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By Lloyd Watkin, Sunday 12th May 2013 5:07 pm

Summary

As of version 0.9.0 xmpp-ftw now supports the Superfeedr XMPP API. If you don’t know what Superfeedr is then read this shamelessly stolen description from Crunchbase:

Superfeedr fetches and parses RSS or Atom feeds on behalf of its users and then pushes them the new entries in these feeds. Superfeedr implements most of the current Real-time technologies and guarantees an entry detection time inferior to 15 min. Superfeedr has both an XMPP and a PubSubHubbub API.Read more: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/superfeedr#ixzz2T6A0Grml

The XMPP-FTW interface to Superfeedr is built off their documentation which can be found here: http://superfeedr.com/documentation#pubsubhubbub.

Example data

At the bottom of this post I’ve included two gists. One is a push from superfeedr about a commit I pushed to github. The first part of the gist is the raw XMPP stanza with the second part being the JSON message that XMPP-FTW pushes to clients. To jump straight there click here.

Supported actions

XMPP-FTW currently supports five actions when working with Superfeedr. These are:

• Subscribe to a feed (xmpp.superfeedr.subscribe)
• Unsubscribe from a feed (xmpp.superfeedr.unsubscribe)
• Retrieve a list of current subscriptions (xmpp.superfeedr.subscriptions)
• New item notifications (xmpp.superfeedr.push)
• Item retrieval (xmpp.superfeedr.retrieve) *

* Currently the Superfeedr team are rewriting the item retrieval functionality so it isn’t available. Therefore XMPP-FTW is coded against documentation but is currently untested. Once its back up and functional I’ll give it a proper test and fix any issues. Until then it is suggested you use the HTTP API.

Parsing posts

For this work I’ve started to build a translator from an XML based document format to a JSON representation for XMPP-FTW. Currently it supports (some of) ATOM (RFC-4287)  but as requests (or pull requests!) come in then it will support extensions and additional formats. I plan on breaking this out of XMPP-FTW in future in case its useful to other projects.

As always feedback is very welcome, it would also be great to hear if you are using XMPP-FTW in one of your projects.  Thanks to Julien who has been very helpful in answering questions about Superfeedr’s XMPP API whilst I was building this.

Try it out now https://xmpp-ftw.jit.su/demo

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By Lloyd Watkin, Sunday 24th March 2013 10:33 pm

I’ve just published the first version of a new middleware package I’ve written to expose your project’s README.md via express.

To install simply run:

npm i --save express-middleware-readme.md

Continue reading 'Expose github README.md at a path using express middleware'»

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By Lloyd Watkin, Wednesday 13th March 2013 8:37 pm

We had the inaugural XMPP/realtime meetup held at Mozilla London on the 13th March which was sponsored by my employer Surevine.

At Surevine we believe that XMPP has a very important place in the future of the web and this goes hand-in-hand with realtime technologies too which is why we’ve started this meetup which will hopefully grow into its own entity.

I’ve written a blog post up on the Surevine website about the event which I suggest you read if you are interested. This also contains details about finding out more about the event and where to get information on future planned events too.

Continue reading 'Talking at the first XMPPUK Event – March 2013'»

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By Lloyd Watkin, Sunday 10th March 2013 6:39 pm

Originally seen on http://awesome-wildlife.blogspot.co.uk/2009/12/aardvark.html

I’ve spent most of the day writing a new demo system for XMPP-FTW and despite it looking ugly as sin (I am no god with design) I’m quite pleased with how it works, so I thought I’d write up a little piece about it…

Continue reading 'New demo system for XMPP-FTW'»

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By Lloyd Watkin, Wednesday 27th February 2013 8:18 pm

At the Feburary London Node User Group (LNUG) I had a chance to speak about one of my new projects pinitto.me. Pinitto.me is an open source infinite virtual corkboard application that I created over a weekend around christmas to help with planning days for myself and colleagues at Surevine.

Continue reading 'Talking at London Node User Group (LNUG) – Feburary 2013'»

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By Lloyd Watkin, Friday 22nd February 2013 7:08 pm

I noticed something very strange in google results whilst searching for referenes to pinitto.me online today.  After the usual links to github, the site itself, and some various small references I noticed the following in the results:

I checked several of these links fearing my site had been hacked and it turns out none of the pages exist. There’s also no reference to them in the admin section of the site or from grepping site logs.  The posts seem to have been posted over the past few weeks according to google.

Have google search results been hacked/tricked? Or is there something else going on with my wordpress install? Currently running wordpress 3.5.1.

