Mon Havre de Liberté

The second release of Jabber Feed is out today. It has been greatly improved though I will still have some work on it. Now all nodes are created automatically by the plugin when you configure it. Hence it will “tell” you if your Jabber account is wrong or if you don’t have the rights to create the node.

The posts will be published to a subnode ‘posts‘. So people can subscribe to this node in order to receive only notifications about new posts.
Comments are published under the subnode ‘comments/{id}‘ where ‘{id}’ is to be replaced by the post’s id. Hence people can subscribe to the comments of a single post. By subscribing to ‘comments’ node only, you will receive all comments, as long as the correct option to receive items of subnodes as well is set (unfortunately this option is not understood by ejabberd, the server which I made tests with, and the one of jabber.org. I don’t know for the other server softwares) in your subscription.

Of course we cannot ask people to “know” all this. This is why autodiscovery links are automatically set on every pages (you can subscribe to comments on a specific post only, to all posts, all comments, etc.). I also provide 2 templates to generate these links (either autodiscovery links for html header, or just simple ‘a’ tags, or even just bare XMPP urls) in order for you to use them as you like in your theme. For instance, I added a ‘a’ link to the post and comment nodes at the bottom of my test page, and a ‘a’ link above the comments for subscribing to comments of a post.

One of the other main points I improved since first version is that now, all nodes are created automatically for you! The blog admin don’t need to do anything, he doesn’t have to know XMPP and how it works. She or he simply has to know a pubsub server and choose an unchosen node on it.
You can also have a look at the improved configuration page which creates the nodes and tests the Jabber login (JID) when you aknowledge the configuration with the “Update” button.

To conclude this all, I will say that I am pretty happy of this all. This is still not perfect. Some details have to be improved, or even fixed (I keep a todo list you can read in the wordpress repository). But this is a nice step since first version and soon technically close to perfection from a publishing system point of view. :p Now I will work on higher priority on the syntax of the sent message because it is really ugly (and without content processing, it will probably fail with some special html character or tags). I especially want to process the posts and the comments’ content to make them XHTML-IM compliant before sending it. Note that I will probably provide this new version very soon (in a week, if my mind don’t get disturbed by other stuffs).

More information, as well as the plugin itself, are foundable on the Wordpress repository website.

Any feedback is more than welcome.

P.S.: note that I don’t even use the plugin here (in fact yes, I enabled it but don’t show it by using the templates in my theme!) because ejabberd (the server software I use, and one of the most famous. For instance jabber.org also uses it) has a big bug on the pubsub implementation which prevents from creating and especially subscribing to a node from a JID of another server! So this is not a useful PubSub implementation if people cannot subscribe (or only people on the same server as you, which is a huuuuge limitation).
Yet I was told Tigase has currently a very good pubsub implementation (close to 100%). So I will make some tests soon (but first I have to install it, unless someone can forward me to one where I can run tests to spare time?) with it and maybe change my server for Tigase if it is really better.

I had 3 monthes pretty sad, at least compared to what I used to: no motorcycle — public transportation instead — no volley ball, and in fact no sport, whatever it could be. I was missing my old companion, a black Honda CB 500, perfectly working. I am especially sad I could not save it; and also I had never done any pictures of it, first because I never expected to have an accident (of course you may always have, but you never hope to, so you will try to forget!), also because I am not such a photographer (I don’t really care about photographs, and indeed don’t even really have a camera). This motorcycle was named “Dark Marmot“, just for the record and this way it won’t be forgotten completely… For the record, and also because I never told it, my first one was “Marmotton“.

And so here is my new one, I got it one month ago, a wonderfull motorcycle (Moto Guzzi, Bellagio) called “Joly Marmot” (or sometimes also “Joly Roller“). Nothing interesting to say because this is only my life, so that’s just it: for the pleasure of sharing my joy to people I don’t even know!

Joly Roller

A diaporama of this beauty is available here. And honnestly it is even more beautiful when seeing it in real life.
See you!

Jabber (also called XMPP, as a protocol standardized l’IETF) is well known for being “just” an instant messaging system (and network) which can be compared to ICQ, Yahoo!, Live Messenger, AIM, Gadu-Gadu or others. But it is in fact far more. As a very young protocol for real-time communication, new features are continuously imagined, developped and improved. One of these features can be very interesting and may prove to have a nice future, in my own opinion: this is the “Publish-Subscribe” (abbreviated into pubsub).

As the name implies, this system enables users with a role of “publishers” and others as “subscribers”. Hence the publishers will obviously “publish” information on a Jabber node (with is simply a term defining some kind of Jabber address), whereas the subscribers will have the possibility to read this information, and configure their subscription according to their needs. For instance a common use would be to ask being notified when new information is added. This last use case gave me the idea to developp a small plugin for Wordpress (the publishing system used for this website), which I called: Jabber Feed.

Jabber Feed will enable readers of this website for instance to subscribe to a Jabber node, then asking to be notified in realtime of every new post, or even comment. People could compare this to RSS feed, though Jabber Feed has many advantages: it is realtime, it spares bandwith, and it can be highly customizable.

Yet the main big problem is that it is hardly supported currently by most Jabber clients (even the more advanced ones; for pubsub, Gajim being the better I have tried), and by servers but with many lacks of the full protocol (as far as I have tried at least). Thus my plugin is rather a Proof of Concept as for now. Anyway I will regularly improve it and update news on this development here. Hopefully soon more clients will have a better support. I created also a permanent page about it here and the code can be foundable on the official Wordpress’ plugin repository).

I will give later a node for my public diary (the one you are reading!) because someone noticed it is apparently unsubscribable from an exterior address and I have no time to look how to configure my server as I am leaving for 2 weeks of hollydays in Japan in a few hours.
So see you then!

Edit: here is the notification I received in Gajim (last subversion). This is not much, it does not support full content currently, but it is the only client (among the ones I have tested) which notified me at least!