Hello!
Tim Broder
I guess I'm yet another developer that got annoyed and rolled their
own sharing solution. (http://readersharing.net) Obviously I
recognize the folly of having multiple systems all trying to do the
same thing...
My solution is written in django and seems to be in line with the
vision page on sharebro.org. It seems I've mimicked the functionality
depicted there as well as getting the follow a friend and friend list
functionality. I have an api that will capture user, title, link, and
body of the post being shared with a greasemonkey extension that works
with reader
My next steps were to be to integrate the same 'shared feeds' with
people's google plus feeds so they had the option of how they wanted
to share but either way you could see their posts back in Google
reader. The Groups functionality is not yet in the plus API or I would
be using that as well. Also sharing directly from android/iphone is
high on my list.
My ruby experience is unfortunately minimal, but I'm like to pick it
up quickly as I'd really like to see this project work, or maybe put
some of my other skills to use
Either way I'd like to get involved somehow. I'm about halfway
through reading all the emails on here but I have to run out for the
day, will continue tonight.
thoughts?
Thanks
Alex Chaffee
roughly the same direction :-)
--
Alex Chaffee - al...@stinky.com
http://alexchaffee.com
http://twitter.com/alexch
Sanjeev Satheesh
Hey guys.
My name is Sanjeev. I had also set up a userscript and service for sharing.
I am reading through the emails to get an idea of where things are headed
and where I may contribute. I also have do not have much experience in RUBY.
Without reading all the code and emails, I have identified these areas where
I can lend a hand.
i) OAuth instead of passwords for the plugin.
ii) Note in Reader bookmarklet.
iii) Extending feeds from google+ -- In Google+ people tend to post the link
and a small comment and google expands the link, whereas the feed has only
the link and the comment. Ideally I would like it to show me the content in
the link rather than going to the page. (but do we access to the plusr
codebase? )
I am familiar with jquery and php. If you guys feel there is some section I
can work on apart from these, let me know also.
Thanks,
Sanjeev
Hi all,
thoughts?
Thanks
--
The Sharebro Google Group: for http://sharebro.org and related development
http://groups.google.com/group/sharebro for archives and options
Emmanuel Pire
Alex Chaffee
I'd really like to get on the same page about the technical road map
for sharebro.org and related projects. Later today I will write a
better email than this one :-)
Alex Chaffee
emphasize "yet" since I'm sure I could walk you (and Emmanuel and
Sanjeev) to the point where your Ruby is good enough that you could at
least read the code and give me feedback, if not write actual patches.
At this point the plan hinges on some fairly technical discoveries and
decisions. Google Reader did something in their database/API/app that
several other apps have done in slightly different ways.[1]
So sadly the problem we need to solve is not as simple as "add an item
to an RSS feed"... and I'd be happy to enumerate my understanding of
the complexities. The stuff going across these mailing lists (sharebro
and google-reader-diaspora) has been chaotic and contradictory and I
wouldn't be surprised if you read the whole backlog and ended up being
even more confused :-)
> My solution is written in django and seems to be in line with the
> vision page on sharebro.org. It seems I've mimicked the functionality
> depicted there as well as getting the follow a friend and friend list
> functionality.
Your friend list looks more organized than mine but is actually less
useful since you're making a separate line for each email address,
where if I'm not mistaken each google user can have multiple emails.
Also there's no one big "Refollow" type button -- I can't imagine
anyone having the patience to click "Follow" dozens of times.
Also, it's not clear to me what that "Follow" button actually does!
Can you explain briefly but technically?
>I have an api that will capture user, title, link, and
> body of the post being shared with a greasemonkey extension that works
> with reader
Those fields are good but we have to learn what's underneath them.
User is good -- but is it a google user id (good) or a string name
(bad) or an email address (possibly good)?
Title is good -- but there's also the title of the feed it came from,
which I think you're not grabbing (yet)
Link is good -- but is it a link to the original item, the original
web site, or the original feed file (RSS)?
