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The weekend is over and so are the first DokuWiki Hackdays ever. I had a wonderful weekend even though I didn't get much sleep. Meeting all those nice people I only knew from the net was as much fun as I thought.

Besides a lot of socializing, playing Mario Kart DS and having beer and cola we got quite a bit done on DokuWiki. The XML-RPC interface got a lot of attention and patches, from which the DokuWiki FUSE file system directly benefited. Some bugs were fixed and some progress with supporting DokuWiki farms was made. We also added some initial stuff for better supporting mobile browsers and discussed possibilities to add oAuth to DokuWiki. Last but not least we talked about how to improve the FCKW WYSIWYG plugin.

		Florian is working on his Wordpress/DokuWiki integration. Pierre talks to one of the TWiki guys.
Michael and Chris are working on DokuWiki farming. Guy studies the FrOSCon program.		Upper row: Michael Klier, Michael Haman, Andreas Gohr, Chris Smith. Lower row: Pierre Spring, Gina Häußge, Guy Brand

Many thanks to Gina Häußge, Michael Klier, Chris Smith, Guy Brand, Michael Hamann, Pierre Spring, Florian Feldhaus and all those who dropped by to talk about DokuWiki¹⁾ – you made this a success. And a big thanks also goes to the FrOSCon organizers who made all this possible in such a uncomplicated way. Kudos.

I'm really looking forward to the next time and there will be one for sure. This was just too cool to not be repeated.

PS. Be sure check out Gina's post as well.

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Wikis are about collaboration. It's no wonder there are many real life events around the topic as well. There are small grass root events like the Wiki Wednesdays in different cities around the world. There are big conferences like WikiSym and WikiMania. And many of the wiki engines have their own events too. Like the TikiFests from TikiWiki or the upcoming DokuWiki hack days.

But keeping up to date with what happens around wikis wasn't that easy in the past. Today my company released a new feature at WikiMatrix that should change that. It's called the Wiki Event Calendar and does what the name suggests. It is a central calendar on all wiki related events.

To make this work really well the calendar needs your help. If you plan to attend some event about wikis, or are maybe giving a talk about wikis somewhere, please check if it is already listed and if not, just add it.

To keep up with what happens in the wiki world, you can subscribe to the calendar via RSS and iCal subscriptions. Or you can search the upcoming events for locations or keywords at the website.

BTW, we also updated a few other things on the site. If you are looking for a wiki just have a look at WikiMatrix. Oh, and if you haven't blogged about WikiMatrix yet, do so!

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The iPhone is a great device for accessing web sites while on the road. But things you look up on the road often differ from the things you'd need at home. Often the information you are looking for is directly related to your current location. This is why the new iPhone 3G comes with a builtin GPS.

Unfortunately the location data can not simply be used in a web application because Apple didn't add any possibility to do so in Mobile Safari.

But now you can access this information using a free tool from the appstore. The tool is called Search Quest. I mentioned it in my last blog post already:

There are two srceens. The first screen lets you enter a position using various options.
The second screen gives you the choice to use the position to do various things.

One (badly documented) feature of Search Quest is to use it to relay your location to any website. Search Quest provides two options to do so¹⁾:

1. calling Search Quest from your web application
2. calling your web application from Search Quest

Let's have a look at both options.

The first option is really simple: you just create a link using the pseudo protocol searchquest://. After the protocol you put the URL of your application replacing the http:// with an uppercas H. Like this:

<a href="searchquest://Htools.splitbrain.org/gc/loc.php">Get Location</a>

Clicking this link in Mobile Safari (and having Search Quest installed of course) will quickly popup Search Quest and then redirect the user to the given site. The current position is passed as variables in the GET request.

You can try it here: http://tools.splitbrain.org/gc/loc.php

Unfortunately this method has a disadvantage: Search Quest will not update the current position but will send the data from when it last updated.

The second method registers your web application in Search Quest itself. This makes it more likely the user will update the current position before accessing the web application.

To do this you need to create a special menu file on your webserver. I couldn't find a way to do this without this menu file. I also couldn't find any description of the format. But it is easy enough to figure out from an example. It basically configures a few texts and the URL(s) you want to have called with the location data.

I wrote a little example which will redirect you to the list of nearest geocaches at geocaching.com or shows a map with them. The menu file looks like this:

{
    G="1";
    T="Geo Caching";
    B="Apps";
    C=(
    (   
        {
        T="Please choose";
        },
        {   
            T="Nearest caches";
            E="The nearest caches to your location";
            S="http://tools.splitbrain.org/gc/nearest.php";
        },
        {   
            T="Show GC Map";
            E="Display the geocaching.com map";
            S="http://tools.splitbrain.org/gc/map.php";
        },
        {   
            T="Show my data";
            E="Display all your location data";
            S="http://tools.splitbrain.org/gc/loc.php";
        },
        )
    );
}

The URLs just do a simple redirect:

<?php
header('Location: http://www.geocaching.com/seek/nearest.aspx?lat='.$_REQUEST['lat'].'&lng='.$_REQUEST['lon']);
?>

To register the menu file in Search Quest you need to enter its URL in the second screen under Access Location-Based Web Apps. Here's a series of screen shots:

After the menu URL is registered once you can always update the menu file to add or change your service URLs.

