links for 2009-07-02
Jul 2nd, 2009 by Jon Stahl
Wordpress Themes are GPL
Jul 2nd, 2009 by Jon Stahl
Wordpress released an opinion from the Software Freedom Law Center today confirming that Wordpress themes must be GPL, although the images and CSS in a theme don’t have to be.
This is substantially similar to how Plone and Drupal have always thought that GPL applies to themes and add-on products, and it’s nice to see a project as large as Wordpress putting its heft behind this common-sense interpretation of the GPL.
links for 2009-07-01
Jul 1st, 2009 by Jon Stahl
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talk by Danah Boyd
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Great piece that places social media hype in context
links for 2009-06-29
Jun 29th, 2009 by Jon Stahl
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good, skeptical review
Progress Towards A New Commenting System for Plone
Jun 29th, 2009 by Jon Stahl
Commenting is the building block of most “social” features on the web. Plone has had commenting since its very early releases, and got a lot of things right the first time. However, the web has become more sophisticated since 2004, and our “mostly good enough” commenting framework is now showing its age. It’s time for a rewrite, and that rewrite is under way! Here’s a short progress update, and an invitation to help out.
Thanks to Google Summer of Code 2009, Timo Stollenwerk is leading the work on plone.app.discussion, a modern, lightweight, easy-to-extend commenting system for Plone. Martin Aspeli is serving as the project mentor, and is playing a large role in designing the architecture, project management and quality assurance — all with a goal of ensuring that we have code of sufficient quality to land in Plone 4 later this year. I’m playing the role of the “customer,” helping to articulate and prioritize requirements and testing the results.
Check it out!
Our roadmap and progress log is public at http://www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/15135. As you can see, we’re using an Agile development process on this, thanks to Martin. Basic commenting functionality is now working, and we’ve got iterations planned out for the rest of the summer (and beyond!). You can give our development version a try at http://gsoc.timostollenwerk.net/. More experienced users can get their hands on the code with our development buildout.
links for 2009-06-27
Jun 27th, 2009 by Jon Stahl
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"The crackdown in Iran shows that, for regimes bent on survival, squashing electronic dissent isn't impossible. In many ways, modern communication tools are easier to suppress than organizing methods of the past."
links for 2009-06-26
Jun 26th, 2009 by Jon Stahl
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Email and TV ads more important than facebook and twitter.
links for 2009-06-24
Jun 24th, 2009 by Jon Stahl
links for 2009-06-17
Jun 17th, 2009 by Jon Stahl
links for 2009-06-10
Jun 10th, 2009 by Jon Stahl
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"ONE/Northwest, a Seattle nonprofit that provides technology and communications strategy assistance to environmental advocacy organizations, organized a two-day sprint to focus on adding specific functionality to an add-on module for the Plone content management system. The half-dozen or so developers were local, with one exception. "We covered travel expenses to bring lead PloneFormGen developer Steve McMahon to Seattle from his home in Davis, CA," says Jon Stahl, director of web solutions at ONE/Northwest. "Our total 'hard' cost was on the order of $300." ONE/Northwest provided the office space and beer."
links for 2009-06-08
Jun 8th, 2009 by Jon Stahl
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case studies on Shibboleth
Auto-optimizing images in Plone
Jun 8th, 2009 by Jon Stahl
I’ve been brainstorming a bit about how Plone do an even better job of helping non-technical website editors manage and optimize their images for the web, and I’ve come up with what I think is a pretty clever idea. I have neither the time nor the skill to implement it, and so I thought I’d float it out there to see if
A) it holds water;
B) if I can’t interest someone in implementing it 
The problem: big-ass images
Lots of people who edit Plone websites don’t really understand how to properly optimize images for the web via resizing and compression. Plone is not entirely unhelpful here; if you upload an image, we automatically create several different resized versions for you to use in your pages. However, Plone doesn’t currently do anything to help you make sure that original image you’re uploading is appropriately sized and compressed.
When you couple user inexperience with the massive image sizes that today’s digital cameras produce (6/8/10/12 megapixels!), the result is often a situation where users are uploading massive digital camera photos to their Plone sites, then using the PIL resizes in page. While this works, it quickly produces a bloated ZODB. In addition, the automatic PIL resizes don’t apply much compression, so the resized images aren’t very well optimized either. This slows down site performance and causes lots of unnecessary server load.
There are a number of add-on products that can help in various ways, among them:
- Plone.app.blob and Filesystem storage, which push large binary objects such as images to the filesystem, reducing ZODB bloat.
- ImageEditor, the amazing Photoshop-like image editing program that runs inside of Plone. It can do resizing and compression, but only one image at a time. It’s a great solution for end-users, though.