Body may or may not be good. Without tricks like cross-domain POST you
can't send the whole body, which led to bugs in Emmanuel's script like
posts getting cut off in the middle of multibyte letters. If we[2] do
send up content text we should be clear whether it's supposed to be
- full body text of original item
- an excerpt or quotation
- a note -- fully original content written by the sharer
Missing is some link to the original item as Google Reader knows about
it -- an item id, or a [item+sharer] dyad, or even [item+sharer+tag]
since it might be cool for one person to have many feeds, split by
topic and/or security (who can see / subscribe to it).
The link to the item is important since it allows the old Reader
feature of showing an item once, then "comments on this item shared by
Alice", then "comments on this item shared by Bob".
> My next steps were to be to integrate the same 'shared feeds' with
> people's google plus feeds so they had the option of how they wanted
> to share but either way you could see their posts back in Google
> reader.
Currently sharebro.org allows you to individually subscribe to a
single friend's public G+ posts (via plu.sr). Not ideal in many ways,
and leaves open many questions, e.g.:
- Should the G+ posts be folded in to the main shares feed or appear
as a separate feed?
"Alex's Shared Items" vs. "Alex's Plus Posts"
- If the latter, should the feeds be grouped under the same folder?
"Shares" vs. "Posts"
> The Groups functionality is not yet in the plus API or I would
> be using that as well.
What are Groups? Are they like Circles?
> Also sharing directly from android/iphone is
> high on my list.
What app would you use for that? We'd have to contact the app
developer and provide them an API.
> My ruby experience is unfortunately minimal, but I'm like to pick it
> up quickly as I'd really like to see this project work, or maybe put
> some of my other skills to use
In one of my current careers I am a Ruby teacher. I would be happy to
start a new thread on learning Ruby and point you to some of my work,
e.g. http://testfirst.org/learn_ruby
- A
[1] Twitter, Tumblr, Posterous, Facebook, Delicious, and Plus all had
to make decisions about what a "share" (also a "reshare" or "retweet")
actually is, data-schema-wise. And now so do we! :-)
[2] "we" can mean either "we who are writing sharebro.org" or "we who
are writing any of these sharing systems" or even "we who are writing
Feed Reader apps (like hivemined.org) and want to either integrate
with a common API or do it all in our own database". I'm happy to get
all those "we"s into the conversation.
Alex Chaffee
What is the URL? I'll add it to sharebro.org/links (unless you want to
retire it).
What technique does your script use? Sending data up to a new feed on
your own server? Or something in the Google Reader API?
> Without reading all the code and emails, I have identified these areas where
> I can lend a hand.
>
> i) OAuth instead of passwords for the plugin.
I think this will happen when we move the server code to Ruby.
Sharebro.org already uses oauth. I can't wait to check whether this
survives a "send to" or a userscript "share" button that goes there.
Though we may need to store some local auth in the browser, but there
are ways to do that.
> ii) Note in Reader bookmarklet.
We must be careful here, since "Note" still has some meaning inside
the Google API and some apps are still using it. If I were alone in
this project I would make a bookmarklet called "Share" and make it
work kind of like the Posterous bookmarklet, where you get to select
the quoted text and the destination feed.
> iii) Extending feeds from google+ -- In Google+ people tend to post the link
> and a small comment and google expands the link, whereas the feed has only
> the link and the comment. Ideally I would like it to show me the content in
> the link rather than going to the page.
This is probably doable, but we'd need a server-side solution to fetch
the original HTML page and strip out all the crap. If the page is from
a feed that already has an RSS item then the job is easier -- we don't
have to strip anything, but we still have to find the feed and the
item inside the feed. I hope to learn about whether there's a part of
the Google Reader API that will let me search for that.
> (but do we access to the plusr codebase? )
The plu.sr codebase is scraping the Google Plus public feed pages.
I've been chatting with the developer over email. He says be careful
about bandwidth and storage since there's a LOT of content coming
through, and he says he'll be maintaining it for a while so I'm
comfortable relying on his RSS feed(s).
Google+ Posts seems like an OK replacement for Reader Notes btw... I
mean like Buzz, not like "top comment".
> I am familiar with jquery and php. If you guys feel there is some section I
> can work on apart from these, let me know also.
Thanks!
- A
Sanjeev Satheesh
From: ale...@gmail.com [mailto:ale...@gmail.com] On Behalf Of Alex Chaffee
Sent: Sunday, November 20, 2011 1:50 PM
To: Sanjeev Satheesh
Cc: shar...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [sharebro] Hello!
