webservice

Google Apps Script — Google Developers. Interesting - JavaScript scripting for Google Apps like GMail or GDocs and so. Doesn't look so uncool and now also has an Eclipse plugin to be able to edit the scripts offline.

Roundcube - Free and Open Source Webmail Software. Thanks to NSA, one starts to think again whether one does not want to handle mail oneself. Ok, one really does not want to, because sorting spam is no fun, but well, if one does want to, this might be a somewhat more modern variant of webmail solutions. In addition, one can integrate it into Owncloud via an app. Although this is really just an iframe integration - so do not expect to be able to use your address book together or something like that. Personally, I will probably stick with pushing my mail through Google and letting the NSA sort my spam. But contacts and calendars could soon end up on my owncloud. Even the file sync has become really good in the latest versions.

Tiny Tiny RSS Tutorial – Part 1: Installation & Configuration › Michael Sonntag. And for those who want to take a look at Tiny Tiny RSS, here is a nice description of the installation and usage, including integration into a blog and Android app.

Tiny Tiny RSS is my current favorite RSS feed reader after the Google Reader debacle, after I also looked into Feedly and others. The problem: I want to access the same database on my desktop and mobile device. And cross-platform. But unfortunately, all RSS readers are now going in different directions. Some go with Feedly, others with Feedbin, and yet others throw in the towel (like the Goodnews programmer). So I need something I can somewhat trust - and what could be closer than self-hosted open source software? Tiny-Tiny-RSS even has an official Android app, which is also open source (but can also be purchased as a paid version to support it). For iOS, I'll use the mobile interface for now, as I don't have an active iOS device in use at the moment, and on the desktop, I use the web environment, which is surprisingly usable. Let's see how it all works after some longer operation, but it looks good for now.

OX Documents: Online-Office-Suite als Open Source - Golem.de. Another candidate worth taking a look at - especially since the OX App Suite can almost completely replace Google Apps. However, I would then have to handle spam filtering myself (or simply route it through Google and have it sent directly to me, as there was an option for that). It somewhat conflicts with what Owncloud does, so I'll have to see which of the two services is actually more interesting for me. But maybe file syncing will also come to OX App Suite soon.

Newsblur is one of the candidates to replace Google Reader that can also be self-hosted. However, it has somewhat broader requirements. Still worth a look? But first, let's wait and see what happens in the reader app market, because without an Android and OSX app that syncs with it, it's not very interesting for me.

Sync API - Dropbox. Finally, a normal sync for Android and iOS. So far, you had to program the sync more or less yourself, but I like this much better when you can simply write local files on mobile devices and the sync then happens automatically in the background.

Thingiverse - Digital Designs for Physical Objects. And you can go there to search for inspiration and starter models. Presumably also on the other usual 3D warehouses, but then you have to convert the models to STL first (and make various preparations to the models so that they become printable).

Tinkercad - Mind to design in minutes. Wow. There's even 3D design software for 3D printers that runs completely in the web. Okay, since you can boot Linux in the browser, nothing should surprise me anymore, but it's still cool ...

End of Chumby as we know it... Page 1 - Chumby.com - chumbysphere forum. The cloud is not always a good idea - I also have one of these Chumby devices at home, but if the rescue plan here doesn't work, it won't even be usable as an alarm clock. It looks like I should hurry up and root the device to get local software running on it myself. Basically, the Chumby is just a small embedded Linux system with a few hardware sensors and an integrated touchscreen (well, more of a squeeze screen - it's as imprecise as the first generations of Palm Pilots were after one year of use).

imwilsonxu/fbone · GitHub. Not so uncool at all. I'm actually a Djangonaut, but Flask has always interested me a bit, as it's quite a good basis for more compact projects. With the integration of HTML5 Boilerplate and CSS Bootstrap, this could also be interesting for small web projects with frontend. Although Flask offers enough room to grow to realize larger things - it's just that for larger things I often still reach for Django. But especially for the typical web service with additional HTML presentation of the data, this can really be practical.

Cloud Storage Programming Interface - Store everything. This looks quite interesting - a C# library for accessing various cloud storage. It also supports Dropbox and, most importantly, it supports Mono for Android and MonoTouch, which I could use as a basis to rewrite my small Android project in C# for testing.

ownCloud’s Latest Community Edition Adds Video Streaming, and Easy Mounting of Third-Party Storage. Sounds nice, especially the mounting of cloud storage. I wonder if it only resides in the cloud and is passed through, or if it is also additionally downloaded to the server. But I could maybe play around with my small installation. The improved sync also sounds good, as the previous one is really a bit strange with its regular timestamp file check.

