Introducing Ohloh Journaling

eh cool stuff ;-)

its like twitter but way more "professional" ;-)

Clever, I'm curious to see how people will start using this.

Possible future directions?

• update journals by mail
• support IRC on top of Jabber

@Jason Allen Well I never and will use twitter. I just know what it is..

yeah and keep it technical otherwise we will have a mess here...

Our next integration point will be IRC

that's sweet!

oh my goodness that looks sexy.

Now what you really need to do is figure out how to integrate with with the RSS feed pulling stuff so blog posts elsewhere can be used as journal fodder :p

Please make any message prefixed with the exclamation mark not published on the website. :) That way, someone typing "!hel" instead of "!help" by mistake would not generate weird journal entries ... :)

So can you "introduce the feature" with words? I really can't use video as a source of information - just tell us about it!

Apart from an introduction - just how do you plan to "keep it technical"? Spammers are constantly on the lookout for new venues...

@Jason, Ok, will wait for more documentation (as in "words"). ;)

You 2-phase approach sounds good - as long as you keep on top of it. Watching Twitter I'm somewhat worried, while GetSatisfaction does have a reporting system (a link on every post).

Finally, how about an API? I *do* use Twitter, and don't see myself "journaling" the same things in two places. Now Twitter has an API and I could easily build a script that picks up my latest tweets and repurposes them (in fact I'm planning to do something like that for a different purpose anyway). I could pick up a "code" and send such filtered tweets back to Ohloh; now I could fake a form post (if you have a form!) but an API would be a cleaner way to do it.

@Jason, It seems project link send to an invalid page. If I prefix with #project (in my case #NuFW) generated link is not sending to a valid page.

@Jason, I'd just do my own "bridging". I'd prefix a tweet with a code (say 'ohl:') and my program would pick up only those updates (minus prefix) to send on to Ohloh. What it boils down to then is that I type it only in one location (Twitter) but if I make the decision it should go to Ohloh as well, I'd add the prefix. So whether I type here, or in Twitter, it's still my decision that it's content for Ohloh (as well).

What I type in Twitter would be all my things, I'll only filter some of that (by prefix) to also go to another destination (another I have in mind would be updating my Travel Blog from my phone via Twitter ;)).

My Twitter update "Sunny this afternoon" might then appear in my Travel blog (if appropriately prefixed), but not in Ohloh.

Clear as mud?

@Jason: I'm waiting for IRC integration. +1

@Jason that's brilliant - http://twitter.com/ohl now has {its|his|her} first follower: http://twitter.com/marjoleink

Maybe you could set up something like having a field for Twitter (etc..??) account in your profile and then @ohl could start following those (or just use their API); that way you'd have a reasonable way to limit it to Ohloh users. Or ask for some verification code maybe.

So... pretty soon, when waiting for a train I have this brilliant idea for #WikkaWiki, type it into my phone, send it to Twitter - and it will appear here. Who needs a desk? :D

Of course _my_ little program is waiting for an available timeslot, too, so no hurry - a little brainstorming is fine for now.

Jason, I'm eager to see Ohloh roll out all these new features. I second JavaWoman's request of a proper API. The reason is the following. Now that you are building clients to interact in real time with the Ohloh DB, I see a number of potential extensions that would make the Ohloh bots much more powerful, were there an actual API to program against.

You could then query the Ohloh bot from Jabber, IRC or Eclipse not just to retrieve journal information but also fresh project and/or developer information. E.g. where is this user located or under what license is this project distributed or even what's the main URL of this project.

OK this maybe sounds like science fiction, just tossing my 2p in.

some random ideas about lookup commands

projects

• !license [project] (main license)
• !lang [project] (main lang)
• !commits [project] (# of commits)
• !lastcommit [project] (who+when+comment)
• !loc [project]
• !size [project] (size of the codebase)
• !rating [project] (aggregate ohloh rating)
• !devs [project] (# of committers)
• !users [project] (# of stacks)
• !homepage [project]

users

• !about [username]
• !contrib [username] (list of projects)
• !kudorank [username]
• !commits [username] (# of commits)
• !where [username] (location)

general

• !usearch [string] (users)
• !psearch [string] (project)

@dartar: wow! (or should that be: !wow ?)