If you want to try it, register http://tools.splitbrain.org/gc/ in SearchQuest.

Search Quest gives you a simple method to get access to your user's location on their request. Personally I like the first method better as it is simpler to desribe to your users: “install Search Quest on your iPhone and click this link”.

Hopefully Search Quest will add a feature to force an update of the location data when using this method in the future.

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After a week with the iPhone it's time for another post . Apple's appstore makes it really easy to find and install interesting software for the little computer. Here's a list of software I really liked so far.

List and eye candy after the break.

Instapaper combines a web service with a native iPhone app. The webservice lets you mark web pages for reading later through a simple bookmarklet. But instead of just bookmarking it, it does fetch a copy of the site and creates an easy to read text-only version of it.

When you sync the iPhone app (over the air) these stripped down text version as well as the full featured HTML page is pulled to your iPhone for convenient off-line reading.

Zenbe Lists is an application, Apple forgot to include with the iPhone software for some mysterious reason: a to-do list application.

Zenbe isn't too fancy. You can create to-do items and put them in lists. A nice touch is that you can sync your lists to a web service and even share a them between multiple people. The web service is not as featureful as Remember the Milk or Todoist, but is free.

Stanza is one of those tools where you can't believe it's free. Stanza is a book reader for the iPhone. What makes it so incredible is the built in library browser which lets you download hundreds of free books from Project Gutenberg and other sources. Eg. the recently recommended book Little Brother is available through Stanza.

This is a simple utility your service provider or Apple should have included. But of course they didn't. UsedBudget logs into your T-Mobile Germany account and fetches info about your used up minute and SMS contingents and warns you if you approach the limits of your contract.

Twinkle is a nice looking Twitter client with a twist. Besides showing tweets and messages from your friends it can also display tweets by other Twinkle users in your proximity. An update with identi.ca support would this make the absolute killer app for me. If you agree, bug the developers about it.

This app only interesting to people living in or visiting Berlin. Fahr-Info calculates public transit connections. It uses the iPhone's location services to find the nearest stations and can display the network plan centered at your current position.

This is very simple game using the iPhone accelerometer for controls. The gameplay is simple: avoid the cubes. To steer, you lean the phone to the left or right. Of course the speed of the approaching cubes increases over time… Simple but fun.

The must have for every Unix geek. iSSH is a SSH client for the iPhone and quite usable already. What I miss is the possibility to do key based authentication.

This is the swiss army knife to location based services on the iPhone. The interface is a bit confusing at first, but once understood it is simple.

There are two sceens. The first screen (“where”) lets you enter a position using various options. You can use the iPhone's GPS but you can also enter an Address and use Yahoo's geocoder for lookup.

The second screen (“what”) gives you the choice to use the position to do various things. This includes getting a list of Wikipedia pages about objects near by, mailing a Google maps link to a contact or to update Yahoo Fireeagle. Frotz (free)

I wrote about Interactive Fiction a while ago. Frotz brings IF to your iPhone, together with a big online library where you can download games for free. Unfortunately the program seems to be a bit buggy currently. After playing for a while it starts to slow down real bad and you need to restart it. I hope this will be fixed in an update soon.

How often did you need a dice to play but had none available? Okay, didn't happen to me either. But this little app is just too beautiful to skip, even though it is quite senseless. It just displays up to five dices which you can throw by shaking the iPhone. It will even vibrate and make typical dice throwing sounds. Fun.

Got an iPhone? What are your favorite apps? Let me know in the comments.

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If you follow me at Twitter you may have noticed, that I barely tweet anymore. This is not because I no longer interested in micro-blogging but because I found a different platform to do so. This platform is Identi.ca.

There are probably a dozen Twitter clones coming out each month, but Identi.ca is a bit different. Identi.ca is not just another web service. It's a philosophy. It is all about openness. All tweets (or dents as some like to call them on Identi.ca) are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution license and the software itself is Open Source, too.

Yes, that's the coolest thing about Identi.ca: you can download the software behind it (Laconi.ca) and run your own micro-blogging service. And not only that - all Laconi.ca installs can talk to each other so you can subscribe to people on different servers similar to what Jabber does. Distributed micro-blogging, yeah.

Laconi.ca development is going really fast and a lot of features where implemented in the few weeks it is available. There's a Jabber gateway, a (working) reply tab, a Twitter compatible API, hashtags, OpenID logins, tracking, search and RSS feeds for everything¹⁾.

Because of the API being 100% Twitter compatible many of the available Twitter clients also support identi.ca.

An interesting touch is the license the Laconi.ca creator Evan Prodromou²⁾ choose: the Affero General Public License (AGPL). I never heard about it before, but it basically boils down to a more radical version of the GPL. You have to make the source available to all your users. In contrast the “normal” GPL only requires you to deliver the source when distributing the software it self, which does not apply to web services. Using that license is a good idea for a service that aims to create a open and distributed cloud. Time will tell how well it can be enforced though.

So follow me on Identi.ca and say goodbye to the fail whale.

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