Posts for the ‘Blog’ Category
Monday, June 9th, 2008
MiaCMS yet had another release a few days ago. MiaCMS 4.6.5 release has a few cool additions to it. Here is a list of things happened in the latest MiaCMS release.
The MiaCMS team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of version 4.6.5. This release fixes old bugs and adds a good bit of new and/or enhanced functionality. In addition to the release itself we have launched the new miacms.org site and the redesigns of our forum and wiki.
Here are the release cliff notes:
1. Cache Fixes & Enhancements
2. Enhanced Statistics & Poll Result Charting
3. New Templates, Site Designs, & the Official Logo
4. External Library Updates
5. Enhanced Commenting & Akismet (Spam Blocker)
6. Performance Improvements & Dynamic YUI Loader
If you’re using MiaCMS 4.6.4, or a Mambo 4.6x family CMS, I would surely recommend you upgrade to Mia 
Here are a few screen shots;
http://miacms.org/index.php?option=com_wrapper&Itemid=46
Posted in Blog | No Comments »
Monday, April 28th, 2008
I recently across this post on http://forum.mambo-foundation.org. I’ve been keeping a close eye on the project after I stripped myself off my official Mambo Foundation duties. The post below is truly saddening and it’s not even funny for someone who has some idea of what’s going on inside.
Informal Survey - what can we do to improve the team and community?
In April 2001, Mambo became open source under the GPL - its our foss birthday month right now! Over time, and particularly in the last three years, Mambo has undergone a lot of changes. 2 1/2 years ago we went through the biggest change of all with the Joomla! fork.
At the moment, the team is going through a restructuring so that we are set up properly to take Mambo forward into the future. The way the team worked in 2005 worked well for bringing Mambo back from potential disaster. We have made a few changes along the way but we know we can do better.
One of the things we are looking at doing is taking development discussions out into a mailing list that anyone can join and can contribute ideas to (and even code suggestions). Do you think this is a good idea? If you are a developer, would doing this encourage you to participate?
What else should we look at doing? Are there any barriers to your contributions that we may not be aware of?
The team works hard at being here, on the forums and part of our community. We want Mambo to be inclusive and friendly, and to encourage contributions. How can we improve this?
Share your thoughts here please (constructive only - we want this thread to be something of value that we can use for improving things, not an opportunity for criticism that would only discourage the team).
link to the post
Since I do not want to discourage the team - or whatever is left of it - I prefer to vent here. For those who do not know already, Mambo Foundation lost three elected team leads in the last 4 months; and I am one of those folks who departed.
I’ve been an active member of the Mambo Foundation, QA & Release Team Lead at some point, and took over the Core Development Team Lead after Chad’s departure. Being known as a patient person, Mambo’s internal political dynamics even got to me, resulting in a not so nice resignation letter. Funny it is, I personally and with Chad collaboratively accomplished more than six months of work if we were to stay with the foundation, in a week.
Al takes over the reigns after my core team departure, and in less than a month, he gives up too. And knowing Al, his resignation letter was probably a bit more colorful than mine.
Now, let’s go back to the drawing board for a second and pop two questions.
Why would three Team Leads depart a big FOSS project in 4 months?
And why the board is still looking for a solution by doing informal public surveys?
I guess, we’ll all just sit tight and watch the fireworks.
Posted in Blog, MiaCMS, Open Source | 1 Comment »
Friday, May 9th, 2008
A quick update on the blog URL.
I changed http://wp.ocszone.com to http://blog.ocszone.com . “wp” subdomain did stand for WordPress, and didn’t connect well with the current concept of the site. It was once intended to be a WordPress extensions demo site. Not anymore. I intend to use this site as a full-time blog. Thus the name change 
Posted in Blog | Comments Off
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008
Link exchange between the sites just don’t cut it anymore. “Cross-site information sharing” paradigm is growing into a greedy monster requiring new ways to expose your content. RSS has been holding up really good in that front. Given that you can put together - mash up- a website filled with thousands of articles in a matter minutes; it seems like, RSS over-accomplished its task. So what’s next ?
Today, core Mambo and Joomla! are both lacking good RSS facilities. You can only share your “Front page content” via RSS in Mambo (probably the same for J!). If you are keeping only one content item with some “never-updated-flashy” short content, your RSS feed is technically useless to the rest of the world. You can find a good RSS extension, which would cover that scenario.