Nice feature addition, thanks! I've got two requests/comments:

1. why is the whole news text printed in bold face? IMHO, the dark/bold text of the journal entries is visually too heavy, makes the text hard to read, and kinda ruins the otherwise nice page layout.
2. I'd like to include HTTP links similar to this. Even better, besides links, support for some other Markdown markup (e.g. phrase emphasis, lists, images, blockquotes, code spans, preformatted code blocks) in Journal entries would be nice!

@jason: many thanks for the informative comments, and for the quick formatting fix! IMHO, the visual appearance of the journal entries is much better now, and they now blend nicely with the rest of the site layout. Great!

I didn't know about the '##' trick, that's helpful, thanks! I guess it would be nice to include this info in the Journal FAQ, but I'm sure you'll update the FAQ as soon as you can.

I agree with you that it makes a lot of sense to unify the markup in forums and journals. Offering support for a well-known markup language (such as Markdown, Textile or BBCode) obviously has benefits, but I see that this may cause markup "collisions".

I also understand that many of the markup choices remain unused by the majority of users. However, for those who know about it and want to use it, it's an essential feature.

Personally, I'd be more than happy if you could at least add support for inline links (such as '[link] (http://url.com/)') in journal entries. Super nice would be if you'd further allow to use the same markup as is listed in the Markdown "quick help side bar" (that's next to this forum post's entry form) -- sans the header markup, of course.

@Jason: It would be nice if Ohloh API was available on #ohloh IRC channel via ohlohbot, something like fsbot on #emacs channel,. I think that '!command' syntax would work on IRC channel (via IRC bot) too.

As to commands: project summary (perhaps first few lines of description) and project homepage, so one could check what is the project they talk about about.

Jason Allen: You mention that Markdown is available (but not being used) in the forums. I completely agree with that that it's not being used, but suspect that it's because people don't know about it.

• There is no hint / link on the "new post" or "edit post" pages as to how to use it.

• The text explaining it is below the text entry box (and completely off my screen) when I reply to a post.

• There is no preview button in the forums (which encourages people to experiment once they have worked out that markup is possible). Yes I know that posts can be edited.

• The layout of the articles page is better (help beside the text entry box), but until just now I'd not realised that articles and forums had different layout...

This is all with firefox 3.0b5 (hardy)

cheers stuart

If you're going to integrate with Twitter, then keep in mind that # (single hash) is used to informally 'tag' things there for the #hashtags service. I have no idea whether double hashes would work with that.

(I have -- even more informally -- started to use it a bit but due to Twitter's current scaling problems it's temporarily non-functional in that it can't pick up new tweets. Still, you can see what it's supposed to do as a result of my lone Twitter voice about Xaraya here. While it's down (or rather Twitter's IM interface is), I can't test double hashes either...)

@jason: I just sent a tweet to @ohl, with "links" to both #xaraya and #wikka - that should give you something to play with. ;)

(not testing, real info in there)

Twitter was cool.

Twitter is crumbling now - not just downtime (that's for everyone), but inability to see more than one or two pages of your time line for many, or not being able to see your own archive, new anti-spam measures overshooting so many people find they cannot add more people to follow ... and the latest: many people losing massive numbers of followers and followees.

So now what? identi.ca is what. Superficially it looks like a twitter clone, but there's a big difference that should appeal to the Ohloh community: it is:

1. Open Platform
2. Open Source
3. Open Content (CC-BY)

Launched just a few weeks ago, it's taking off fast, thanks to its being open source. And identi.ca's daddy, Evan Prodromou, is as open as Twitter is closed: if there's a problem you'll hear about it from him, on identi.ca itself. New features are being rolled out at a fast pace. And it has an API that's compatible with that of Twitter.

So Jason, I would urge you to consider identi.ca integration rather than Twitter integration. Ohloh is about Open Source, after all, so identi.ca is a perfect fit.

And if you're an OSS developer reading this: you should be on identi.ca! Forget about Twitter already, it's been downhill for weeks there.

I'm mostly here now: marjoleink (and busy programming my own little client. ;)) When you arrive, say hi! and I'll follow you back.

P.S. identi.ca runs on OS software called laconica. ;)

Now see if you can find Twitter's software here. 'Nuf said.

Suggestion: there should be a Twitter Ohloh account to follow. :)