Archive for the 'About ORBlogs' Category

So, lots of people have been asking about the progress, or lack thereof, with ORBlogs. Here’s a quick summary, and by quick summary I mean so mindnumbingly long that you’ll start feeling frustrated that weblogs exist in the first place.

Feel free to throw in your comments below. I’ll start by noting the most important issues first.

The Completely Pointless

We have undertaken a number of tasks that are seemingly orthogonal to the project, mostly as a reason to use the word orthogonal.

1. ORBlogs.org: We no-longer have use of the ORBlogs.com domain, so I have registered ORBlogs.org. Ever the helpful one, I’ve populated it with a completely pointless wiki page that is more confusing than functional. Did this step need to occur? Of course not, who cares if ORBlogs.org is registered? The real reason I did it is the hope that If there’s ever a formal organizational authority, I can sell them the domain name for riches and glory (or a pint of Rubinator).
2. @ORBlogs: Just so that we assure ourselves that our geekiness cannot be surpassed, we actually have a Twitter update account to post update to our fellow pasty-faced coders who hate sleep. Yeah, I know, that’s over the top. “What the hell are you updating Twitter for? Have you done anything yet?” Well of course we have! We made a Twitter account!
3. More @ORBLogs: Not geeky enough? There’s actually an Identi.ca account as well. What a pointless waste of time, especially since we haven’t quite gotten around to that because certain team members keep passing out (wimps).
4. Funding: Yes, a seemingly orthogonal path to getting the site up and actually running it is looking for witless people to dump upon our intrepid souls gobs and gobs of money. Yes, one could argue that it’s not important to look for funding sources now, but I’d argue that there are some people who can’t help directly with setting up the site and coding SQL queries in javascript. Those poor, lost, lonely, useless souls are just begging for reasons to forego sleep. Why not give them the thankless job of door-to-door “canvasing” of PDX neighborhoods at midnight? (Or, as one somewhat secret ORBlogs agent is doing, finding money through somewhat more realistic methods?)

The Somewhat Pointless

Some pursuits are slightly less pointless, being merely tangental to the overall cause.

1. This Blog: Do we need it? Of course not. It’s here to serve two purposes, really. The first is to make you try to say- three times, really fast: “The official Oregon Blogs Blog is at blog.orblogs.org.” The second is to see how much meaningless writing we can convince you to read before you get to the slightly less mindnumbing stuff at the end of articles such as this.
2. Google Groups: We’ve decided that it would be beneficial to overlap as many channels of communication as possible in an attempt to be as confusing as a Lawyer advertising conference. Therefore, we started a Google groups page where developers can get together and write posts that, tangentially at best, discuss development. (Personally, I think development proceeds best when individual files are emailed back and forth, but some crazy people want to try bleeding-edge new development techniques).
3. Friendfeed: What was incredibly pointed and helpful in the beginning has become somewhat less so. Mere moments after Paul’s Announcement, J-P Voillequé started a FriendFeed page to help keep us all abreast of the situation. The effort was somewhat overshadowed by later communications, but it was a beacon in a storm of chaos for a bit, and much appreciated. It’s still live as of this writing, but the Google Groups Email List has taken it’s place as the main comm stream.

The Fairly Un-Pointless

Before you get too far down the road of questioning the overall usefulness of weblogs as a communication platform, we’ll go ahead and tell you some of the somewhat useful information that you actually came for. There are a few things we’re doing that, believe it or not, actually involve rebuilding the ORBlogs website. Stunning, I know.

1. Database: AJ (i.e. The man of the hour) has taken the XML file from Paul Bausch and grokked it completely, spitting out a near complete list of blog feeds. He’s also coding up- by himself, while the rest of us selfishly sleep away our #afterhours- at least 8 different parsers so that we can get the data from feeds that return substandard or non-standard formatting (ironically, like this one).
2. Presentation: We have an initial presentation framework graciously donated by Patrick Lightbody. Called BigBark, it was initially coded up for a political aggregator. It comes complete with DIGG-style ranking and lots of other goodies. As of this writing, he’s “scrubbing” the code so that we can get it into our source control system. (Last time I tried to scrub my code, I completely shorted out my motherboard. Maybe too much soap?). Good luck Patrick.
3. Google Code: Speaking of data and presentation, there’s a Google Code page housing the source repository for the backend code. As soon as the presentation layer is cleaned, it’ll be housed there.
4. Server: It’s pretty amazing the number of people who’ve come out in support of the ORBlogs rescue effort. Two such people are David W. McKelvey and Robb Shecter of Lewis & Clark College. They have graciously gotten Lewis & Clark to front server space for the ORBlogs effort and are waiting merely for us to get on the ball with our framework so we can plug all the wires in and make it sparkle. Rumor has it thatall blogs listed on the site will be contacted monthly by the Louis & Clark Alumni Committee. (That’s just a rumor, right David?)

Finale (i.e. “The Good Part”)

Overall, the database is coming along quickly under AJ’s unrelenting assalt, and once we have Patrick’s BigBark running, we’ll dump the database, spit it out, and realize just how ridiculously broken a website can be. We’re hoping for later this week. Patrick’s mixing the soap very carefully.

Future Pointlessness

Got an Interesting idea? Cool Wordpress plugin? Let us know. You can help with the pointlessness by suggesting changes and functionality to the Blog, or the Twitter account.  We want to keep our media presence as kitch as possible so that people are convinced that we are total geeks. In the future, Oregon’ Favorite Floral Arranger will also help build a team of blog authors to make sure that people have plenty of ORBlogs to read while at work.

We also need, at some point, some sweet-ass graphics to convince the world that, well, we like sweet-ass graphics. Again, this project is somewhat tangental to the current coding effort, but utterly necessary to the sweet-ass graphics lovers of the ORBlogs team.

Future Pointedness

There are also ways that you can help actually do something. Head over to the Google Groups page. Until the presentation layer is up, it’s pretty quiet- but soon there’ll be plenty for you to do while you’re supposed to be sleeping.

Disclaimer

Oh, and just so you know, I was talking about chocolate donkeys. What we need are graphics representing donkeys made of chocolate. Those are the graphics we need. Not the other thing you were thinking of.

Remember: Chocolate donkeys.