weekly launch #20: crowd funding appeal, reloaded

[Michiel de Jong]

Hi!

So these weekly reports will now be more about what was finished during the current week than what was being worked on. That way, we make sure we publish only things that we consider more or less finished, and not things that are, in the negative sense, still being worked on. ;) So although this week we also worked on things like node.js, owncloud, browserid, etcetera (see below), what we're publishing is the relaunch of the donations campaign. Yay! :)

As you can see on http://www.unhosted.org/ we recorded a video. The first scene with the cool truck was filmed at Lohmühle (an artist community that was built on land where the Berlin wall used to stand). The rest is in and outside Betahaus, one of Silicon Kotti's famous co-working spaces, where Javier, Kenny and I tend to work during the daytime. We also filmed in 4 or 5 other places, but those all had problems (mainly with the sound). It was a lot more work than we thought to get acceptable sound and acceptable lighting at the same time. That's why every scene is in a different place. I used Pitivi and Oggconverter for the post-production. I didn't want to spend more than one day on it. In the end we just subtitled it to make sure you can understand what's said, and that way you can also watch it if you don't have headphones handy.

Also, the subtitles can be translated and crowd sourced, thanks to Universal Subtitles, an awesome project that I had heard of via Drumbeat. Thanks to Vejeta for browser testing and to Dodo for also pointing me to Browserling.com, a handy tool for cross-browser testing.

So yeah, 15 days left to get an Unhosted Crowd Angel T-shirt! And this time, you can also donate via bank transfer. So you don't have to go through paypal anymore.

Spread the word! :)

Other stuff this week:

- we realized (thanks, edwincheese) that we probably don't want to go through the hassle of setting up browsermail right now, because hopefully browserid.org will soon start offering support for primaries. I'll write more about BrowserId, and how i think it fits into unhosted, soon.

- we want to try to be in OwnCloud 2.0, which is going beta this week, so we want to work on that quickly, probably.

- we talked about whether we should support proprietary APIs as well as open standards

- we continued to work on the port to node.js (see the 'syncStorage' branch in http://github.com/unhosted/unhosted if you want to help with code review, debugging, etc).

- we applied for funding from nlnet. it would be a great help to get to our 42000 euros financing goal.

cheers,

Michiel

[Thad Guidry]

I had to Shift F5 (hard refresh) in order to see the new video appear.

And since I now see that Michiel is blond haired.... I take back everything I ever said. ;)

--
-Thad
http://www.freebase.com/view/en/thad_guidry

[Michiel de Jong]

On Tue, Aug 2, 2011 at 3:14 PM, Thad Guidry <thadg...@gmail.com> wrote:

I had to Shift F5 (hard refresh) in order to see the new video appear.

i've seen some problems loading it in chrome as well. I changed the pageload order now, so it should display the entire page correctly first, then load in the subtitles menus, and then the video content.

 

And since I now see that Michiel is blond haired.... I take back everything I ever said. ;)

You know what they say about blonds...

  ... they have more fun! ;)