Pie Palace

For the past couple of weeks, Blogawa has been misbehaving. It’s been quietly ignoring posts from Perspective Ottawa. I use FeedWordPress to aggregate posts from around town, so this weekend I looked into it a little more seriously.

After I upgraded to the latest FeedWordPress, I started seeing errors like:

WP HTTP Error: Operation timed out after 10000 milliseconds with 48,382 bytes received

when I manually refreshed Perspective Ottawa’s feed. With a bit of digging, I discovered that there’s a default timeout of 10 seconds in the library FWP uses to download and parse RSS feeds. I’ve pinged the author about it, but in case you’re having a similar problem, here’s my fix:

1. Edit your-wordpress-directory/wp-content/plugins/feedwordpress/feedwordpress.php.
2. Search for function fetch. You should find the function near line 1407 (for FWP version 2010.0905).
3. Under the line $feed = new SimplePie();, add: $feed->set_timeout(25);.
4. When you’re done, your code should look something like:
   
5. Go to your blog’s Syndication admin page, and update your feeds. If you get PHP syntax errors, you made a mistake.

With that fix, FeedWordPress and I are now BFFs again.

The Web 2.0 dream is to be able to give something away while still making a living on it. That may work for Cory Doctorow, but for most of us, it’s untenable. The only mechanism I’ve seen for paying open source peeps for consumer-grade projects is donations. Paypal and Amazon both provide an ability to donate to a project, as does Pledgie, but I haven’t seen anything that makes donating easy.

Then I found Flattr. It allows donors to give micropayment-style donations to anyone with a web page (and a Flattr account). It makes life easier for donors because they choose how much they will give a month, and that amount is divided amongst their donees.

It isn’t perfect. The Flattr community is pretty sparse, and there’s no way to set a recurring Flattr, but they’re 90% of the way there. It’d be great if Canonical, vim, Parcellite, Google Chrome, kdenlive, and Guake accepted Flattrs.

If you’re looking for an invitation, hit me up with the contact form and I’ll hook you up.

(h/t Raphaël Hertzog)

I’ve always liked the idea of open source bounties. I want open source coders to be able to make money on what they do, so I like the idea of users banding together to pay for a feature. The only drawback is that I’ve never actually seen a bounty collected. As an experiment, I’ve picked a worthy project, and I’ll be matching donations to it that (a) link back to this post, and (b) total no more than €60, (c) comment here. So hit Cofundos and take my money! (Yes, I’m avoiding typing. But this is a minipost, so it doesn’t count.) UPDATE: I’d like to make clear that I’m only offering €60 in total, and that’s matching on any single donation made after the original date of this post (April 14, 9:00am-ish, EST). I also added (c) above, so that I don’t have to check the cofundos site.

As much as I try to avoid it, I occasionally get sucked into gadget marketing. The latest toy that has caught my eye is the Agora Pro made by Kogan¹. It’s specs are a laundry list of what I want in a phone:

• it runs Android,
  
• it has an FM receiver,
  
• it talks wifi,
  
• and it has a touch screen.

To top it off, the Canadian price after shipping is less than $375.

Now, if it just had a “democratically depose Stephen Harper” button, I’d pre-order one right now.

1. Okay, it probably isn’t made by Kogan, but it’s being marketed by Kogan, which is close enough for my purposes. (back)

I’d like to switch blogawa.ca to use more standard aggregation software (a) so that I don’t have to maintain the codebase, and (b) so that I can add microformat parsing to the aggregator so that other planet sites will be able to detect microformatted postings.

There only seem to be two popular planet implementations: Planet Planet which is written in python, features 9,503 loc and output generated by a templating engine; the other implementation is planet-php which is written in PHP, with 608 loc (plus 1202 lines of XSL, ugh), and features output generated by XSL.

Given my aversion to templating engines, my dislike of XSL, I seem to be stuck. I either bite a bullet, or I keep up the opensource tradition of forking, splitting, and generally reinventing the wheel. =(