External Authentication

One of the plans is to allow users to login with as many different authentication services as possible, not just by registering for a PostFresh account. Today I spent some time reading up on the offerings from Google, Yahoo, Six Apart, and OpenID.

Slightly closer looks at Google’s and Yahoo’s authentication services led me to believe that they are primarily for accessing Google’s Calendars and Spreadsheets, and Yahoo Photos respectively. While these could be used for Authentication anyway, I decided, for now, to focus on the two services that are designed as authentication systems: TypeKey and OpenID.

It didn’t take long to find a little library that handled TypeKey from Ishinao (warning: very little english on that site). Two files, one class, and everything works as it should. (I had to port it from PHP5 to PHP4, but that was quick work) OpenID was a little bigger challenge. It seems that most of the implementations of the OpenID API are huge, bloated, and more complex than I was hoping for. OpenID seems to want to steer people towards the one particular library, which happens to be the largest, most bloated of them. I settled on this one, which comprises one file, which is well commented and documented. Quick. Easy. And it works.

We’ll revisit using Yahoo and Google libraries some other time, unless I run across some clever way to use them as authentication gateways.

Newfound Dislike for Opera

Tonight after completing the transition from mootools to prototype/script.aculo.us that I discussed yesterday I fired up a copy of Opera. Bad news. The version 1.6.5 version of Scriptaculous with v1.50 RC1 prototype dies a horrible, nasty death in Opera. It seems like virtually every prototype function call generates some sort of fatal error.  Specifically, using the PeriodicalExecuter didn’t work.

message: Statement on line 141: Type mismatch (usually a non-object value used where an object is required)

Opera did a lot of complaining about type errors and things like that. Bizarre. It looks like there are a few bugs in the system about Script.aculo.us/Opera compatibility… for now that’s just going to be the way it is. Later we can worry about work-arounds for Opera. For now if it works in Firefox, IE 6/7, and Safari that’s going to be good enough.

Javascript Libraries

There’s not much new to talk about in terms of development, things are progressing more or less on some sort of schedule, we’re hoping to be ready for a public demo in another week or so. Hopefully in time for a LiveBlog of either the International Bowl (between Cincinnati and Western Michigan) or the GMAC Bowl (Southern Miss and Ohio).

The most notable thing that’s happened in development is that I’ve finally had enough of the Mootools Library. It’s sleek, it’s sexy, it’s small… but it’s so poorly documented that I spend more time guessing how it works than actually coding. That’s a problem. It doesn’t help that the demos seem to have disappeared from the documentation wiki.

Tech Preview Wrap-up

The pre-alpha demo went off with very few hitches, but wasn’t particularly well attended, so we’re posting a short screen-cast of the bare-bones functionality. Take a look!

We should have a fully-public demo in a few weeks, but if anyone is interested in taking a private tour in the mean time, feel free to contact me via email and we can set something up.

Preview On For Tomorrow

Tomorrow at 3:30pm eastern time the main page will be replaced with a login prompt. Invitees should have already received their login information. If not, send me an email (pete.holiday@gmail.com).

The final design and branding is still being worked on and will be implemented early in January. The preview will be focusing on functions and, as a result, will not be as pretty as the final product. While the preview will also be a little light on killer features, the primary goal is to serve as a more easily understandable explanation of what, exactly, liveblogging will become once PostFresh launches.

Remote Blog Integration: One feature that will not be ready by the preview is the ability to host events on your own blog. PostFresh will allow you to insert a small piece of code into one of your own blog entries which will basically embed a PostFresh event right there on your blog. When it’s all over, you’ll be able to to download the event transcript to toss into the blog entry. To make things even easier, PostFresh will also support a number of popular blog system APIs so that the whole process can be automated.

Showing Signs of Life

While there has been a lot of work going on behind the scenes, not much of it has seen the light of day. The site itself has been shouded behind a “coming soon” screen, and probably will be for a few more weeks.

Over the course of the coming week we’ll be putting the finishing touches on the core functionality in preparation for a pre-alpha technology preview. Invitations have been sent out, and it looks like we’ve got a solid group.

We’ll have more details about the preview up as we get them hammered out, and afterwards we’ll start discussing things in greater detail.