Question
What if you want to expose more from your CMS site ?
Answer:
With the addition of the Brilaps REST API, MiaCMS, Mambo, Joomla! will allow for advanced external interaction. Meaning that interaction with the site and its content no longer has to occur directly through normal browsing methods. For the first time you can start to consume Mambo’s internals as external services via the data type of your choosing (i.e.) JSON, XML, or Serialized PHP.
How?
Brilaps REST API, MOStlyREST provides the com_rest as a base library that takes care of the message receipt and packaging back to the caller. Brilaps also released a few other goodies that goes along with the base implementation that the other 3rd party developers can use as samples or extend from those. com_rest_content and com_rest_stats components sit on top of the base component(com_rest) and expose your “top ranked”, “most popular” articles, or articles for certain sections/categories, or your site stats to any application that’s capable of parsing some simple XML.
Why?
Why do want to REST enable your Mambo or Joomla! site? One simple answer to that is, larger audience. Larger audience is both audience as in visitors and utilizing applications.
A few examples:
- You can have one MiaCMS site as a content repository, and expose parts of content to multiple other sites that you own. See the sample application, SMRC, to imagine different possiblities.
- You can have a widget like Bridget,
that you can distribute to your visitors to track or search your site at the comfort of a desktop application.
- this list can go on and on, but I leave it up to the implementers and site owners imagination
Next?
I believe, REST enabled MiaCMS, Mambo and Joomla! sites will change the landscape of the content management landscape covered by MiaCMS, Mambo and Joomla!. Indeed, that’s a pretty large landscape. I guess, we just sit back and watch what’s gonna happen next…
For questions and comments about the REST API for MiaCMS, you can visit http://forum.brilaps.com
*Same article is also posted on Chad’s site; http://www.opensourcepenguin.net . If you’d like a take a peek at some other cool stuff, browse on.
Posted in Blog, MiaCMS, News, Open Source | 1 Comment »
Monday, April 28th, 2008
I recently started writing this article study about Free Open Source Projects and their ways; internally and externally.
My initial goal was to analyze the internal and external dynamics of a FOSS project, especially constitutionalizing the internals, the identify the issues being faced, possible recommendations, outcomes and such.
Now, I am wiping what I’ve done so far, and opening this into a collaborative article. Feel free to add your opinions in the comments section. Once it’s ready to become an actual article/case study, I will contact the posters individually asking for their blessing about adding their pieces in the finalized paper.
Thanks in advance for your input.
Posted in Blog | 5 Comments »
Saturday, October 20th, 2007
Just some thing flashed on my mind the other day.
- Creation
- Creativity
- Chaos
- Compliance
Don’t you think, almost anything you can think of goes through those phases?
Posted in Blog, Stuff | No Comments »
Sunday, August 10th, 2008
Another cool gadget from Brilaps just hit the wires.
iMia is a web application focused on bringing a standard iPhone web interface to the MiaCMS, Mambo, and Joomla! content management systems. Yes, the iPhone does have a full web browser that is capable of displaying any site, so it is possible to use these content management systems without iMia. However, the experience is often less than appealing since users must constantly zoom in, zoom out, pinch to expand and contract, etc. As with most web sites and/or applications, these content management systems were coded with the desktop browser in mind. This is were iMia comes in…
iMia brings a simple web interface to the MiaCMS, Mambo, and Joomla! content management systems for iPhone users. The application is designed in accordance with the recommended iPhone interface design guidelines laid out by Apple. iMia makes use of the iui project’s fabulous efforts in this area.
Learn more on the product page here - http://wiki.brilaps.com/wikka.php?wakka=iMia.
Posted in Blog, Linguistics | No Comments »
Wednesday, March 26th, 2008
Today, Brilaps released version 0.8 of Mia chat -Ajax web based chat- application. Chad Auld states, “This release is stable enough for everyday use and has undergone a great deal of testing on the various popular platforms and browsers. We have been using it to do all our own chatting for months now and we’re loving it. We are nearing a 1.0 release, but have a few new tricks to try before then”. Mia Chat is released under the MIT License. For more information about Mia Chat go here.
Edit: Mia Chat and MiaCMS are entirely different applications. Mia Chat is a a standalone web application. It cannot be installed as an extension on MiaCMS.