Streak - CRM in your Inbox. Strange - that thing completely passed me by. Ok, maybe that's because they call it a CRM and that's boring by definition for me. But in reality, it's not a CRM at all, but rather a kind of spreadsheet with mail integration and filters - you can define rules and sort mails into boxes and evaluate, filter, sort all these things according to various criteria, whatever. And the whole thing is integrated into GMail, directly into the web platform (which of course means it only works there and not, for example, in the mobile clients). And suddenly the whole thing is interesting again, because if you deal with larger quantities of email-controlled workflows, you can use something like this well. At least if you have your emails in GMail. Their architecture is also not uninteresting, as they use pretty much everything Google has to offer.

Jetstrap - The Bootstrap Interface Builder. Maybe check it out - with this you can design Bootstrap sites in their structure without having to fiddle with the CSS yourself. The output can then be used as a basis for your own website. Looks quite nice.

David Waring - Remember the Milk CLI. I switched from OmniFocus to RTM because OmniFocus is a data silo on Apple systems - and especially for tasks, I don't want to be tied to a platform but be able to move to any arbitrary one. And RTM is the only service I have found so far where you can define recurring events with appropriate power (specifically, the "repeat after X units after checking off" is important). Well, here there is a Python CLI solution with which you can even use the Linux command line for your tasks. And with that, todo.sh is probably done for me, because that way everything ends up in a database.

Features | ownCloud.org. Hmm, now I just need iOS access to the OwnCloud and I think I have a longer installation session ahead of me. I probably won't be able to completely give up Dropbox or similar services (and I don't want to), but maybe it will be enough to switch back to the free version of Dropbox if I only manage the large amounts of data on my own server.

TeamPostgreSQL - PostgreSQL Web Admin GUI Tools. Looks good, a web interface for administering PostgreSQL databases that comes close to PGAdminIII and doesn't look as spartan as PHPPGAdmin. However, I have problems accessing databases from a project - it seems not everything is quite cleanly implemented, especially in the handling of sequences. Therefore, I can't say anything yet about whether it is performant. The whole thing comes with a Java-Tomcat server, so you can install and run it locally directly.

Map of Life. Interactive map based on Google Maps that can display the distribution of animal species.

sametmax/0bin. Interesting approach to circumvent the problems of pastebin hosting. With pastebin-like sites, the problem is that users post all kinds of content and the server operator can quickly be held liable. 0bin tries to shift this problem so that the operator cannot know what is in the pastebins, as they are stored encrypted and the encryption is done by the client via JavaScript. This works, of course, only if the judges also accept that the server operator cannot know what is going on - and not, for example, argue that he should then just install different pastebin software where he can know and still hold him responsible. Certainly an interesting approach, especially the idea of putting the key for the encryption in the hash of the URL (i.e., the part after the # in the address) and thus having a functioning URL, but still not providing the server with the key (since the hash of a URL is only used by the client and not communicated to the server).

Hotcanvas: Realtime coding. I'm a fan of Processing-like environments, this one comes quite close, but runs as an interactive environment and looks quite nice. Ok, there are probably quite a few of these things by now, but still, I like this kind of stuff.

ownCloud.org | Your Cloud, Your Data, Your Way!. I will definitely keep an eye on this, because once the OSX desktop client and the iOS client are available, this will be a clear alternative to Google Drive, Dropbox, or SkyDrive for me. After all, I already have my own server (classic Ehschonda solution), and I would only use Dropbox for integrating various iOS applications and then integrate their content into my own server and bring it to my desktops. Because no matter how good a cloud provider is (and so far Dropbox is one of the clearly better ones), my own server gives me more trust in the end.

arskom/rpclib - GitHub. Since I recently had soaplib, this is the successor to it. The colleagues have probably already gained some experience with it (positive experience).

Mellow Morning » Django Facebook 3.2 – Simple image upload and wall posts. Since FB is unfortunately still the only social network with a serious API (sorry, but G+ doesn't have a serious API as long as they only offer a level like RSS-over-JSON and the Diaspora API is unfortunately still internal - but Diaspora is in alpha anyway, so there will certainly be more in the beta), you have to deal with it. And the new features of django-facebook look like they could ease some of the pain (and maybe one or the other interesting toy could become interesting for me).

