LiveDemo Imminent

Not much else to say… we’ll be keepin’ it real over at PostFresh.com starting at 7:45pm eastern. Hope to see you all there!

Late Nights and Snags

Things are still on pace for tomorrow night’s LiveBlog, although last night was a late one. Every developer has come across a time when something stops working for what seems like no reason at all. Being mostly logical people, developers realize that it’s not possible for code to work and then stop working if nothing has changed… but finding what changed or, just as importantly, why that change matters, can be a stressful, frustrating experience.

Last night I was having a problem where a javascript function would not complete, but it would also not throw an error. It just seemed to die, leaving half of the function uncompleted. It ended up being a problem with a javascript for…in loop. The for…in loop iterates over every member of an object… every single one. This includes inherited members and (I think) methods. I’m not sure where, exactly, this caused the problem, but it looks like there are parts of the prototype/script.aculo.us library that, if they fail in a certain way, fail silently.

I also ended up having to re-tool one of the display algorithms because it choked when using the display effects on a large number of new items. Those things seem to be working now, and features are slowly being implemented in preparation for tomorrow’s demo.

Public Demo & Plans for Beta

Public Demo: Jan 7th
We’ve reached a point in the development that I think we’re ready to flip another switch. On the 7th we’re having a public demo of the capabilities in the form of a LiveBlog of the GMAC Bowl. Because I’m not very funny, we’ve rounded up a venerable (and funny) LiveBlogging expert from Every Day Should Be Saturday to take care of things for us. It should be a pretty good time and for those who care more about PostFresh and less about college football (in general) or that bowl game (in specific), it’ll be a good example of the features.

Plans for Beta
After the demo, if things go well, we’ll spend a few days squashing some bugs and fine-tuning before we start opening up for beta testing. Things are still subject to change, but we anticipate that the early stages of the beta will work like this:

If you have an event you want to liveblog, you’ll let us know in advance (there will be a form) and we’ll slowly open the nozzle number, frequency, and size of the blogs so that we can keep an eye on performance and bandwidth.

Once we’re satisfied that performance is where it should be and our host is satisfied that it won’t take down the whole noc, we’ll start into a period where beta testers will be able to start events at the drop of a hat, as they please, and we’ll increase the number of hosts until we’re happy with where the software is, at which point we’ll release it to the public. Beyond the very first stage of this, we have no solid time-line.

Lazy Registration

Today I finished up adding support for a kind of “Lazy Registration” by way of OpenID and TypeKey (as I mentioned before). Anonymous users aren’t going to be allowed to comment, but folks will be allowed to login with an OpenID or TypeKey and that will allow them to comment. At any point they’ll be able to convert those identities into full-fledged PostFresh accounts. Two things will be unavailale to the lazy users: ratings and “remember me” for logins. The former a precaution to avoid gaming and the latter a function of the way these authentication mechanisms work.

The only thing I’m having trouble with, at present, is getting things to work with LiveJournal. For starters, it seems that LiveJournal sees requests for ‘http://xxx.livejournal.com/’ and ‘http://xxx.livejournal.com’ as two different identities, and disallows the latter. The former returns an invalid authentication according to my library, but running the diagnostic at OpenIDEnabled doesn’t show any problems. Hopefully this doesn’t mean I’m going to need to switch to one of the more complex libraries.

Tomorrow I’ll have more information about the first public demo.

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.