> My name is Sanjeev. I had also set up a userscript and service for
sharing.
What is the URL? I'll add it to sharebro.org/links (unless you want to
retire it).
I retried my plugin and the current userscript page points to Lipsumarium's
script.
What technique does your script use? Sending data up to a new feed on your
own server? Or something in the Google Reader API?
It's built on jquery and php. It makes a cross-server post, and gets the
full body so the data does not get truncated to 2K characters.
> Without reading all the code and emails, I have identified these areas
> where I can lend a hand.
>
> i) OAuth instead of passwords for the plugin.
I think this will happen when we move the server code to Ruby.
Sharebro.org already uses oauth. I can't wait to check whether this survives
a "send to" or a userscript "share" button that goes there.
Though we may need to store some local auth in the browser, but there are
ways to do that.
> ii) Note in Reader bookmarklet.
We must be careful here, since "Note" still has some meaning inside the
Google API and some apps are still using it. If I were alone in this project
I would make a bookmarklet called "Share" and make it work kind of like the
Posterous bookmarklet, where you get to select the quoted text and the
destination feed.
Yes, by note, I was talking of the share option.
Thanks!
- A
-Sanjeev
Tim Broder
I would appreciate any assistance even if you don't know Ruby yet. I
emphasize "yet" since I'm sure I could walk you (and Emmanuel and
Sanjeev) to the point where your Ruby is good enough that you could at
least read the code and give me feedback, if not write actual patches.
sounds good, I've tinkered with it in the past but wouldn't be as fast as python or php. I'm getting couch setup now to start playing with the repo.
At this point the plan hinges on some fairly technical discoveries and
decisions. Google Reader did something in their database/API/app that
several other apps have done in slightly different ways.[1]
So sadly the problem we need to solve is not as simple as "add an item
to an RSS feed"... and I'd be happy to enumerate my understanding of
the complexities. The stuff going across these mailing lists (sharebro
and google-reader-diaspora) has been chaotic and contradictory and I
wouldn't be surprised if you read the whole backlog and ended up being
even more confused :-)
Your friend list looks more organized than mine but is actually less
> My solution is written in django and seems to be in line with the
> vision page on sharebro.org. It seems I've mimicked the functionality
> depicted there as well as getting the follow a friend and friend list
> functionality.
useful since you're making a separate line for each email address,
where if I'm not mistaken each google user can have multiple emails.
Also there's no one big "Refollow" type button -- I can't imagine
anyone having the patience to click "Follow" dozens of times.
Also, it's not clear to me what that "Follow" button actually does!
Can you explain briefly but technically?
Those fields are good but we have to learn what's underneath them.
>I have an api that will capture user, title, link, and
> body of the post being shared with a greasemonkey extension that works
> with reader
User is good -- but is it a google user id (good) or a string name
(bad) or an email address (possibly good)?
could have gone user id here but I couldn't think of a scenario where using email would break something
Title is good -- but there's also the title of the feed it came from,
which I think you're not grabbing (yet)
Link is good -- but is it a link to the original item, the original
web site, or the original feed file (RSS)?
Body may or may not be good. Without tricks like cross-domain POST you
can't send the whole body, which led to bugs in Emmanuel's script like
posts getting cut off in the middle of multibyte letters. If we[2] do
send up content text we should be clear whether it's supposed to be
- full body text of original item
- an excerpt or quotation
- a note -- fully original content written by the sharer
Missing is some link to the original item as Google Reader knows about
it -- an item id, or a [item+sharer] dyad, or even [item+sharer+tag]
since it might be cool for one person to have many feeds, split by
topic and/or security (who can see / subscribe to it).
The link to the item is important since it allows the old Reader
feature of showing an item once, then "comments on this item shared by
Alice", then "comments on this item shared by Bob".
Currently sharebro.org allows you to individually subscribe to a
> My next steps were to be to integrate the same 'shared feeds' with
> people's google plus feeds so they had the option of how they wanted
> to share but either way you could see their posts back in Google
> reader.
single friend's public G+ posts (via plu.sr). Not ideal in many ways,
and leaves open many questions, e.g.:
- Should the G+ posts be folded in to the main shares feed or appear
as a separate feed?