About Weavrs. Social Media Bots. Defined by keywords, they run around and simulate a defined personality. Can be further controlled by filters and topics. And here someone who is now getting started with the bots and releases several "personalities" on G+ in response to "Real Name Requirement". Of course, this won't convince Google that the Real Name Policy is completely bananas. But it's still funny.

Diaspora* Advanced Sharer. Another Diaspora share button, this one is hosted on github (and can therefore also be "cloned" for self-hosting). It offers a selection of pods that you have used - not just a single pod. Therefore interesting for those who are on multiple pods.

Service to share on any Diaspora* pod [[Basshero.org]]. Well blogged, this already looks quite neat. A Share-on-Diaspora button that first asks the user for their home pod and then stores this in a cookie, so that this Share button can really work with all pods. Maybe I could rebuild this into a Wordpress plugin and integrate it into my blog - then everything comes from my own blog, so there are no problems like with the other Share/Like/Tweet buttons (and it doesn't need to be as complicated as with FB, Twitter or Google+).

oryx-editor - Web-based Graphical Business Process Editor. Just looked this up for a colleague and it looks quite interesting - I should take a closer look at what it actually does. This could be quite exciting for some work projects.

websites - How do I suppress the address bar in mobile Safari? - Apple - Stack Exchange. Bookmarked because I just want to remember this - it's quite practical for web applications if the silly address bar is not there (at least if you work with Single-Page-Applications that do most of the work on the client)

django-tastypie - GitHub. This sounds very interesting as an alternative to django-piston - for example, it automatically provides all CRUD features via different APIs without any programming. This is particularly interesting for projects that are more focused on web apps (and where larger parts of the code run locally in the client in JavaScript).

Offline Web Applications - Dive Into HTML5. It was somehow better described in the first glance than in other sources I have read so far. Therefore, I have blogged it.

Social Opt In « WordPress Plugins. Maybe interesting - Heise prepares its own code, but this seems like an alternative. Or you take this as a basis and then mix in the Heise code when it's ready (it looks really useful in use and certainly has the advantage that Facebook is much more likely to accept something from Heise).

Cross-domain communications with JSONP, Part 1: Combine JSONP and jQuery to quickly build powerful mashups. Since I needed it for a colleague and therefore searched for it, I'll just bookmark it. JSONP is basically just a convention for JSON services that respond to a callback parameter by passing the generated JSON as a parameter to a function call and using the content of the callback parameter as the function name. This makes the data accessible from domains other than the one from which the actual script comes - normal AJAX does not allow this.

Installable Web Apps - Google Code. There you can find some background information on how to convert web applications into installable web applications or hosted apps. This allows you to use Chrome as a runtime for applications that behave very similarly to regular applications - Amazon's online Kindle is a great example. Programming is done in JavaScript, which is much less intimidating than it was a few years ago. As Packaged Apps, you can also do everything that Chrome Extensions can do (and can go beyond the scope of regular web applications).

Map Tunneling Tool. Cool - you can enter your location on a map and it will show you the antipodal point on the other side of the Earth. We are pretty much in the South Pacific, southeast of New Zealand. Spain has it good, they come out directly in New Zealand.

wsgi_lite. Since I sometimes program "raw" against WSGI, this is not entirely uninteresting for me - a slimmed-down WSGI that defines simpler calling conventions for middleware and applications and thus further reduces the code somewhat. For entire apps, it usually doesn't bring much, as you typically write apps with a web framework, which already eases this part for you.

BuddyPress.org. Just stumbled upon it again when it came to self-hosted social networks. BuddyPress somehow always flies under the radar, but it's quite an interesting development with all the features of WordPress - including, for example, all login integrations and similar. And there are also separate plugins for BuddyPress, such as the BuddyPress Media Plugin, with which you can create your own Flickr from a BuddyPress installation. And there are countless more things, up to commercial plugins for various purposes. And additionally, you can use all WordPress themes and build on them.

WSGID When your WSGI app becomes a nix daemon. Mongrel2 by Zed Shaw has interested me for quite some time, but the biggest drawback was that there are not many Python frameworks that work directly with Mongrel2. wsgid solves the problem, it is a WSGI server for Mongrel2 and can thus then connect frameworks that can run under WSGI - for example, Mongrel2 can be used as an HTTP server for a distributed Django installation. By using ZeroMQ in Mongrel2, the whole thing is then significantly more flexibly structured than with the classic (FCGI-based) server integrations.

