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Qaiku, the conversational microblogging service that launched a year ago had a refresh that launched today. While it hasn't yet convinced the twittering masses, it has already proven itself as a lot more thoughtful platform for the Finnish online community, and as a valuable workstreaming tool.

The new version looks quite nice and fresh. Notice the privacy information on the right-hand side, which is relevant as Qaiku allows channels and profiles that are private or invitation-only:

Technically the new version is also remarkable as it is the first major website to run fully on top of the legacy-free Midgard2 platform. So yes, every entry you see there is a GObject. And D-Bus signals fly when you post.

On to the challenge, then

To highlight Qaiku's threading, conversational nature I started a new "On my travels, I have" thread for sharing your most extraordinary travel experiences. This is not on Twitter or Buzz as with Qaiku it is so easy to keep the conversation together and accessible for the future as well.

To contribute, sign up on Qaiku, go to the thread and add your experiences as a comment. If you have a link or picture to include, you can also do so. My first entry was:

seen ice descend from the heavens and provide us with cold beer on a hot day in Lesotho

Will be interesting to see what comes out of this :-)

I'm doing a talk today in the Bossa Conference about using Midgard as a content repository for mobile applications. As part of my presentation I wrote some simple example code for using the Midgard APIs in Python, and thought they would be good to share to those not attending the event as well.

The idea of a content repository is that instead of coming up with new, isolated file formats or database setups for your application you can just work with objects and signals, and let Midgard handle the rest. This is something that lots of people are doing with CouchDB as well, but we feel Midgard, with its light footprint and native APIs for languages like Python, C, Vala and PHP fits better in the mobile applications context.

Installing Midgard

Midgard packages are available for many different Linux distributions through the OpenSuse Build Service. To find the right repository for your setup, go to the OBS project page. For example, on my Ubuntu Karmic netbook the URL to add to apt sources.list is deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/midgardproject:/mjolnir/xUbuntu_9.10/ ./. Then I just:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python-midgard2

Midgard is also available in Maemo extras and for OS X on MacPorts.

Defining a schema

The first thing when developing a Midgard application is to define your storage objects. This is done using the MgdSchema XML format. In this case we're doing a simple "attendee" object that amends Midgard's built-in person record with information related to the conference:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Schema xmlns="http://www.midgard-project.org/repligard/1.4">
    <type name="openbossa_attendee" table="openbossa_attendee">
        <property name="id" type="unsigned integer" primaryfield="id">
            <description>Local non-replication-safe database identifier</description>
        </property>
        <property name="person" type="unsigned integer" link="midgard_person:id">
            <description>Person attending the event</description>
        </property>
        <property name="registration" type="datetime">
            <description>Registration date of the attendee</description>
        </property>
        <property name="likesbeer" type="boolean">
            <description>Whether the attendee likes beer</description>
        </property>
    </type>
</Schema>

Then we just save this XML file into /usr/share/midgard2/schema/ so that Midgard will find it.

Initiating the repository connection

Once the MgdSchema is in place it is time to import antigravity and start hacking in Python. The code works pretty much in the same way in other languages Midgard is available for, but Python is used here for the sake of simplicity. First we load the Midgard extension:

import _midgard as midgard

Then we setup the repository connection. With these settings we will store our content into an SQLite database located in ~/.midgard2/data/midgardexample.db:

configuration = midgard.config()
configuration.dbtype = 'SQLite'
configuration.database = 'midgardexample'

# Open a Midgard repository connection with our config
connection = midgard.connection()
connection.open_config(configuration)

As this is the first time we're interacting with the repository we need to tell Midgard to prepare the storage for itself and also for our new openbossa_attendee class:

midgard.storage.create_base_storage()
midgard.storage.create_class_storage('midgard_person')
midgard.storage.create_class_storage('midgard_parameter')
midgard.storage.create_class_s

Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 2314 bytes)

Which CMS does The Real Story Group Use? (Tony Byrne / CMS Watch):

The answer is, we use an open-source platform called "Midgard." We picked it nearly ten years ago, and it has held up fairly well.
...

One of the things we like about Midgard actually makes it rather unsuitable for many simpler publishing scenarios: it is highly object-oriented. This allows us to run multiple sites off largely a single codebase -- at the cost of quite user-unfriendly administrative and authoring facilities.

Also, Midgard is very much a development platform, and we have had to create a fair amount of custom code, especially to handle structured content. In that regard, our CMS experience probably resemble yours. As an industry we remain very far from plug-and-play content management technology for all but the simplest of websites.