"Alex's Shared Items" vs. "Alex's Plus Posts"
- If the latter, should the feeds be grouped under the same folder?
"Shares" vs. "Posts"
> The Groups functionality is not yet in the plus API or I wouldWhat are Groups? Are they like Circles?
> be using that as well.
What app would you use for that? We'd have to contact the app
> Also sharing directly from android/iphone is
> high on my list.
developer and provide them an API.
I was going to write it. Brand it however we want and have it show up in the global share menu on android. If you want I can start on this while I ramp up on ruby
In one of my current careers I am a Ruby teacher. I would be happy to
> My ruby experience is unfortunately minimal, but I'm like to pick it
> up quickly as I'd really like to see this project work, or maybe put
> some of my other skills to use
start a new thread on learning Ruby and point you to some of my work,
e.g. http://testfirst.org/learn_ruby
This is awesome I'm going to run through it in the next few days.
I have a decent chunk of time this week I can dedicate, please let me know where you can use me.
- A
[1] Twitter, Tumblr, Posterous, Facebook, Delicious, and Plus all had
to make decisions about what a "share" (also a "reshare" or "retweet")
actually is, data-schema-wise. And now so do we! :-)
[2] "we" can mean either "we who are writing sharebro.org" or "we who
are writing any of these sharing systems" or even "we who are writing
Feed Reader apps (like hivemined.org) and want to either integrate
with a common API or do it all in our own database". I'm happy to get
all those "we"s into the conversation.
--
http://timbroder.com
http://nycendurance.com
Alex Chaffee
Currently sharebro.org allows you to individually subscribe to a
single friend's public G+ posts (via plu.sr). Not ideal in many ways,
and leaves open many questions, e.g.:
- Should the G+ posts be folded in to the main shares feed or appear
as a separate feed?
"Alex's Shared Items" vs. "Alex's Plus Posts"
- If the latter, should the feeds be grouped under the same folder?
"Shares" vs. "Posts"
Ideally we'd be able to determine the difference between the two. I think having them separate would be helpful, but at the same time if someone doesn't install our plugin and uses the built in sharing, I'd want those to show up under Shares rather then posts
> The Groups functionality is not yet in the plus API or I wouldWhat are Groups? Are they like Circles?
> be using that as well.
I meant circles sorry. In some of the API discussions they are calling them groups.
What app would you use for that? We'd have to contact the app
> Also sharing directly from android/iphone is
> high on my list.
developer and provide them an API.
I was going to write it. Brand it however we want and have it show up in the global share menu on android. If you want I can start on this while I ramp up on ruby
In one of my current careers I am a Ruby teacher. I would be happy to
> My ruby experience is unfortunately minimal, but I'm like to pick it
> up quickly as I'd really like to see this project work, or maybe put
> some of my other skills to use
start a new thread on learning Ruby and point you to some of my work,
e.g. http://testfirst.org/learn_ruby
This is awesome I'm going to run through it in the next few days.
I have a decent chunk of time this week I can dedicate, please let me know where you can use me.
Tim Broder
Currently sharebro.org allows you to individually subscribe to a
single friend's public G+ posts (via plu.sr). Not ideal in many ways,
and leaves open many questions, e.g.:
- Should the G+ posts be folded in to the main shares feed or appear
as a separate feed?
"Alex's Shared Items" vs. "Alex's Plus Posts"
- If the latter, should the feeds be grouped under the same folder?
"Shares" vs. "Posts"
Ideally we'd be able to determine the difference between the two. I think having them separate would be helpful, but at the same time if someone doesn't install our plugin and uses the built in sharing, I'd want those to show up under Shares rather then posts
Wait, there is no built in sharing any more. And I think your answer just restated the dilemma:Where one human can emit one or more share feeds -- including but not limited to Reader "broadcast" items, G+ posts, a custom twitter feed, delicious, any of these new "put your shares here" feed servers popping up alongside userscripts like yours and Emmanuel's......should those all go in one massive Shares folder, or separate folders per feed source, or both?
