CC Network Feature Update

Nathan Yergler, October 21st, 2008

We just pushed a new feature set to CC Network; most of these are OpenID related, and I’ll try to write more in depth about the interesting ones in the near future:

• You can now elect to “always trust” an OpenID site
• Commoner (the code behind the CC Network) now supports the Simple Registration extension to OpenID
• We have preliminary (experimental) support for Verisign’s OpenID Seatbelt extension
• We’ve added a link that to “add another” after you register a work
• You can now select a full size or “thin” network badge (similar to the license badges)
• We’ve added a link in the head of profile and work list pages that points to the RDF/XML file; we still consider RDFa the primary vehicle but this may help others ingest the data

Other things you think we should add? Let us know — create an issue or email issues@creativecommons.org.

Schema Migration with Django

Nathan Yergler, October 21st, 2008

Django is an amazing web framework; we built a lot of features in a very short period of time and Django [mostly] stayed out of our way. Last night as I was working on today’s feature upgrade for creativecommons.net I decided to tackle what lots of people see as its major weakness: schema migration. Rather, the lack of an integrated migration story.

I had seen some of the tools floating around and decided to watch the panel from Djangocon to get a better overview. For the record the represented tools are dmigrations, south and django-evolution. At some point while watching the video I think I was convinced each was the right solution; they all have features/use cases to recommend them.

Selecting the correct tool is an exercise in change management: it seems almost certain that Django will eventually adopt or create a “blessed” migration tool. And at that point, we need a way to move forward. Because of this I wound up choosing dmigrations. Sure, it doesn’t do some of the fancy stuff that south and django-evolution do (dependency tracking, model “fingerprinting”) but it does let us dump out the entire migration path as raw SQL and that’s something I can easily work with when it comes time to recreate our database on the “real’ platform.

Introducing Commoner

Nathan Yergler, October 21st, 2008

Last week we launched the Creative Commons Network as part of our annual campaign. The Network is a platform for exploring digital copyright registries and has features we think will appeal to our community. Creators can register their works and add a badge to their web pages to show more information about their identity on the license deeds (for more information see this post on the CC blog).

Like everything we do at Creative Commons, the code behind the CC Network is free. commoner is a Django-based Python application that runs the code behind creativecommons.net. While we don’t expect someone would want to run a site exactly like the CC Network, we think there are plenty of opportunities for different registries that serve different communities to flourish. The enhanced deeds aren’t dependent on anything in the CC infrastructure stack — we’re just consuming metadata published on the pages.

You can find information on Commoner in the wiki or the auto-generated docs; issues can be submitted on the CC issue tracker.

Issue Tracking at code.creativecommons.org

Nathan Yergler, September 5th, 2008

Continuing the trend started when we moved our source repository, today we’re rolling out issue tracking on code.creativecommons.org. Our goals are two fold:

1. Increase transparency regarding what we are doing and plan to do. If you find a bug or suggest an idea, we’d like to make sure it’s tracked in a publicly accessible location where everyone can follow along.
2. Tangentially, we’d like to make it easier for people to contribute to the work we’re doing. We [semi-]frequently hear people say they’d like to help, but don’t know where to start. We’ve had Developer Challenges forever but they’re not easy to find and poorly maintained. I’m personally hoping that keeping the ideas in the same system we [developers] use every day will keep them in the forefront of our minds.

With respect to the first, we’re initially tracking bugs here for three projects: the license engine, Herder (a translation tool we’ll be rolling out real soon now), and CC Learn’s Universal Education Search project. Feel free to create bugs, wishes, features for any CC project; we’ll create the Project identifiers as we go.

With respect to challenges, I’ve created a community keyword we’ll assign to projects that it’s unlikely we’ll tackle, but which might be appropriate for someone in the community who wants to contribute. Luis’ idea from earlier this week is the first. I hope we have a giant pile of ideas (and a corresponding giant pile of completed ideas) by next year’s Summer of Code.