Posted in Blog, News, Open Source | 1 Comment »
Monday, June 9th, 2008
If you’re a MiaChat user, you better hurry and upgrade to the 0.8.3 version. This minor release from Brilaps, updates the HTMLPurifier library included with the distro in order to bring you a safer ajax chat application.
Grab your mia-chat at http://code.google.com/p/mia-chat/downloads/list
*by the way, MiaChat is not related to, or an extension to MiaCMS
Posted in Blog | No Comments »
Tuesday, May 20th, 2008
As the MiaCMS Team, we recently gave an interview at OpenSourceCMS.com.
Here is a tiny excerpt from the interview;
Chanh:
7) There is a plethora of open source CMS’s available out “there” for people to choose. Why should people consider MiaCMS?
MiaCMS team:
Chad: The MiaCMS team is focused on producing an simple, yet powerful content management system. The team is focused on stability, security, innovation, web standards, performance, and our users. We are community focused and take pride in our product. MiaCMS is not a toy, an experiment, or a hobby. It is a robust CMS which can be used for sites of all types and sizes. Furthermore, MiaCMS has a very powerful extension system which can be used to develop custom extensions to enable functionality not found in the core by default.
Cem: One of the good things that we inherited from Mambo is the mindset of “simplicity”. Can we make it simpler, yet better! We are working on it.
You can read more a http://www.opensourcecms.com/index.php?o…….08&Itemid=188
If you’re in the quest for an Open Source CMS, and don’t want to download/install a bunch of them till you decide, I would surely recommend that you visit OpenSourceCMS.com, play with the demos that they refresh hourly.
Posted in Blog | No Comments »
Sunday, August 31st, 2008
We made it. An -perhaps- insignificant step for humanity, but a giant step for the MiaCMS project.
MiaCMS has been selected as a finalist in the PacktPub 2008 Open Source CMS competition. Our precious project will compete in the the “Most Promising Open Source CMS” category. MiaCMS project is only about 5 months old, but we have worked hard and are quite proud of the results and the interest in the project.
The official list can be see here:
http://www.packtpub.com/2008-open-source-cms-award-finalists
The official voting (the real thing) starts Monday September 1. Your nominations helped get us to this point, and we are thankful for that. However, we need to ask you one more time to show your support for MiaCMS project.
Posted in Blog | No Comments »
Friday, April 18th, 2008
moseasymedia, a sort of well known video embedding extension in the Mambo Joomla! community, has a new release. moseasymedia 2.0.x version is released in mid April with a few neat features.
I’ll try give some highlights from the readme.txt that’s in the zip package.
Please read on,
(more…)
Posted in Blog, News, Open Source | No Comments »
Sunday, August 10th, 2008
As stupid as it looks, and it “does NOT make any sense” at many angles, NewsXperiment bears a few interesting software technologies and paradigms.
NewsXperiment project consists of two parts: NewsXperiment Scrambler Engine (NSE), and Web frontend.
NewsXperiment Scrambler Engine runs offline and gathers, processes, scrambles and outputs a zip file that consists of scrambled news item pickles.
Once executed, NSE goes through its categorized feed repository and retrieves the feeds. Thanks to Mark Pilgrim’s excellent “feedparser” library.
Now that the feeds are read, the engine performs the following:
- randomly picks a certain number of news items from each category as base feeds.
- randomly associates a certain number of scrambler feeds to each base feed.
At this point, the engine has the initial data in place. There comes the scrambling…. However, before scrambling anything, all the entries picked to be scrambled need to be tagged, chunked, chinked.
- Using NLTK, all the titles, and summaries read are tagged, chunked, chinked.(i love this part)
- Accoding to the chunkie, chinckie data, each base feed item’s title and summary are scrambled with the set that was destined to be the scrambler for the base. Ofcourse, this does not always result in a well-constructed sentence.
- At some point, the scrambling process is completed and time to generate the output file.
- Output file is created out of each scrambled item, and consists of a list of titles, summaries and links back to the news items that are used to create them. This file is a pickle dump dictionary elements.
- The output file is datestamped, and zipped. Zip file because, doh!, it’s compressed. Plus, I couldn’t find a way around uploading the pickle content to Google AppEngine. Very likely a MIME type issue, but didn’t dig deep into that. A zipped pickle dump was all I needed, and I had it.