While the post contains many negative points about older Midgard (the UIs are a bit better now than they used to be, quite a lot of development has since been happening especially in the LTS branch), it is remarkable that CMS Watch has been able to run their services through the same CMS setup for ten years. This really shows the durability and commitment to long-term stability we have in the Midgard community. We've been doing this for more than ten years, and will likely keep going for quite a bit longer.

As for usability and popularity of Midgard, there is quite little we can do about it in the Midgard1 area, as that is now in long-term support phase that won't allow major changes. But Midgard2 is a new world with new opportunities. Midgard's content repository is pretty much there already, as is the MVC layer, and this spring we should be able to unveil the new, quite revolutionary CMS concept as well. Watch this blog for updates!

PHP 5.3 has been out now for eight months, and in that time lots of projects have made decisions to begin developing against this version of PHP. Juozas Kaziukenas makes the argument that you shouldn’t be afraid of PHP 5.3 and he provides a number of excellent points to support his argument. I don’t dispute [...]

The documentation for seed gobject introspection is improving continually, I now have a jhbuild virtual machine, which is picking up the latest versions from git.

Few weeks ago I got new hardware for my home network, a QNAP TS 119 Turbo NAS.

I'm really late with this post, but I wanted to write about the PHP London Conference which was held in London last Friday. The event was in a great venue and had hoards of people - this was my fourth year in attendance!! They do, however, have the longest twitter tag in history #phpuk2010!

This year I had the privilege of speaking at this event, although I was concerned that I had to stay coherent and alert right through to the graveyard slot at 4:30pm (conference organisers take note: I really am much sparklier in the mornings!). I kept myself awake by attending what I affectionately refer to as the "Ibuildings track" - with 4 speakers at the event, it did feel like a bit of an invasion by myself and my colleagues. In our defence I can only say that we are a pretty big local PHP employer and, as a developer, I'm happy to be working for someone who sends all their developers to these events, and even happier to be in the company of those other excellent speakers as colleagues!

My talk was entitled "Best Practices in Web Service Design" although perhaps "Things I Wish Web Service Creators Would Consider Before Writing Unclear and Unstable Useless And Frustrating Services" would have been a better title! I talked about web services in general, a bit about HTTP and the various service types, and also gave some general tips and tricks for writing good, stable services. In a bit of a break with geeky tradition, I then talked about services as a whole package, and how to deliver and document them in a way that helps users help themselves. If you are interested the slides are here:

http://www.slideshare.net/lornajane/best-practices-in-web-service-design

The experience was overall very positive for me, I haven't spoken at this conference before and I was very pleased to be included. My talk went quite smoothly, with my nerves nicely hidden away (I've had issues with this lately), and I also avoided falling over either the curtain or the piece of screen that was carefully placed to trip unwary speakers! I'd like to thank everyone who came and asked questions afterwards, and all those who saw my talk and left comments for me on my joind.in talk page - it all helps me to do better next time, thanks and I'll see you all next year!

There has been a lot of talk over the past several years about the difference between performance and scalability. Never mind that the difference between the two will probably not really affect most developers. Never mind that the “difference between performance and scalability” argument is often used when someone’s code performs poorly and their best argument is “Yeah, but my code scales”. Yeah, sure it does.

The Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) specification provides a way to programmatically generate images using vector paths expressed in XML. This makes it ideal for generating images that need to be scaled to different resolutions without losing fidelity. A common requirement in Web applications is to dynamically generate charts and graphs from numerical data. If these graphs are expressed using SVG, they can be blown up to different sizes without any deterioration in quality, and they are also typically smaller in size as compared to their GIF or JPEG counterparts. With this in mind, this article examines various open source PHP libraries that allow you to add SVG charting capabilities to your PHP application.

Last week Google announced it had added Picnik to its stable of acquisitions. Jennifer takes a look. Related posts:

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According to several reports during the past week, Microsoft's browser choice screen was not as random as it could be. Craig describes the problem and reveals Microsoft's solution. Related posts:

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by Kevin Yank On the SitePoint Podcast #51 this week, we discussed what Sexy Web Design author Elliot Jay Stocks had to say about designers who don’t know their CSS from their elbow: Honestly, I’m shocked that in 2010 I’m still coming across “web designers” who can’t code their own designs. No excuse. Stocks went onto outline his [...] Related posts:

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In this post, James shows us several variations of a technique for using pure CSS to create a beveled effect on images -- with no Photoshop in sight! Related posts:

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