Current Products

Open source web design template more / download now
(technical) writers (web) publishing and syndication tool more / download now
hello servlet using winstone and eclipse more / download now

Coming Products

Story-telling for community marketing workshop more
Community marketing mash-ups more

Applications

Coureurs.ca more

we want to become the student painters of the internet

It's coming, but slower than we had hoped. This timeline is to help us organize the remaining work. It is also to help us, and whoever might be interested in our project to keep faith.

Just about done messing about with infrastructure

March 3 2008 13:47:00 EST ... Today I got openfire up on both of my servers, running on port 80 and 443. Admin is via https only on the default port. I am pretty excited about this! I think all that is left is to get jssp, merged into openfire and some sort of url re-writing so that I can host Tim's web page. Congratulations also to Tim for getting his espresso machine going!

Jilted Perl on Valentine's day

February 14 2008 11:24:00 EST ... I am working on a directed payments demo with openfire, bosh and jabber/xmpp. I am one of the many people that has struggled with BOSH on openfire. I was able to vastly aid my struggle by using a recipe online to get openfire debugging in eclipse. Similarly I wanted to do test driven development on the javascript side and I came across John Resig's blog posting about his env.js. I too had fallen in love with Rhino (jilting perl) and written a XMLHttpRequest object in java so that I could do my tests. I was stuck on trying to use E4X to access the challenge in the SASL authentication stage. It was frustrating me, because I knew that I wouldn't be able to use e4x in browsers anyways. I decided to give jquery another try, because of it's promise that it would work in browsers as well as in my unit test environment.
The reason that I am copying all of you guys is because John Resig writes about javascript on rails in his blog entry . I have been getting very excited about Leo Meyer's jssp running on Rick Knowle's winstone. I had been thinking of using it with openlazlo, until this directed payments demo came along. I guess that I am further jilting perl by sending this out on Valentine's day, but thanks for your hard work.

entered cira's contest

February 2 2008 18:00:00 EST ... "The Canadian Internet Registration Authority wants to hear your dot-ca story. If selected, your story and website will appear as part of a national campaign to celebrate the registration of the Millionth dot-ca domain name.
Tell us your dot-ca story before February 8th and you could win one of five Apple MacBook laptops." I told my story, and posted it on the coureurs.ca site.

slightly new direction

December 29 2007 22:00:00 EST ... Have been working on a "whitepaper" for a slightly different direction for the project. The community marketing idea is still very much there. I am moving to a single web site that senses the device you are on, your language preferences, and location. The website will engage a local community with a community calendar/yearbook as well as messaging of various types between individuals. I have let the domain names on the old websites, except for this one expire.
In addition to the different application direction, I have chosen a different implementation direction. If we are truly to be, "student painters of the internet," then we should engage students in the development and maintenance of the infrastructure. For this reason, I have switched to Java. I got it running on my virtual private servers, much easier than I thought I would using the winstone servlet container and the gij package. To make it easier for students to participate, I have implemented a "recipe" for running winstone on eclipse, that works on a eee-pc.

still keeping on!

November 9 2007 21:30:00 EST ... The apache module has been in use for some time, for some data visualisation that I needed to do. Likewise the syndicateme command line interpreter has been in use for making single source training materials from docbook and docbook slides. The oswd template has also become quite popular. It would have been good if I had have had more to offer in terms of other services when I posted it. Perhaps a follow-up and a technically excellent syndication engine will still help generate some more interest when I have more to offer. I need to get the tucows thing working next as it is time to renew our domains. In the setback department, one of my sons has been quite sick, but seems to be finally getting better.

mod_syndicateme

June 19 2007 21:30:00 EST ... Made an apache module over the last few days. Build it with apxs -c. Installed it with "apxs -ie mod_syndicateme.la" The source is in mod_syndicateme.c. Still need to do a post using ap_get_client_block to get the content. Added an apacheintfc.cpp that has the implementation in it. The purpose of the module with respect to the overall syndicateme plan is to do a wizard for sign up and to allow for instant interaction with community marketing web sites. It also represents a bit of a side trip, as I hope to use the technology and ideas for an as yet unrelated data perfection engine. The data perfection engine will interface with a socket based xml protocol which likely doesn't have anything to do with the plan. It also needs to deliver thumbnails, which is very much also required to syndicate from email. Workflow is also an element that I am thinking of implementing with sqlite. Integration with sqlite was how I was originally planning on keeping configuration data. I had an elaborate plan to use sqlite for even more in the first spec, but I am thinking that I may be able to use opensrs, bind and the template files to contain the config information in the file system. This data perfection needs to run on WIN32, so I also successfully built syndicateme on WIN32.

