Blog Updates

Cleaning up

Photo by DanBrady

There’s been a lot going on during the past months and I haven’t posted much on this pages lately. But finally I’ve come to choose a new blog theme and doing a bit of clean up around here.

It all started with me doing lots of house chores and cleaning, washing clothes, picking up room, you know, all that stuff that needs to get done every once in a while (actually must be done constantly). Then I looked at my computer and started cleaning up files and old downloads, then doing backups (yes, that also needs to be done frequently) and finally, I managed to upgrade from Debian Lenny (stable) to Debian Squeeze (testing). And ending up with cleaning up the blog and changing the theme.

On the blog side of things, this time I chose to go back to the black text on white background type of blog, just to see how it feels. Maybe I got bored of the darkness of my past theme. I like this one because its very clear and clean.

I’ve also done some clean up of the categories and blog roll links. I hope I didn’t mess up any category’s RSS feed. There was a lot of categories on this blog and that was because I’ve been using Wordpress before tags were integrated, so I was using categories as tags. That is no longer necessary since several Wordpress releases, so it was just confusing me at posting time and confusing visitors with a big mess.

Hope you like this new theme and hope to keep up with my blogging and publishing more stuff.

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FISOL 2009 was great

I started the month of october at the FISOL 2009, in Tapachula Chiapas. I got invited to give several talks about free software and I have to say it was a great event.
Crowded

First of all, the place was crowded with more than 1,300 attendees. That’s the largest audience I’ve addressed on a free software talk! Everyone was great, from the staff to the people who attended.

I was there to promote KDE and also helped out promoting Firefox along with Ricardo Meza.
Firefox people

The funny part is that we were treated like rockstars or something. People took like a thousand pictures of us and even asked us for autographs! It was funny and I enjoyed the whole thing anyway. Also, took the opportunity to promote this blog and my identi.ca account on the autographs, so it turned out useful.

The rockstars

What was a surprise, at least for all us that were invited to give talks, was the musical performances during the event. Every chat was separated by one or two performances. For most of us it was the first free software conference with musical performances. Here’s one of those musical performances:

You can see more musical performances of FISOL at my blip.tv page. Hope other conferences do the same. That makes it a fully cultural event.

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Sillicon Valley trip

Last week I’ve been visiting my work office at Sillicon Valley. I didn’t take my personal computer, instead I took my work computer, since I was there for work and I didn’t want to be carrying around like 10kg in my backpack.

Its been an exciting experience. I got to see the outside of companies like Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and many others.

I really have not much value to add to my blog post, but since I haven’t responded to any of my personal email in the last week, I just wanted to make it public that I was having fun… I mean a lot of work.

My work mates at California are great people, love the atmosphere over there and I want to thank everyone for being so nice.

Hopefully I’ll be posting pictures soon and a bit more relevant information on this pages. I’m just happy for my trip, it was a great experience.

Oh, and check Nick Moline’s site. Great guy with even greater ideas. (Sorry Dan; you don’t get a link ’cause you don’t have a blog)

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Emacs identica-mode with edit buffer, context and favorites

I’ve added new features to identica-mode, the Emacs mode to interact with any Statusnet, an free open microblogging platform previously known as Laconi.ca.

This time I got a patch submitted by Bradley M. Khun, who prefers to write his updates on a full buffer instead of the minibuffer. So he kindly send me a patch to do that, as well as to save the method of your choice as a preference (using M-x customize-group identica-mode).

Also added notice context links. Apparently conversation context has been implemented on statusnet (identi.ca) for a while now. Every update that is a reply of another, as part of a conversation, now has a “in reply to username” in the timeline. Although there are full conversation urls, that has not been implemented on the Statusnet API yet, so clicking on that text will lead you to the original notice it replies to.

Lastly, I’ve added a shortcut to add a notice to the favorites list. Pressing C-c C-o on a notice in the timeline buffer will add that notice to your favorites.

Also a bug on the mode-map has been fixed. Doing C-h b will give you all the keybindings correctly.

Hope you enjoy this new features.

Download

As always, you can get the latest stable version of Emacs identica-mode from the savannah project page, or get the development version from the git repository

Support

If you have any feature requests or bug reports, please submit them on the bug tracking list. And of course, any donation would be greatly appreciated.



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A website visitor tracking statistics free open source alternative to Google Analytics

Web Analytics software

Everyone that wants to know how his/her website’s traffic is doing has a form of “visitor counter” or web traffic analytics software. By what I’ve seen, the most popular one is Google Analytics.

