hapispace blog

I can't spell or type which is always a problem.

we've been trying (and failing so far) to get some funding going for hapispace.

The premise is that hapispace is a wiki on acid that enables loads of collaboration goodness. Investors are strange beasts though. Mostly people get it. But they all have their own take on how and why it could be profitable. It seems to me that if you get 10 people in a room then, right now, we'll have 10 different views of which direction hapispace should go in.

In positive news http://barcamplondon2.hapispace.com barcamp2 in london got a presentation of hapispace using Otu's new hapispace based S5 presentation tool.

Also, Nic has nearlly finished the openid provider that will form the basis of hapispace's openid support. Then we'll finally be able to make these feeds valid hAtom.

With tools like this timing a release, even a soft one, is quite tricky.

I want enough of hapispace to be working that people can see how to use it, even if it's still more of a struggle than it should be. But it's possible to go too far and start getting all perfectionist. A difficult balance.

I don't have any Internet Explorer support right now... and there seem to be a fair few bugs even with firefox. We are getting to the point where we have usable tools in the form of the planet, this blog and the multi-page blog.

And dealing with legal and money issues is taking up way too much of my time. I should be hacking more.

We need a whole lot of documentation before a release as well. Work, work, work.

We now have what I think is a nice intro page

The inapageblog is working, it's driving this little blog.

Planets are working but not editable yet. I'd like to make them an example of server side editing (perhaps the page should be a drag and drop target for links which are then submitted to the page which saves the link and re-renders?)

The multiblog is probably ok to go into common now. There will be some issues with that which will need to be cleaned up tommorow.

We don't have an FAQ application. Probably should do one... it's not that hard.

After that...everything else is quite major so it might as well wait for a new version.

the current hapispace loader has a cache built in. So that's someway to dealing with the list of things a good document function implementation needs.

dan is a colleague from many different projects. He really gets xslt and architectural simplicity.

We talked today about whether hapispace was viable and what we might need to do to get if off the ground. His view is the same as a other educated people I've talked to: build a community of developers first and then you'll be onto something.

Of course, I'd rather someone dropped 2 million quid in my lap and said: "here boy, go change the way software gets written" but I can see the reasoning in the argument.

they are working!

This took some fixes to libxml2. I may have introduced a big fat memory leak because now the memory debugging stats from libxml2 are all over the place.

Also, Daniel might have forgotten how libxml2 works. That's alright really, It is very big.

Hopefully, we can make planets a part of the default setup people get when they create a new hapispace. Everyone who has already got one will get the new homepage if they haven't made any edits.

do you want to do lastfm with hapitext? It's just an embedded link tagged as a picture.

I just did quite an upgrade on the homepage, altering the space creation form so that you get a bunch of helptext (thanks to larry for the testing that led to that change).

At first I thought it was going to be tricky because I would need to alter the stylesheet controlling the main page.

But then I added a small trick to allow you to pass the xslt on the url line as a parameter (we'll probably ACL the ability to do that).

So now I just copy the main page XSLT and hack the main page with it. Everyone else sees the old one until I swap them over.

I'm stuck doing some other stuff (to put food on the table) and so a release this week is looking unlikely.

I'd really hoped that I could clean up and modularize this blog tool, the multi-blog tool and knock up an FAQ tool for release. I'm going to try and get them done for monday when I shall be talking to dan bennett about hapispace.

Hopefully I'll be able to release to rest-discuss and the xslt list then.

The xpath function document is really useful, but sometimes a more advanced version is needed. I'd really like something that I could give information to about accept-types, or one that guaranteed the presence of something by caching it.

The real problem with this is that it needs to be quite a configurable function and xpath doesn't have named parameters. How else to provide a lot of different functionality in a single function?

It's maybe a bit rich to call this user interface. But I didn't like seeing the username and password UI on all the pages that I did.

Once again, this is the sort of thing that anyone with a hapispace could implement. It's so easy to hack on this stuff.

Errrr... it's a keyhole by the way.

There are additional functions in the hapi_lib javascript library. These are the beginnings of programming support for things that you can do with hapitext.

For a while we thought it would be sensible to directly adopt some javascript framework like mochikit. But the more real applications that get built with hapispace the more it looks like it needs very different (and much simpler) tools from javascript.

hapispace has a built in atom aggregator for presenting a hapispace as an atom feed.

This means we can build quite complex blogging tools and present atom feeds of them in HTML or as native atom. Clearly we could also transform the atom to RSS or any other flavour.

Personally, my favourite Internet syndication format right now is hAtom (which this blog works with). I'll probably make the multipage blog do that in it's HTML pages.

So when you break your pages you can edit them back to life.

I was just doodling but this looks quite good.

Caroline says it makes hapispace look like an orange juice manufacturer. Hmmm.

I'm showing off the blog app to Josh! Isn't it great how it JUST WORKS?

Added some extra whitespace to see what happens

this has some spaces before it

whatever you might call it the javascript library for dealing with the backend is cleaned up, made synchronous and renamed.

if you're not authorized you won't see the editor. You won't even see the script. XSLT is so cool.

As promised, here is a blog editor.

It's not much. But it does work.

A blog editor for blogs like this.

and an FAQ editor for pages like the FAQ page

This page is now an hatom feed

It will be interesting to do RSS and Atom on top of this.

hapispace has a design. Ok, it's a design by me... and there isn't much of it yet... but it is a design none the less.

I did try and get my daughter to make the sun logo but in the end I had to do it myself. Ah well.