Very well, I have the zipped pickles, what do I do with them? If I cannot get them up to Google AppEngine’s data store, how possibly could I share ?
(more…)
Posted in Blog | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, July 30th, 2008
I started playing with Google AppEngine a few months ago. First, tried to port over my work in SillyDomainNames.com into AppEngine, but gave up on it after a short while. Always being on the lookout for new and interesting ideas, I somehow came up with this experimental-mash-up-site concept; NewsXperiment. Not your everyday mashup site, something different and unique. I spent some time experimenting with the code locally and after I brought the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) into the mix, it immediately gained some traction. Brilaps was looking for a project to test out the new Google AppEngine and it made sense to let NewsXperiment.com be the guinea pig. Google AppEngine turned out to be a great idea and it didn’t take long for me to bring this project from an idea to the first beta release. I haven’t come across anything similar yet, so if anything exists, please let me/them know.
So what is NewsXperiment? What can I do there? What is the roadmap and what were the challenges during development? I’ll try to answer those questions in this blog post.
What is NewsXperiment?
NewsXperiment is a news scrambler/generator site. In the possible simplest terms, NewsXperiment reads a bunch of RSS feeds, approximately 200, from a number of highly respected sources and scrambles their news’ titles and summaries using Natural Language Processing techniques. The idea is to create interesting, funny, and/or timely new stories based on actual real-time events as reported by news sources of all kind across the Internet. The mash often produces comical stories such as “Princess Di Dancing with the Polar Bears at Golden Gate Bridge”. How would it come up with such a story? Well at that time of our scrambling there was probably some unrelated news about Princess Di, Dancing with the Stars, Polar Bears, and Golden Gate Bridge. We randomly select and break apart each story, scramble them up, and rebuild them to construct amusing and well structured stories. The magic is in the reconstruction. The engine is still in beta and thus the scrambled Title/Summary text still needs some refinement, but it is worth a bookmark and glance every day or so, as it already generates some pretty interesting mashups several times a day.
You can simply poke around and glance at a few news entries. Or if you feel like digging in more, you can rate some stories and/or comment on them. Better yet, you can write your own version of the scrambled story using the references provided for that news. On top of all that, you can provide feedback and become a true NewsXperiment star
Roadmap and the challenges during development?
As of Aug 3rd, 2008 the basic functionality of an interactive website is in place.
Scrambler Engine, News Upload, and Admin level CRUD operations, Visitor Comments, Visitor Rating are all implemented.
Some tech specs about NewsXperiment project:
- http://newsXperiment.com redirects to http://newsXperiment.appspot.com
- Built with Python
- NewsXperiment hits Flickr per news item and grabs a relevant image.(this is the fun part)
- Utilizes NTLK libraries within the scrambler engine that runs offline.
- The generated output is a “zipped pickle” file and it is uploaded to Google AppEngine using appcfg.py.
- Runs on Google AppEngine.
- Uses Django for server-side rendering.
- Uses Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library for client-side JavaScript and CSS.
What’s in the bag for near future development:
- Sometime in the near future, a “Fork This News” feature will be added. “Fork This News” feature will enable the visitors to make a copy of an existing news entry, and write their own version, which can be rated, commented and yet again forked over and over again. Currently, visitors can simulate doing the same thing using the “Comment” form assigned to each news item.
- A better front-end design would be nice, but I highly doubt I’ll loose sleep on it. I absolutely wouldn’t mind if someone with good design skills taking a stab at it.
- NewsXperiment surely needs a new logo.
I’ll leave the challenges and the technical mumba jumba to another post… Any feedback is appreciated. Please feel free to comment here. If you prefer email communique, see “About” link on NewsXperiment.com for contact info.
Posted in Blog | 1 Comment »
Saturday, June 7th, 2008
Annabel Port of Geoff Show at Virgin Radio U.K. argues against a widely held belief every night. She sure is a MUST-LISTEN.
And some great reading from Annabel, as she is the Head of Showbusiness at the Geoff Show. Here…
Posted in Blog | No Comments »
Saturday, September 8th, 2007
I recently received an email from one of registered users of the ocszone.com
The email follows;
| from a user…. |
| At Joomla Extensions it is said that moseasymedia is free,but here at your download you demand credit card details and want to chargeThis is bull shitI’ll fucken tell everyone I can about your con
fucken piece of shit |
This email is obviously from someone who does not know what GPL means. Indeed, let me rephrase; from someone who does not know how to read.
ocszone.com clearly states - in multiple places- that the software we develop and distribute is free of charge unless stated otherwise. Most of those notices are in different colors and bold, so that they will be eye-catchy. And we do NOT demand any private and financial information.
