I am one of the geeks behind Alertle. Its a web based RSS Reader. I am responsible for a good amount of the JavaScript areas of this app

Features

Single Page Application

The entire application is contained in a single page - everything is done through Ajax. I will not advice that you make something like this(its a maintenance nightmare) but I can say one thing about it - its Cool. With a capital ‘C’.

Keyboard Shortcuts

I got the idea of creating a Keyboard Shortcut Library for JavaScript when I was working on this feature.

Autoplay

You can view articles as you are viewing a slideshow if you enable this.

Feedpacks

You can bunch a group of feeds together into a feedpack - and see all the posts from such a group together.

Sharing

You can share your feedpacks with other users

Perfect for High Volume Feeds

There is one major feature that sets Alertle appart from other RSS readers - it does not tell you if a post is read or not. Yeah, first you will think its a missing feature - but its not. I have used a lot of feed readers - once you subscribe to a couple of high volume feed - like say, BoingBoing or Slashdot or something, you can say goodbye to your sanity. It creates so many new items that the only way of staying away the mess is to click on the ‘Mark all as read’ button once every four seconds. You know what I mean - I am sure you have unsubscribed from many feeds for this reason.

With alertle, you can subscribe all these high volume feeds. And there is no pressure to view all the posts.

If you are an info junkie, I can guaranty that your will get lost for hours in Alertle.

Problems

IE is not Supported

We are still working on this - and due to deadline constraints, we decided to release Alertle without IE support. So if you are an IE user, I am sorry - but What in the World are you Doing? Ditch that terrible browser and get a real browser right now!

If we can get a few people to switch to firefox before we add support for IE, I will say that Alertle gone beyond and above the call of duty to make the web a better place!

Posts don’t have a Read Flag (pun unintended)

Um., yeah, I know - this is both an advantage and a disadvantage. This will prevent me from using Alertle for all my feeds. For my must-read feeds, I will still be using Google Reader. For the high volume stuff, I will use Alertle.

Getting to Know Alertle

So, what are you waiting for? Head over to Alertle and sign up for an account. Its FREE!

But if you are still unconvinced, here is a demo…

Links

• Alertle
• Masable’s take on Alertle
• Alertle Blog
• Alertle Docs

The second Kerala BarCamp was a success. The presentations were very informative and the people were interesting. What more do you want?

Sessions

Xtend IVR - A RAD Toolkit for Telephony

by Jayakrishnan K

This was a demo for an IVR toolkit called Xtend IVR. This is a fairly comprehensive IVR toolkit - it supports Indian languages and had its own simple scripting language. A demo is available here.

Mobile Social Networking in 25 days

By Vishnu Gopal

This was an introduction about how to create a web application. Its a real life case study of what went into building MobShare. Slides for this presentation is available at slideshare.

JavaScript: The most underestimated, undervalued and misunderstood language

By Your’s Truly

A introduction to the power of programming in JavaScript. Its a bit about the functional programming aspects of javascript and an appeal to start using for other things than validation. Slides are available online.

Develop a webservice in 5 minutes using nuSoap library

By Sanil

How to use the nuSoap PHP library to connect to and create Web Services.

Game Development Using Flash

By Eldhose, Juwal and Anish

This presentation was about the simplicity of creating a game in Flash. They also showed how to port the game into FlashLite so that it can be used in Mobiles. To know more, visit their website - CSharks (WARNING: Sounds)

The People

An advantage of such events are that you meet a lot of like minded people…

• Kenney Jacob
• Vishnu Gopal
• Anand
• Mahesh Aravind
• And Many More…

More Links about Kerala BarCamp 2

• BarCampKerala2
• BarCamp Kerala 2 - A Grand Success
• About Geeks and BarCamps
• Kerala BarCamp 2 - In Cochin
• BarCamp Time for Kerala
• Kerala BarCamp 2 Photos

Following the success of the first barcamp in Kerala, we are organizing a second one. This time it will be at Cochin. The date and venue has not been decided yet - we want it to be decided by the community.

For those of you who don’t know what a BarCamp is, here is the Wikipedia definition…

BarCamp is an international network of user generated conferences - open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants - often focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats.

