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

I am looking at some spam I received at LinDesk. These are not your average spam - they are real good. I even let one through before I understood they were spam.

• spartan300 | tcssey@aol.com | dolcemp3.com | IP: 64.12.116.138
  Hhmmm,, this sounds good. but I not yet into upgrading my Fedora7 to 8. i’m not that afraid of changes, but I might incur another error with my linux. I still have lot of work to do, maybe i’ll try this later next week. Thanks though for this blog.
  In article Sound Issue in Fedora 8
• 2cool2sexy | tcssey@aol.com | dolcemp3.com | IP: 64.12.116.138
  Have you checked on its system requirements? You should try checking of their site. http://banshee-project.org/
  I believe there are helpdesk there that can support you.
  In article Banshee - Music Management and Playback for GNOME
• audio-fanatic | tcssey@aol.com | dolcemp3.com | IP: 64.12.116.138
  another nice review here Lin. You really adore using Linux-based software? I think this mp3 software is the one fit for my notebook.
  In article Audacious Media Player

First of all, do you agree with me? Are these spam?

The reason why I think they are spam are the following…

• Same URL and Email - but different names.
• Zero content comments - they add no value to the post.
• My previous experience has taught me that comments with @aol.com email addresses are often spam.
• This guy has only commented on MP3 related posts - his URL leads to an MP3 site.

The reason why they may not be spam are just as valid.

• These comments are written by humans - not bots.
• The writer of the second comment(about banshee) has obviously read the post.
• The commenter has at least a passing knowledge of Linux and Linux softwares.

So, have you received any spam like this - comments that you are unsure about? These three comments are still in my moderation queue. I need advice on how to deal with them.

I could let them through - if no one looks closely, they will think these are actual comments. That will give the articles an appearance of popularity. It is a good thing for me. But I have a zero tolerance policy towards spam. If the comment is a spam, I will not allow it on my site. Its a matter of principle.

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…

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.

I have released Nexty 1.01.A. If you are a user of Nexty, I will recommend that you switch to the new version.

Changelog

Search

Search for tasks, projects and reminders

Next Action

Dedicated page for the next action - and only that

Inbox Feature

Add a lot of tasks in one go using the inbox

Linux Command Line

A script to control Nexty from the Linux command line.

Code uses iFrame

iFrame is my PHP framework

Bug Fixs

Too many to list

Better Installer

Will not overwrite the old data

Printing Support

Well, its better than before

To Learn more…

• Nexty 1.01.A Demo
• Nexty Information
• Download Nexty 1.01.A

I created an RSS aggregater for my site BinnyVA.com that aggregates the content from all my sites. The basic idea is to build a Seinfeld Calendar that will force me to continually publish posts - at least 1 per day.

It is very simple to create - whole system is contained in the following files…

fetcher.php

This will run once a day as a cron job. It downloads the feeds for all my sites, parses the XML and inserts the new posts into the database.

The download is done by my load PHP function. It uses the curl library.

The XML parsing uses the xml2array() PHP function. Currently I parse only the RSS format - I am completely ignoring the atom format.

Finally the data is inserted into the database - the following data is stored…

• Title
• Link
• Date
• Summary
• Full Content
• Categories/Tags

The full file is around 100 lines long.

index.php

This is a simple calendar scripts that lists all the posts of each days of one month. Includes a navigation to enable the visitor to go to the past months as well.

Other Files

There is a bit of mod_rewrite code that make sure that the URL are very clean. For example, the URL for April 2007 is http://www.binnyva.com/2007/04/.

The mod_rewrite for this is in the .htaccess file…

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^([0-9]+)/([0-9]+) index.php?year=$1&month=$2

Don’t Break the Chain

Now all you have to do is make sure that each day has at least one post in it. This system had me creating content continually for the last two months.

If you are looking for an easier way to create the calendar, try out Don’t break the chain.

I have a new blog - LinDesk. LinDesk concentrates on the use of Linux on the Desktop. I am trying to keep it distro agnostic - but there is a slight leaning towards Fedora - as it is the distro I am using. Also, you might find a disproportionate amount of articles about KDE.

Actually this blog has been around for some time. The first article appeared on April 8. But I did not announce it so that there can be a build up of articles before it goes public.

Take a look at LinDesk - and if you are a fan of the Linux operating system, subscribe.

Some Popular Posts

• Konqueror - A Killer App for Linux
• Konqueror, The Browser
• Using Konqueror as an FTP Client
• Internet Connection Sharing using iptables
• How to Mount ISO/MDF Images in Linux
• Top 5 Video Players in Linux
• Wesnoth - The Battle for Productivity

So what do you guys think of the new blog? Is it a good move? Or am I moving towards an early burnout?

As you may know, I publish a lot of code for others to use. Often I forget to specify a license for the code - and I get a few comment asking me what license it is under. So I have created a license page for both Bin-Co and OpenJS. I hate restricting use of my code - so I choose the most permissive one around - the BSD License.

I know that many people feel strongly about software license. I still get a lot of flank from my LUG because I prefer using BSD License over their favorite GPL.

GPL was not an option as most of my code are snippets that are meant to be used with other code. GPL will not allow my code to be used within proprietary projects. Another option is LGPL - but I still prefer BSD.

Basically, all scripts, codes and programs from any of my sites are in the BSD License. That means that you can do anything with the scripts - except claim that you wrote it. You can use, copy, sell, modify or whatever you want with it - but you cannot claim authorship.

Importance of Choosing a License

If you are planning to release your code publicly, it is very important that you say what license you are using. If you fail to specify a license, many people will not use your code. It was a big mistake waiting this long before putting up a license on my sites.

If you want help in deciding the license, these links should be of help…

• A list of the most popular licenses
• Simon Willison’s Licensing Issue - read the comments
• Pick a License, Any License
• QuirksMode Copyright - an example of a license page

More Links

• The WTFPL License
• The problem with BSD Style License according to Richard M. Stallman
• Copyright Explained - not about code licenses - but a must read if you are new to all this.