(more…)
Posted in Bizzare Oddities, Blog, Stuff | 1 Comment »
Monday, December 10th, 2007
StarvingEngineers.com made the news. Gotta love the publicity
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22179829/
http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release.do?id=800971
http://biz.yahoo.com/iw/071210/0337520.html
http://hosting.phpmagazine.net/2007/12/simply_hired_signs_distributio.html
and more….
| Press Release |
Source: Simply Hired |
Simply Hired Signs Distribution Deal With Go Daddy to Expand Publisher Network
Monday December 10, 6:00 am ET
#1 Domain Registrar, to Offer Millions of Customers Job-a-matic to Monetize Their Sites
MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA–(MARKET WIRE)–Dec 10, 2007 — Simply Hired, operates the world’s largest search engine for jobs at www.simplyhired.com, while also providing job board technology to thousand of publisher sites. Simply Hired will quickly expand their publisher network through a prominent distribution deal with Go Daddy, the world’s largest domain name registrar. Through this partnership, Go Daddy is now able to offer their millions of hosting customers the opportunity to monetize their site while seamlessly integrating valuable content into their hosting platforms.
When Simply Hired approached us about offering their free Job-a-matic product to our hosting customers, it was an easy decision,” said Vice-President of Technology Michael Chadwick. “Go Daddy provides a one-stop shop for individuals and businesses to easily establish an online presence. Using Go Daddy Hosting Connection, our customers can take their site to the next level by monetizing it and quickly adding relevant job content.”
The Simply Hired Job-a-matic product allows Go Daddy hosting customers to instantly add a free job board to their site and to utilize a suite of tools to easily customize and monetize their site while providing users with a seamless experience. Another feature of the Job-a-matic product is the quality backfill of relevant jobs coming from the Simply Hired database of more than six million jobs, so the job board will always look full.
“We view Go Daddy as a significant distribution channel for our Job-a-matic product, complementing our existing network of more than 3,000 publishers,” said Simply Hired’s Co-Founder and CEO, Gautam Godhwani. “By coupling our easy-to-use technology and extensive job database with Go Daddy’s flagship brand and massive customer base we are set up to enjoy a very successful and long term relationship and we are pleased to see the positive feedback we are already receiving from Go Daddy customers.”
“We recently published a technical site for engineers and incorporated Job-a-matic into the content of our site after coming across it on GoDaddy.com. The Simply Hired job board technology makes our site look very neat, elegant and most importantly simple and it will provide more value within the context of our site,” explained Ozgur Cem Sen, www.starvingengineers.com.
Contact:
For more information, please visit:
http://www.simplyhired.com
or http://www.jobamatic.com
http://www.GoDaddy.com/WebHosting
Media inquiries, contact:
Julie Craft
510-295-3935
Posted in Blog, News | No Comments »
Sunday, November 18th, 2007
OCS Software Solutions launches http://StarvingEngineers.com as a job market place for many engineering disciplines.
Throughout 2007, job postings will be $5 for 30 days.
Posted in Blog, News | No Comments »
Thursday, September 18th, 2008
At my earliest convenience, I plan experience this Blue Voyage voyage at the Aegean & Mediterranean coastal line of Turkey.
I grabbed the image from this website. I hope that they won’t mind.
*Disclaimer, I’m not affiliated with them in any way, I don’t even know them. It’s just that, their map looks fantastic.
http://www.bluecruise.org/map/index.html
It’d be way too cool to see all those places too.
http://www.bluecruise.org/map/thumbs.html
Just excited with the remote possiblity of this happening sometime soon !
Posted in Blog | No Comments »
Wednesday, June 25th, 2008
For no good reason I joined Twitter today.
As much as I dislike MySpace, FaceBook and similar social networking initiatives,I have a feeling I’ll like Twitter and even try to keep it up to date with my daily activities.
Feel free to follow me
http://twitter.com/ozgurcemsen
Posted in Blog | No Comments »