Attending

If you are in or around Cochin at the end of January 2008, consider coming to the event. If you wish to attend, please add your name to this wiki page.
BarCamp Kerala 2. You can do that by filling out the following form…

Sessions

The sessions are decided and presented by the members themselves - here is a list of the proposed sessions(so far)…

Visual Programming Language, Demo

by Kenney Jacob

Search Engine Marketing

by Mani Karthik

Xtend IVR - A RAD Toolkit for Telephony

by Jayakrishnan K

Visual Studio 2008 - What’s in it for me?

by Jadeja Dushyantsinh

SAAS - Software As A Service

by Linoy Joseph

There are some more proposed sessions.

People

I hope I can meet my fellow Cochin bloggers at this event. Anand and Mani Karthik has promised to come. I hope Nirmal will be there too.

More Details Available at…

• BarCamp Kerala2 Wiki Page
• BarCamp Time for Kerala

Yesterday I went to the first Kerala BarCamp. It was held at Techno Park, Trivandrum. I had to travel 225 kilometers to attend it - and it was totally worth it!

Sessions

Open Social

By Kenney Jacob

About the new OpenSocial API provided by Google. The talk was concentrated on its application on Orkut - as it is the most popular social networking site here.

Game Development in Ruby

By Vishnu Gopal

This session was about creating small 2D games in Ruby using the ‘Gosu’ library. You can get a small sample game he created for this session at N3wton Google Code

Presentation

Home Automation using Bluetooth

By Hari Krishnan

Using your mobile phone as an universal remote for all applications within your home.

Asterisk

By Bipin

Asterisk is a Open Source software PBX(Private branch exchange)

QT

By Dhaneesh and Dev

Using QT Designer to create GUI applications.

Computer Memory Based on Bacteriorhodopsin

By Jidhu

A new way of storing information - by changing the state of a protein. This is done by shining a different colour light on the protein. It is much faster and cheaper than the fastest RAMs available today. Also, it is non-volatile - so it can be as both the HardDisk and as the RAM. I found this the most interesting of all session.

Open Network Project

By Linoy Joseph

A implementation of a mesh style open network.

Android

by Renjith Ramachandran

Developing mobile application using the Android SDK provided by Google. The presentation showed us how to do it using Eclipse.

PHP Wiz

by Sreekanth G S

A small introduction to PHP and Web Application Development.

The People

The best part of the camp is the people you meet. I met a lot of people who I only knew only through the internet. Some of the people I met…

• Mani Kartik
• Kenney Jacob
• Vishnu Gopal
• And Many More…

Until next time…

AGPL or Affero General Public License Version is a new License released by FSF. This is aimed at Web Applications.

The GNU GPL allows people to modify the software they receive, and share those modified versions with others, as long as they make source available to the recipients when they do so. However, a user can modify the software and run the modified version on a network server without releasing it. Since use of the server does not imply that people can download a copy of the program, this means the modifications may never be released. Many programmers choose to use the GNU GPL to cultivate community development; if many of the modifications developed by the programs users are never released, this can be discouraging for them. The GNU AGPL addresses their concerns. The FSF recommends that people consider using the GNU AGPL for any software which will commonly be run over a network. (Emphasis mine)

Say I used AGPL for Nexty. You decide that it is a nice program - so you download it and use it. Then you make some changes to the code. So far so good.

Then you decide that you can put the modified version on your web server. The visitors can use the modified version of nexty - that is, you are not ‘distributing’ the software. If I used GPL, you could have gotten away with it - but if I use AGPL, you have to publish the code you modified as well.

The end result is that the end user is in a lot of confusion about what they should do with respect to the license. If they are not lawyers, they will not be able to understand what the license says. I have opted to use the BSD license due to factors like this - BSD license basically gives you the right to do anything with it - except claim that you wrote it.

Related Links

• AGPL Release News
• AGPL Text
• GNU Affero GPL v3 Released

I just released the latest version of Nexty - and to celebrate that, I am making Nexty an online application. That is, you can use Nexty from the web - without having to install it on your local system.

Of course, Nexty code is available as well - you can download and install it locally if you wish. In fact, I will recommend that you install it locally. That way, the application will be much faster than the online alternatives.

This happens to be my first online app. I have worked on many online projects before - but those were for various clients. This is the first online application that I have created for the use of others! I am working on anther online application - but by the look of things, it is not going to be over soon.

And thanks to Brad Nickel for suggesting this idea.