Asheesh’s liblicense interview

Steren Giannini, August 12th, 2008

Relatively to the liblicense 0.8 announcement, I recently made a video interview of Asheesh concerning his work on liblicense.

Watch it here.

In his demo, Asheesh uses liblicense twice:

• in the online photo gallery to read and write metadata
• in the Eye Of Gnome plug-in to read license metadata

This shows that liblicense is now mature enough to be used by your applications.

SemanticEditTime

Steren Giannini, July 14th, 2008

My last task concerning Semantic Media Wiki was to create an extension which adds automatically the “Revision Time” and the “Revision User” of a wiki page in the semantic data.

You can now use these data to sort querries, for example :

{{#ask: [[Category:Task]]
| sort=Revision time
| order=descending
| limit=3
}}

It’s currently used in the Casestudies page of the CC wiki.

You’ll find the code and the instructions in the Creative Commons Git repository. This small piece of code is more a hack than a real extension. The semantic properties are supposed to be rewritten in the next version of Semantic MediaWiki, which will enable much easier user-defined special properties.

Flickr Image Re-Use for OpenOffice.org Demo availlable

Mihai Husleag, July 12th, 2008

Never trust a programmer when he gives you a date for something to be done . Thats what i did in my last article (2 weeks i think i said then) and here we are a month later.

What has be done since my last article :

• right click on an result (image) will show you a popup menu with the available sizes on Flickr server
• left click on a result will insert directly in Writer the image with size medium as default
• once the image is inserted some text will be added beside the image(title , link to the image, license and link to the license)
• i improved searching and the way the image is adding into Writer
• i added a more friendly interface when you want to search over license (similar with advanced search on Flickr website)
• added a previous button to see previous results if needed
• if you insert a image, when you open again the extension the previous search will be done immediately ( on the exact the same position if you used the previous or next buttons)
• about searching : we can have multiple tags (separated by space : ” “) and the relation between them is AND . also the results are ordered by interestingness
• a progress bar was added
• the extension after installation can be found here : Insert \ Picture \ From Flickr …

Some screenshots :

The results from a search by the extension vs Flickr search

Right click on an image

Inserted image into Writer

Also i would to add that this extension, at this momment, works only in Writer.

Download (right click and save as)

Any suggestions or remarks are greatly appreciated.

Labs and Techblog have merged

Nathan Kinkade, June 28th, 2008

For most people reading this, you will have likely already realized that the CC Techblog has moved to Labs. We recently realized that Labs and the Techblog overlapped enough in intent to merge them into one mostly cohesive interface. The name Techblog has gone away in favor of the name Labs. The front page of Labs is now what was the Techblog. The new Labs blog is also sporting a new old theme, which is the same theme used at http://creativecommons.org with a few minor changes.

No more excuses for not doing tasks!

Steren Giannini, June 24th, 2008

Stay up to date and don’t miss your deadline any more with the brand new email task notifications and reminders.

I created this as an extension of Semantic MediaWiki. It is mainly supposed to be used as an internal tool at CC. Basicaly, it sends email to concerned users each time a tasks is created or updated. It also sends reminders at different date before your deadline.

I’m currently working on an online release of the entire project and task tracking system used here, so stay tuned.

One of those days…

Frank Tobia, June 23rd, 2008

I wake up in the morning to find that eternal funny man George Carlin has died. Add to that the fact that one of my recently-ported api tests has failed, and you just know it’s going to be one of those days.

Work on porting the test suite was slow at first. I had thought it would be easy enough just to jump in and start coding. Later this pipe dream evaporated and I forced myself to learn CherryPy, Python Paste, and a bit of WSGI.  Then Asheesh and Nathan filled me in on the intricacies of the “buildout” build system (which is really quite nice when you get to know it), and I was ready to go.

So the porting has begun. Check out the branch where all the fun is happening, if you happen to be so inclined. And as the fates would have it, the lucky number seventh test I ported just so happens to fail. This leads to the real challenge every software tester must eventually face: fixing a broken test. Getting to the bottom of this means a fun-filled day ahead.