These are great, but I think we can do better.
Some possible clever solutions
Here’s how I think we can do better.
First, some changes to Plone’s default behavior:
- Make the amount of compression that PIL applies to its resizes settable in the Plone control panel. Right now it is hardcoded into ATContentTypes, and it’s hard to customize without rolling your own content types.
- Automatically resize all “original” uploaded images to 1024px. Make it user-configurable, and disable-able for those rare occasions when you need to upload really high-resolution originals.
More daringly, I think that someone could write a clever add-on product for site administrators that would do the following:
- Walk the site catalog, looking for all objects that are Image-ish and in JPEG format.
- Look at the pixel dimensions and the filesize of each image.
- Find images where the “bytes per pixel” (filesize/*(height*width)) is higher than a certain “reasonable” value. (0.5 bytes per pixel seems about right to me, based on the idea that a 150X150 pixel JPEG image shouldn’t weigh much more than 10kb. (Obviously, these settings should be user-editable.)
- Present the user with a list of “suspiciously large” images, along with their pixel dimensions, filesize, bytes per pixel and a preview.
- For the JPEG images, offer to apply additional compression to some or all of the selected images. (Make value user-settable, maybe offer an opportunity to test it against 2-3 images, and estimate the savings you’d realize.)
- For images that have larger pixel dimensions than anyone would want to display in a web browser, offer to resize the original image down to a user-specified size (1024 pixels seems like a reasonable default to me).
- Apply compression via PIL, presumably in a background process so that Zope doesn’t bog down. Rebuild Plone’s auto-resized images afterwards from this new original. Purge caches as necessary.
So, whaddya think? Is this sane? Would you get value from these things? Are there other low-hanging fruit I’ve overlooked? Interested in helping roll the first two ideas into PLIPs for Plone 4? Or building out the bulk image optimizer? Or helping raise some money to sponsor such a project? I’d love to hear from you.
links for 2009-06-06
Jun 6th, 2009 by Jon Stahl
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A pervasive elitism hovers in the background of collaborative software development: everyone secretly wants to be seen as a genius. In this talk, we discuss how to avoid this trap and gracefully exchange personal ego for personal growth and super-charged collaboration. We'll also examine how software tools affect social behaviors, and how to successfully manage the growth of new ideas.
links for 2009-06-05
Jun 5th, 2009 by Jon Stahl
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draw and edit polygons on a Google map
links for 2009-06-03
Jun 3rd, 2009 by Jon Stahl
links for 2009-06-02
Jun 2nd, 2009 by Jon Stahl
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nicely done
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Now supports Python 2.5 and 2.6.
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Rapid turnaround radical transparency on people who sign to put Referendum 71, Washington State's anti-human rights initiative on the ballot
Theming without tears
Jun 1st, 2009 by Jon Stahl
The Plone community is hard at work on some game-changing innovations that will redefine your notion of what is possible with a content management system. One of the coolest elements of this is Deliverance, a new system for “theming” (applying a custom visual design) to a Plone site.
Deliverance introduces the paradigm-shifting notion of “rules based theming” in which the theme consists of a simple set of rules expressed in XML which are capable of mapping chunks of a source page (raw Plone) into sections of a fully-styled HTML/CSS page.
It’s easier to see than describe: Nate Aune put together a fantastic set of slides about Deliverance for Plone Symposium East 2009, I can’t recommend them highly enough.
Even cooler bonus: Deliverance will let us build a new generation of “point and click” theming tools like Banjo, which Nate and Eric Steele whipped up during the post-Symposium sprint. It’s a proof of concept, not ready for primetime yet, but it’s a pretty compelling glimpse into the future of theming.
This isn’t quite “mainstream best practice” for Plone yet, but it will be in the not-too-distant future. I for one can’t wait!
One more thing: Because Deliverance runs outside of Plone, you can use it to theme almost any web application! I wonder if we’ll see Drupal and Joomla adopting Deliverance someday?
H/T to Elizabeth Zimmerman.
links for 2009-05-28
May 28th, 2009 by Jon Stahl
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interesting new collaboration service coming from Google later this year
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"Hopefully down the road a network of non-partisan, web-based local and state activists will come together and create state and national email lists of millions of mobilized activists. Until these grassroots local and state groups learn the tricks of online activism and marry it to powerful grassroots organizing campaigns, real change will be deferred."
links for 2009-05-27
May 27th, 2009 by Jon Stahl
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great academic summary of the various facets of the environmental movement
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integration between Eventbrite & Salesforce. $5/user/month for NGOs
links for 2009-05-25
May 25th, 2009 by Jon Stahl
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Interesting examination of why health care expenses are high in some places and not others.