...more recent posts
Chandler is the code name for the Open Software Application Foundation's networkable PIM I mentioned a few days ago. (That's Personal Information Manager: mail, calendar, contacts, to-do, etc.) The buzz around this project is huge. Vista is a prototype for what Chandler might be like. It's not a product that will be released, but it's described in detail, with screenshots, in the hopes of focusing discussion. This looks very very cool. The idea that we could have networkable PIMs without a centralized server is very promising.
One of the coolest features of Vista is the ability to browse remote repositories using Jabber to convey the necessary data and meta-data. It uses Jabber extension messages to determine what views are accessible to the requestor, and to request and receive the relevant data items, via a simple UI described in the next section. More sophisticated users can address remote views and data items directly, by typing a URL that has a Jabber ID at the beginning, as described above.
Making good progress today, although there is a lot to do in very little time.
Here's my latest working theory. Probably this is obvious, but I don't think it's ever been implemented exactly the way I am doing it. The idea is that since all posts (and comments) are stored in a database, there is remarkable freedom in how I can serve them back up. And recently it occured to me just how similar weblogs, bulletin boards, email lists, and RSS feeds are. They're just different views of the same atomic data.
So I'm extending the system so that any page can be viewed in any of these styles. Making what are now weblog pages into mailing lists is my first task, because a mailing list is what we need. In this scenario the weblog becomes the mailinglist archive. Anything posted to the page gets sent as email to everyone on the list. Same with comments. This is working now, although you have to open a web page to reply (you can't just hit reply in your mail client, you have to click the reply link in the message which will open the proper page in your browser.) So that's a drawback, but I'll have this fixed up fairly soon.
I'll probably make the bulletin board view next, and then the RSS feeds. But I need the mailing list wow. I mean now. Almost there.