Social Web framework that’s emerging. This includes:

WebFinger support: WebFinger is an extension of the classic UNIX finger utility. It allows arbitrary data to be associated with an email address. There are 2 parts to this: ocPortal can take advantage of WebFinger data by populating profiles with existing public information, and it can produce WebFinger data by making public profile information available to services looking for it.

Salmon support: Salmon allows content to flow upstream (ie. towards the source). It means that, for example, a news article can be syndicated by many different sites, and comments from all of them will be sent upstream to the source. There’s an issue here with comment spam, since we would like this to be automatic (ie. CAPTCHA wouldn’t work), but once the protocol is supported we can keep it turned off until we work out a solution to spam.

PUbSubHubbub: This is a publish-subscribe mechanism, similar in principle to XMPP PubSub which I wrote a library for a couple of years ago. This allows arbitrary content to be sent downstream to everyone subscribed to a source. For example, it allows comments on a news article to be sent to everyone who is syndicating it. Combined with Salmon, this allows content like comments on a republished article to be sent upstream to the original, which can then push them out to everyone who’s republished that article.

OStatus support: This is a group of standards made to interoperate with each other. It allows users on different sites to follow each other’s activity, comment and converse. There’s a really clear breakdown of how to make a site/application/service OStatus capable. The nice part is that each step towards integration gives useful functionality. This depends on WebFinger, Salmon and PUbSubHubbub support, if we want to support the whole lot.

There are some ocPortal hacks knocking around in Subversion to log user activity in a “Bob made a comment on Foo” way, so this could be piped into any social web structure I manage to put in place. Ideally, ocPortal should be able to pass the SWAT0 test.

If I manage to get some of the above done then I might have a go at turning ocPortal into a Diaspora “pod”. From what I can tell, this also requires WebFinger and Salmon support, but the only documentation I can find for Diaspora’s message-passing interface is pretty sparse. When I do get around to this I think I’ll have to have a chat with some Diaspora devs.

Oh well, time to install Apache, MySQL, PHP and ocPortal on my XO :)

UPDATE: Holidays are over. I’ve done a lot of reading of specifications, and I’ve started hacking the “Salmonpress” plugin for WordPress into ocPortal. This also includes a skeletal use of WebFinger and, the main reason I chose it, “Magic Signatures”. I’ve cleaned up the code to remove WordPress-specific stuff, mostly put ocPortal replacements in place, and have got rid of its stupid use of classes and static methods (otherwise known as functions, which is what I’ve turned them into). Haven’t worked out the best way to get this working for all content types (or as much as possible) yet. Also, didn’t need MySQL on my XO, I used ocPortal’s built-in XML database :)