Planet ASSO

@ivanhoe Montag, wie in der eMail geschrieben und ich muss mir mal den cron Job ansehen warum das zwei mal gesended wurde

Der nächste Sitzungstag ist Mittwoch, 7.3.2012

Der nächste Sitzungstag ist Montag, 5.3.2012

Gestern wurde die Nominierungsrunde für den Vincent Preis , einem deutschen Preis...

Nachdem ich in der vorletzten Ausgabe des Fandom Observer einen Nachruf veröffentlicht habe, habe ich mein Versprechen wahr gemacht, und einen erfreulichen Beitrag zur Verfügung gestellt: Eine Besprechung des finnischen Fanzines Spin, das die Szene dieses Landes hervorragend beleuchtet.
Ich glaube,...

Hochverehrte Tiefenwesen, liebe Mitshoggothen,
die Sterne stehen günstig, das Jahr 2012 läutet den Untergang der menschlichen Rasse ein und wir, die wir diesen finsteren Moment mit Freuden entgegensehen und die Ankunft unserer formlosen Meister erwarten,...

nur ein Test, nichts zu sehen...

Some weeks ago I started a python module for Friendika (yes that was before the name change and I have not changed the name of the python module lazy as I am for historical reasons) friendika.py. One of the things I wanted to do with it and finally found the time to implement it was a Desktop Notification Applet for friendica.

Today I pushed the source of notifyfrndc to bitbucket, where you can either clone the Mercurial repository of grab the latest code as tar-ball.

It uses py-notify to display the number of new items to your wall or the network tab, the number of new private messages and the number of new introductions. It also displays a list of all the stuff behind those numbers and when it happened.

It is a bare script at the moment, without any fancy installation guidelines but you should be fine with a

$ python /path/to/notifyfrndc.py

Also you need to create a file in your $HOME directory called .notifyfrndc.cfg with your favorite editor (vim) or emacs your choice). The file should look something like that:

[account]
api = https://your.friendica.tld/api
user = yourusername
password = yourpassword
[settings]
timeout = 5
lookevery = 60

The stuff in the account section should be self-explanatory. The settings options are used as follows: The lookevery parameter gives the seconds after which the script should check for new stuff on your account. The timeout parameter is the number of seconds the notification shall be displayed. This is the base time, one additional second will be added for every item in the list, so that you can read it all.

Although the script may check your account every 60 seconds (or whatever you choose) it will not display the results every time. It will only do so if there is new stuff and it had not shown you the numbers before.

Ok, that’s all—have fun with it

Social networking is only fun if you have somebody to social network with, that’s the case in all form of reality the digital as well as the non digital. If you are using ~friendica there are several ways to find interesting people. None of them involves scrolling through the user directory although this can be fun too!

The 1st step in your search process should be your default profile. Scroll a bit down to the Public Keywords and enter some reflecting your interests and yourself. Those keywords will be published along with your profile picture in the public user directory (hover the star in the corner of some user pictures). You can also add additional keywords into the field below. Those private keywords will not show up on the user directory. You should enter the keywords in English and your native tongue, except you don’t want to have international contacts but the network is relatively small and English keywords could provide better results.

Once you have filled in your interests go to the Contacts tab¹ where you find a listing of your current contacts. Depending on your theme this page will look differently, but at the side there will be a menu.

At the top of this menu you find the add new contact box which can be used to add any contact from a service that ~friendica supports², followed by a list of the groups you have created to sort your contacts³. Below these two things you find the tools to find new contacts.

1st a search box. If you are interested in something, say “opensource” you can enter it there and ~friendica will search for profiles with matching public and private keywords.

If you now search for Linux there will be some more results, you have to play a bit with the search. Not everybody thinks about the same keywords you think about.

Below the search box there are three links. The third Invite Friends is self-explanatory but what are the other two for?

If you click on the first link Similar Interests ~friendica will match your keywords against the public keywords of other user in the global user directory. When you use this link without entering any keywords, friendica will tell you to do so.

Once you have found some friends you can use the 2nd link Friend Suggestions which will offer you a selection of the friends of your friends. These suggestions are drawn from all the networks your friends are connected to. At the moment I see suggestions from friendica, Diaspora*, identi.ca and Twitter.

And finally, if you have a homepage or blog and use friendica, you should consider linking your profile so that visitors stumbling over your web content can link to your friendica account for further networking.

Have fun

¹ when you are logged in you’ll find it at (your friendica server)/contacts/

² ~friendica, Diaspora*, OStatus / StatusNet (identi.ca), Twitter, RSS feeds…

³ these are similar to the aspects of circles of other networks

I had a funny little problem with my StatusNet instance which was that I was unable to change the theme of the page. What ever theme I selected in the config file, I always got the default neo theme in the browser. I should have read the logs more carefully, as is was written there…

During my upgrade from version 0.9.7 to 1.0 one piece from the old config remained there that was not overwritten by the setting in config.php. Obviously the theme setting¹—and StatusNet kept looking for the cleaner theme I used with 0.9.7 which wasn’t there anymore so as fall-back it used neo.

I was reading @sazius article Setting up my personal StatusNet instance finding, among others things, the filter setting for the logs.

Now, being able to change the theme I played through the available ones (those coming with SN and the neo-kafai theme by Ryan Weal) it was nothing there for my taste. My taste is something against the gray outside, that is supposed to be called winter.

The result is something that I call neo-sand with the yellow of my smily-logo in the background and something sandy as background for the rest. Except the default font, everything else stayed the same as in the neo-kafai theme.

Have fun with it

Download: neo-sand (tar.gz)

¹ look in your mysql DB, the config table and there the themme entry