There’s a free and open source web alternative to Google Analytics and its called Piwik.

I’ve been using this software for several months now and its been great. You can get your visitor data right away, instead of waiting about 24 hours for Google Analytics to give you its results.

Piwik interface screenshot

Here are some of the features Piwik offers:

  • A quick and simple installer. All you need is PHP on your webserver and a database
  • A highly configurable user interface
  • A plugin system to add more functionality
  • An API to integrate your site’s statistics to any web enabled application
  • Last visits graph
  • Average time on site
  • List of referrers and search engines
  • List of keywords that people used to find your site
  • A graph that shows at the times your visitors came
  • List of countries where your visitors come from
  • A record of your visited pages and even downloads

And there’s a bunch of more things you can track.

So quit depending on third parties to get your site’s traffic information and use Piwik.

Statistics image via Flickr by Michael Balzer.
Piwik screenshot via Flickr by Louis Volant
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5 ways to promote Identi.ca and Open Microblogging over Twitter

identica_mosaic_thumb
On the Free Software Foundation Latinamerica mailing list, there’s been a discussion about supporting Identi.ca and open microblogging and encourage quitting using twitter by setting the example.

The topic about closed network services and its risks is a very important issue that I will cover on a later post with detail or you can read more about it on the Autonomo.us website. The following is an english translation of what I posted on the mailing list and I got a request to post it here on my blog. You can read the original email if you read Spanish.

About the discussions generated around the question of weather to use or not Twitter to support Identi.ca and Open Microblogging, I’ll explain some of the ways I’ve been promoting the use of Identi.ca for about a year.

  1. Word of mouth: As part of the free and open source community in Mexico, I get invited to give talks on several events. On my presentations and the material handed out, I always put http://identi.ca/gabrielsaldana on the first place and as a secondary link I put my twitter url, and sometimes I omit the second one. And when I talk about this little piece of information I always tell them the clear message: “use Identi.ca instead of Twitter” and I go ahead and talk about Identi.ca’s benefits and advantages. Being on a mass forum I think the message does get across to more than one.
  2. Start with your close ones: When meeting with my friends, collegues or other FLOSS enthusiast (and my girlfriend) I always mention and sometimes “insist” that they use Identi.ca for microblogging, and most of them have done so.
  3. Be positive and pragmaticWhen I mention Identi.ca (laconica) not only do I mention it because its free software, because many don’t care about the freedom issues. I mention the technical advantages it offers like:
    • The XMPP (Jabber) client that Twitter took down and Identi.ca has always offered
    • At the times where Twitter was famous for its downtimes, Identi.ca has been (and still is) very stable
    • Very recently Twitter integrated search, when Identi.ca has had it for a long time
    • Ident.ca has integrated groups and tags, where Twitter has some partial support for tags and no groups yet
    • The groups feature is the one very appealing. Since many use microblogging to ask open questions and expect to recieve answers, if you don’t have a large list of followers from that specific topic you’re asking about, its very improbable that your question gets answered or even heard (read actually). On Identi.ca this gets solved with groups: you send a message to a group or mark it with a tag and all of the people interested in that topic will get the message and most of the time you’ll get answers in seconds. This has worked for me a lot!
    • The fact that you can install your own instance on your server and follow anyone on any other instance of laconica. This way you are not tied up to a single provider and you have total control over your data.
  4. Set examples: I implemented a laconi.ca instance at my previous job for internal communication. Everyone got to see the advantages and features of laconi.ca and some even created accounts on Identi.ca. Others just followed people on Identi.ca from the company’s account. This happened because they wanted better communication on the projects progress and were considering using Twitter. I mentioned that it was not a good idea to put internal communication on a third party server and that we could have “our own internal twitter” with free software and it got authorized.
  5. Contribute Lastly, instead of asking, wishing or whining about ways to post or update my microblogging acount, I decided to create the Emacs identica-mode, a way to view timelines and update from Emacs, my favorite application. Identica-mode has had good response from users and it now has more features than the original twittering-mode from which I forked the code. By the way, if you know elisp I could use your help to implement some features like: expand shortened urls to see where they lead (for security), see image links (twitpic, yfrogg, flickr) inline in the timeline list and many more
  6. I hope this could help as examples to promote open microblogging without having “religious” debates with people who do not, and will not, care about the freedom implications of proprietary (closed) network services. This arguments have worked for me to “convert” many to Identi.ca.

    For the ones interested in free/libre network services you can read more about the topic at Autonomo.us.

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