I think separate, half the reason I started my work was I didn't want to sift through lolcatz when reading through developer friend's shared items that are usually just tech related (As i would have to to see what they shared on G+)
> The Groups functionality is not yet in the plus API or I wouldWhat are Groups? Are they like Circles?
> be using that as well.
I meant circles sorry. In some of the API discussions they are calling them groups.You mean G+ API discussions?I bet they're all on Google Groups. Heh.What app would you use for that? We'd have to contact the app
> Also sharing directly from android/iphone is
> high on my list.
developer and provide them an API.
I was going to write it. Brand it however we want and have it show up in the global share menu on android. If you want I can start on this while I ramp up on ruby
I'm not an android user and don't know what the global share menu is but that sounds good to me!
In the google reader app if you long press on an article title or menu->share, that menu above will show up. I'm thinking have an entry in there for ShareBros which would hit your api.
Only downside so far is that we might only have access to the link at that point, I'll have to dig into it
In one of my current careers I am a Ruby teacher. I would be happy to
> My ruby experience is unfortunately minimal, but I'm like to pick it
> up quickly as I'd really like to see this project work, or maybe put
> some of my other skills to use
start a new thread on learning Ruby and point you to some of my work,
e.g. http://testfirst.org/learn_ruby
This is awesome I'm going to run through it in the next few days.
I have a decent chunk of time this week I can dedicate, please let me know where you can use me.
I really appreciate the offers for help. At this point i think I need testers and design advice --- like this very thread!
- A
[1] Twitter, Tumblr, Posterous, Facebook, Delicious, and Plus all had
to make decisions about what a "share" (also a "reshare" or "retweet")
actually is, data-schema-wise. And now so do we! :-)
[2] "we" can mean either "we who are writing sharebro.org" or "we who
are writing any of these sharing systems" or even "we who are writing
Feed Reader apps (like hivemined.org) and want to either integrate
with a common API or do it all in our own database". I'm happy to get
all those "we"s into the conversation.
--
http://timbroder.com
http://nycendurance.com
Tim Broder
Just saw your other email, it would have to do some of this processing whether that's serverside/phone side would be up for discussion
It sends up a few pieces of information, including the href of the
original item in the feed. I can then use the "feed-finder" API call
to get the href of the full feed, then use *another* API call to get
the feed as Google-processed Atom XML. From there I can find the item
whose href we got during the first send_to call (so many calls ago).
And then finally, from there, I can get all the information I might
need to add it to a "real" feed.
Alex Chaffee
>>> the global share menu on android. If you want I can start on this while I
>>> ramp up on ruby
Sounds fine to me!
>> A lot of apps in android have access to the share menu (looks like this ->
>> http://bit.ly/v6o7vM)
>> In the google reader app if you long press on an article title or
>> menu->share, that menu above will show up. I'm thinking have an entry in
>> there for ShareBros which would hit your api.
>> Only downside so far is that we might only have access to the link at that
>> point, I'll have to dig into it
Yeah, the saving grace for using Send To was that they pass the source
feed url as well as the original item url.
> Just saw your other email, it would have to do some of this processing
> whether that's serverside/phone side would be up for discussion
> It sends up a few pieces of information, including the href of the
> original item in the feed. I can then use the "feed-finder" API call
> to get the href of the full feed, then use *another* API call to get
> the feed as Google-processed Atom XML. From there I can find the item
> whose href we got during the first send_to call (so many calls ago).
> And then finally, from there, I can get all the information I might
> need to add it to a "real" feed.
That's what I did! Source code at
https://github.com/alexch/sharebro/blob/master/lib/send_to.rb
(for the moment -- I'm a refactoring maniac)
--
Alex Chaffee - al...@cohuman.com - http://alexch.github.com
Stalk me: http://friendfeed.com/alexch | http://twitter.com/alexch |
http://alexch.tumblr.com
Tim Broder
Something I was having issues with though, if you have the reader id of an article, have you been able to get its atom or xml representation?
Also, I'm going to Google on Thursday night for a hackathon
http://googleappsdeveloper.blogspot.com/2011/11/join-us-at-google-apps-developer.html
If you have any questions you want me to ask, let me know
--
The Sharebro Google Group: for http://sharebro.org and related development
http://groups.google.com/group/sharebro for archives and options
Emmanuel Pire
Emmanuel