Typekit. I'm still researching web fonts and their simple use in various situations, especially the search for useful fonts. Typekit looks quite interesting in this regard, although their free offer is somewhat limited, the prices for the larger packages are not entirely utopian - at least if their claim of efficient delivery of the fonts via HTTP really stands up to reality. In principle, you rent the fonts for use instead of buying and hosting them yourself. There are a number of plugins for Wordpress, this one from OM4 also seems to be currently maintained.

Google Plus RSS Feeds. Interesting post, not officially from Google, but a nice little app with which you can fetch your stream via RSS. With this and Twitterfeed, you can then push your Google+ posts to Twitter or Facebook.

Google+. Now I also have one of those funny gadgets. However, I still don't really have an idea of what I need it for. What I like is the already quite good integration with other Google services, although I am surprised that I cannot automatically transfer my recommendations from Google Reader to Google+. Or that I cannot import a simple RSS feed into Google+ for automatic posts. Let's see how this develops. The setup for targeted sharing with different recipient groups, however, I already find much more thought out than the strange stuff on Facebook.

I should check this out - it allows you to run AppEngine programs on your own servers that are based on Django (the AppEngine APIs are emulated using Django means). Certainly better than using the AppEngine Dev-Server directly.

Cloud9 meets Bitbucket - Cloud9 IDEs Posterous. That's nice, because Mercurial is my preferred versioning tool and Cloud9 can now directly support it - and thus also access Bitbucket projects. It's getting more and more interesting.

cloud9 is the software behind Cloud9ide.com - an IDE that runs entirely in the browser and is programmed in JavaScript based on Node.js. An interesting project, the current version also offers an offline mode, so you can easily work on projects on your server via the browser and then continue working locally in the offline case (on the train or in WLAN-sparse hotels in Swabia) and later resynchronize. I myself am IDE-incompatible, but programming in the browser has fascinated me for many years, simply because you can access your projects from anywhere, even without having your own computer with you. If I ever want to take a closer look, someone has written an installation guide for Ubuntu. Support for iOS devices is also in the works - so this could also be a nice way to access your own projects via iPad while on the go.

Spring cleaning for some of our APIs - The official Google Code blog. Good example of why cloud services are simply a bad idea as a basis for projects that have any significance beyond "playing around". The provider of these cloud services and APIs can simply shut them down at any time - and Google once again shows how to piss off a large number of developers with such actions. I can only quote from one of the comments: Why should we ever use any API from Google again?

Cloud Foundry - Make it Yours!. Interesting project for building a cloud platform based on Ruby. The source is freely available on Github. CloudFoundry is probably what runs under ActiveState Stackato (where Perl and Python are supported). Such a private cloud can also be quite interesting for your own projects, because you can develop locally at home or on the go, and the deployment to your own root server is simple and easy. At some point, I think I want to set something like this up (currently, every service is set up individually for me, which can be quite annoying in the long run).

TiddlySpace/tiddlyspace. And since I find TiddlyWiki interesting right now: this project is a hosting project for TiddlyWikis that can be linked to users there and can be networked with each other - sounds like an interesting platform for collaboration on projects, for example (projects that are not about code - there's GitHub and Bitbucket for that). TiddlySpace is also a direct platform where you can register, or you can simply take their open source project here and host it yourself.

Read the Docs. I didn't know this one yet - a web service where you can read various documentations through a uniform interface. And host your documentations for projects. And also directly different versions of documentations for projects.

App Engine Go Overview. Honestly, I would find it more exciting if Google would move away from outdated Python 2.5. But well, instead of Python 2.7 or a JVM language, you can now program the AppEngine with Go. At the same time, however, prices and conditions have changed, so it would probably be better to first check whether it is worth it at all. Because you can also use Go just as well on your own root server ...

ifttt / About ifttt. Sounds interesting: a simple event-action mechanism on the web that can connect various channels (Facebook, Twitter, Email, and so on) with actions - for example, create a tweet when someone tags you in a picture on Facebook or something like that. Although you probably have to provide your login details for some services, which you shouldn't necessarily do for every service ... (still in beta, access only by invitation) - a few more details about the motivation and the ideas behind it on the IfThisThenThat blog.