Clearly google did see something at some point:

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By Lloyd Watkin, Saturday 12th January 2013 2:38 pm

From bdc.co.uk

I’ve been writing a new application in Nodejs, using websockets (socket.io), this application is deployed using the PaaS Nodejitsu.  Everything has been going great and I’ve been surprised how easy it has been to create a realtime application using socket.io. Deployment has also been a breeze with Nodejitsu’s tools.  I develop on a Linux machine myself but the other day I passed the details to someone using a windows machine running internet explorer.  The application stopped working with an error message, a redeploy didn’t help. The error I was presented with was as follows:;

An error has occurred: {“bytesParsed”:0,”code”:”HPE_INVALID_CONSTANT”}

As I haven’t uploaded any new code in about a week I made the incorrect assumption that something had gone wrong on nodejitsu’s side and so dropped them a tweet to let them know as they are still in beta as far as I understand.

Within 90 minutes I’d got a reply from Nuno Job (@dscape) from Nodejitsu letting me know that there was an issue with Internet Explorer, socket.io, and Joyent’s servers. He also included a workaround, and a link with further details. Excellent support!

From what I’ve understood the proxies used at Joyent don’t like non-HTTP response (from the flashsocket) and so prevent any further connections to the domain (please correct me in the comments if incorrect).

The solution is to turn off flashsocket as a transport when configuring socket.io as follows:

var io = require('socket.io').listen(80);

io.configure(function(){
    io.set('transports', [
        'websocket',
        'htmlfile',
        'xhr-polling',
        'jsonp-polling'
    ]);
});

See: https://github.com/LearnBoost/Socket.IO/wiki/Configuring-Socket.IO

I hope this helps anyone that comes across the same issue, the original solution/explanation came from http://blog.dreamflashstudio.com/2012/08/nodejitsu-on-joyent/.

With this in place the app sprung back into life. I just really need to report to users with browsers that don’t implement websockets that they need to use something more modern…

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By Lloyd Watkin, Tuesday 6th November 2012 11:54 am

At the end of October I got a chance to attend the awesome Realtime conference 2012 as well as the XMPP Summit in Portland, Oregon. It was an immense week and I had the chance to meet some great people and learn about some awesome tech,

I’ve written a post up about this on Surevine’s (my employers) blog: Realtime conference 2012 and XMPP Summit.

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By Lloyd Watkin, Thursday 27th September 2012 7:40 pm

As of this evening it is now possible to have Github post to a buddycloud channel when a push is made to a repository. This allows you to get (amost) real-time repository change information in your buddycloud channels.

Background

I’ve talked about work I’ve done with buddycloud before, but briefly buddycloud is an exciting new federated social network built upon open-source and open-standards. The buddycloud team has recently come back from San Francisco where they were involved with Mozilla’s WebFWD programme getting some great mentoring and guidance from luminaries in their fields. I don’t think I need to really introduce github, they are awesome too :)

If you’re not aware of them github has a set of service hooks that as a repository owner/admin you can utilise in order to push event information (be it commits, pushes, pull requests, branching, etc) to a 3rd party service. There’s a whole set of these services that you can already push to from Jenkins CI right through to Yammer, and now buddycloud!

If you have a service that you’d like to push event information to then github make the code available. All you have to do is fork the service-services repository, knock up some ruby code and submit a pull request. Once it’s been accepted you can then setup github to push information to your favourite information system each time something happens to your repository.

Continue reading 'Update a buddycloud channel when events take place on your github repository'»

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By Lloyd Watkin, Monday 3rd September 2012 9:00 am

What is the RaspberryPi?

Raspberry Pi image from wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi

The Raspberry Pi is a small (credit card) sized computer which costs around the £25 mark. Originally envisioned to help bring back proper IT skills to schools (rather than just how to use Microsoft Office suite and alike), just like when children of the 70′s – 90′s were growing up (I just caught the tail end of it).

The ability to not only see the hardware but to mess around with the software running it without fear of breaking it. I learned many of my computer skills from continually breaking my father’s beloved PCs as a child and then hurriedly fixing them before he found out, I’m sure if I tried I could still even run off some MSCDEX lines :)

These little devices, since launch, have been near impossible to get hold of on a short timescale for they have been gobbled up by the developer community and those who remember playing with computers in the long distant past. There is a huge number of projects coming out using this little board and, more importantly, there’s even 8-year old kids generating their own programs (read: games) using it.

My first board is used to run a media server using xbian but one of the projects I was really looking forward to was running the software for an open source project I help out on (professionally and personally) and get my own open-federated social network running from the depths of my basement (more on that below).

For more information please see: Raspberry Pi – About Us

Continue reading 'Running your own open federated social network from your home for just $25'»