Registered as Tucows Reseller

June 14 2007 21:30:00 EST ... Tim is quite far along with his BigPoppa Barista site, so I got a back up name server and registered with Tucows to be able to register his domain on our name servers. Also rearranged the syndicateme class a little to do the execute at the end tag, rather than the start. That way we can have stuff between the script tags available at execute time. Stuff between the script tags was required if we were going to embed sqlite or other data entry/perfection mechanism. This is required to make a wizard for people to sign up for our services.

Put old pages back on new server

May 10 2007 2:25:00 EST ... Got tired of looking at potted plants! I duplicated the functionality of the old pages that were produced every 1/2 hour from a perl program. Now they are produced using our syndicateme program. To make them work like the old ones I had to make some fixes to syndicateme. I enabled exslt in the xsltproc class and in the unescape class I also now unescape &. I also caught the idea of adding a gallery section from Dianne's http://helpinghandsabroad.net site

Get Well Soon Dad

Apr 5 2007 9:47:00 EST ... We have joined the dubious list of projects where a team member has gotten sick while on the job. Hopefully we will resume our efforts soon.

Made another update to the spec

Mar 12 2007 20:08:00 EST ... This weekend got some major work done on the blogging from email vision. I integrated libspopc and mimedecode with our stuff. While working on publishing our first 2 stories that include word attachments, came up with a plan for finishing. wvWare has a wvDocBook script that sealed my inspiration to use docbook articles. My current thinking is that I will use wvWare to make a section of the article, based on the word document. I will make the body of the article from my stl structures while parsing the mime parts. The sections will be all pulled in as xml entities.

Moved back onto Canaca Server

Mar 4 2007 23:59:00 EST ... Took advantage of the greater availability of the canaca server as of late by making it the production server as well as the development server. Added a prod account and updated httpd.conf to point in to it.
This gives us the advantage of not having to move data around except for on our server. It also gives us the ability to make some dynamic content.

Had First Customer Inquiry

Feb 4 2007 22:56:00 EST ... Sent this response:
I am afraid that we are still hard at work on our own stuff. It is our plan to offer the services that you describe for a fee, and to also share our tools on-line for free. The main thing that we wanted to do starting out, though, is to run courses on community marketing on a fairly regular basis in Toronto. Community marketing is doing things like you are doing on your site with the stats, articles and the upcoming events. It builds community by getting people to participate by posting events, stories, reviews, and other articles on your site. You can see, what I think is a good example, by looking at the http://www.gibson.com. Another one that I really like is http://torontostreetfashion.com/. I noticed that you have already been quite resourceful at finding places to add community building type things to your site, like articles and comments, and in adding the CafePress e-store. I also noticed that the "discuss this article" link is broken on the one article I tried it on. Hopefully the course and tools will help us build a community of on-line community builders like yourself.

Added Customer Repository

Jan 26 2007 09:00:00 EST ... thinking that customers may want us to work on internal communications that they don't want in a public repository like sourceforge. Added a private customers repository that backups daily from gondor, and checked it out under templates in my development tree.

Added Timeline Template

Jan 20 2007 09:00:00 EST ... using our syndicateme tool with simile's time visualization to display our project plan

Our Template is on OSWD

Jan 13 2007 09:00:00 EST ... over 500 people have downloaded our template, on this page under products

We are online!

Jan 7 2007 09:00:00 EST ... the initial web sites in the applications portion of this page came online. At first they didn't work on a version of internet explorer, which inspired the development of our template.

Finished second specification

Dec 27 2006 09:00:00 EST ... since, pretty much rewritten with the idea of integrating open source tools by interpreting xml.

Inaugural team meeting

Dec 22 2006 18:30:00 EST ... went over ideas for sections for the on-line papers. Made a business focused blog to demonstrate the technology at the meeting.

Open Source Web Design Template

When developing the blog for our new web 2.0 startup, I got a template from the open source web design site. I found a picture on flickr, which I thought really helped to communicate the idea. It was very easy to turn the oswd template into a blogger template, and I was very quickly able to use the results to demonstrate to the rest of the team the basics of blogger. When it came time to deliver the Queen Street News, a syndication community based on a cool street in Toronto, each of the oswd templates that I tried, gave me some difficulties. Embracing this new constraint, I made a highly derivative template of my own. I am posting it back on the oswd, as a way of thanking my inspiration. more

Features

The site is intended to be a very readable online newspaper. There are no distractions from the news, but still a pleasing layout. I preserved the balance and use of fonts of my inspirations. It loads really, quickly, which hopefully also adds to a professional feel. The intent of our business is community marketing through storytelling, much like amazon selling books with reviews. We want English majors, to do the writing. The technical and design elements are to not distract from the excellent writing. The site is valid XHTML 1.1 and CSS, and I have maintained a standards based approach to the more technical aspects of the rest of the project as well. more

About the author

My dad and I both find ourselves energized by students, and would like to provide an opportunity for learners to try their careers on for size while studying. Computers, are/were our livelihood, and we hope to profit financially from this application of our livelihood as well as help students to make some money. back to events

(technical) writers (web) publishing and syndication tool

syndicateme is a tool for publication and syndication. Syndication separates content from formatting in feeds. These feeds can then be formatted for different audiences, and even "mashed" together with other content. Technical writers have been using this separation for some time now. They produce on-line help, manuals and quick references from the same content. One tool many tech-writers use to produce different products from the same content is xslt. An open-source implementation of xslt is xsltproc. Syndicateme integrates tools, like xslt, that we used to publish our online newspapers. It also integrates other tools like a pop client, regular expressions and the curl library. To integrate these tools in a consistent manner, syndicateme uses a couple of simple ideas. It extends a web-log by allowing you to log articles from an email account. It publishes articles by interpreting xml passing through everything but script elements with a type attribute of "text/syndicateme." These script elements can do things like apply xslt.
Syndicateme can be run on the command line, where it interprets xml passed to it on stdin. It can also be run as an apache mod, where it interprets xml passed to it by XMLHTTPRequest, the root of AJAX. It is very effective in both applications as the tools that it integrates are some of the most effective of breed. In mod-syndicateme mode it gives very snappy performance for a professional look and feel. Snappier performance still can be gained by using syndicateme on the command line to periodically push content to web servers, even from behind a firewall. This is the mode that we use syndicateme in for the online papers.back to events

hello servlet using winstone and eclipse

Some time ago I noticed that apache-fo, xerces, xmlmind and other docbook tools were available in Java. At the same time, I also noticed that the Universities offer introductory programming courses in Java. I decided to make the switch to Java to allow for the engagement of students in the project in it's entirety. One of the original reasons for steering away from Java was to run on virtual private servers at least at first. I was pleasantly surprised by the performance of gij and the winstone servlet container on my virtual private servers. I also plan to continue using static html pages refreshed every 1/2 hour, and ajax so the servlet functionality is really only required for localization and updates. back to events

Story-telling for community marketing workshop

Sell books with reviews, like Amazon or guitars with guitar playing news and tips like Gibson. Community Marketing isn't just for computer companies anymore.
In Web 2.0 fashion, we are going after the long tail ... small businesses that want to build community around their products and services. We will offer workshops in story telling for community marketing. The first participant will get the first year's subscription for a community marketing mash-up included. Additional participants from the same company will be charged a reduced registration. back to events

Community marketing mash-ups

We will hopefully work with one of Tim's school mates turned luthier on a guitar maker's mashup. It will somewhat emulate the Gibson one, but will try for more consistency and be built around external news feeds and articles and songs emailed to the luthier's site.
Community marketing mash-ups will be included with the above workshop, and sold as annual subscriptions to businesses, interested in building a community around their products. These mashups require a url. A url is a way of locating the online community. The urls are controlled by the following policies:
1) exhibit a
2) ICANN Policy
The mashups will build community by allowing users of products or services to email in stories. The stories will attract new users for products by being added to google base and the applicable ...stnews.ca web site. back to events

Hotmail migration service

An excellent article that I read, while writing our business plan suggested that many successful software projects start because they fill a need that their author has in common with others.
I needed to get off hotmail for a couple of reasons:
1) I found the spca add disturbing. I guess that I am not very desensitized to such things.
2) I found the lava life adds tacky. I am a middle aged guy. I don't want to know how many svelte 20 somethings have messages waiting for me. I have svelte 20 something kids, and they sometimes send messages asking me for money!
I switched to google for domains as part of this project. What was I to do with the 2000+ emails that I had on hotmail? I integrated a couple of open source tools and I had all 2000 some messages in gmail by the next morning. Now when I send messages they have my new mail address on them. Hopefully within a year, people will have switched to my new address. Even if they don't I still am not disturbed by that ad. My thinking is that this is something that I have working very well that we can operate on an annual subscription basis. It can be set-up from a web form with no human intervention, yet hopefully provide value to other email hoarders that need off hotmail. back to events