login with twitter
I am playing at a “login with twitter” feature on my dev website and so I started looking at oauth in detail.
As a first step, I read The OAuth 1.0 Guide. It’s a bit complex, but I figured a few things out from it. The principles are not really that complicated, but it relies heavily on encryptions for oauth v1.0, so i used an Apache library called SignPost that did a lot of the work. OAuth v2.0 works differently so I implemented it directly without using any libraries other than the apache HTTP client.
I then went to my twitter account and registered an application there. The purpose is simply to create two tokens (a consumer key, a consumer secret) that will identify my application to Twitter when the site visitor wants to log in.
All I had to do was to create a “login with twitter” link on my page. When I got it working, I added a “login with facebook” (using oauth v2.0), “login with google+” (using oauth v2.0), “login with linkedin” (using oauth v1.0).
Since I got going with the API at linked-in and it is my most up to date profile, I saved my access tokens and used them to truly integrate my web app with my linkedin profile and read my profile summary and headline through the API. That way, the profile page on my site contains the same information as my linked-in profile. I think I will actually create a profiles page with company CVs generated from linked-in.
Most of these APIs are Restful web services returning JSON objects or XML, so integrating with them is really easy, especially with the addition of the json java library from json.org that creates and transforms JSON objects to and from XML.
The access tokens I retrieve from the login providers are not stored yet. To me, they should just available during the session but it does open up some interesting marketing and intelligence capabilities, such as integrating with a couple of other google APIs to do automatic customer segmentation.
News from Klout
according to Klout,
“You know how to connect to the right people and share what’s important to your audience. You generously share your network to help your followers. You have a high level of engagement and an influential audience.”
I think this is more accurate than what it was, with a score of 39 now, which reflects a little bit of regular participation on the blog and lots of reading on linked-in. I am beginning to see how this can be a useful “metric” if I wanted to go solo and sell the advertising space to a sponsor, but with a low-ish score like that, that will take me nowhere at the moment. I will keep posting and see if I can improve the score somehow, but I find it hard to use the metric as a tool, and not post in order to improve the metric. Still it’s a good motivation and a good reminder of the fact I should post more regularly.
Free web design?
With my upcoming training project making good progress, thought it was time to start making progress on promoting it a little bit more. I stumbled on http://headwebmaster.com/index.html quite by accident but really loved the idea. Being done by students, not all their designs are great but I have been surprised by a couple, so I decided to give it a chance.
Here is the form I submitted:
Hello,
I saw your offer for free web design and absolutely loved the way you are going about it.
I want to do an education website for software training on the Autonomy Interwoven TeamSite CMS. I have lots of experience as a web developer but I lack the “artistic creativity” required to present the information in a good looking manner. All my own designs always end-up very square and blocky.
I have are the following needs:
- a good looking homepage promoting the training services, with the ability to promote additional services later on, so it has to be flexible and grow with me in the design. although I want to launch it a s a training organisation first, the aim is to also find work later on as web development and support for large organisation in the US. Being in the UK, I want to offer the time zone difference as a unique selling point to this market. the homepage should be quite vibrant, but not overwhelming. As such, I envisage links to the next course coming, a featured course and some news (see below).
- listing of upcoming courses
- by topic
- by date, as a list
- by date as a calendar
- detail page of each training course containing dates, additional information, introduction video (not currently on the page, but is on my wish list). Later on, adding frequently asked questions about each course.
- a custom shopping cart
- a My account page, a secured zone to view recordings of training courses is in development. What I need is an alternative design to indicate a logged in zone. I understand this is a bit vague but the home of the logged in one should detail what courses they have bought and also links to manage their account.
on the social front, I want to display
- news, with an RSS feed and a twitter feed
- a contact us page, with contact details and links, forms, plus emphasis on connecting via social networks
- an About us page, detailing the previous company clients
I have already developed a site and used a free template but I would like someone to move it to HTML5/CSS3, which I believe would be a good exercise for your students, as well as have a bespoke design that fits my needs as opposed to me shoe-horning my content in someone else’s template.
I am quite happy to work with “Lorem ipsum” text for the samples you provide. I can also provide a static zip file of the content I already have so you know what type of content you can expect on the various pages.
The site itself is powered by XSL so it is important that all the pages’ HTML is 100% validating, otherwise I will not be able to produce the desired output.
The project will also be added to my existing blog and on-going progress will be reported on, so I also believe this is a good advertising opportunity to promote your school too. You will also be welcome to appear with guest entries on the blog to report your own success stories in the project.
I would like you to consider my application. Being with a site already and understanding all the technologies makes me an easy client to talk to. I understand that nothing is truly free, so I am more than happy to spend some time as needed with the student(s) too.
It has been really good for me to fill out this form. It has, if anything, helped me to re-focus my ideas, so for that, thank you already.
I look forward to hearing from you.
setting extended attributes in folder files, recursively
I’ve had enough of windows. I just wanted to recursively tag some files using (beurk) command line. thankfully, I managed to make it work using this little command:
FOR /R “y:defaultmainacmeWORKAREAwatemplatedatanewsarticlesen-gb” %f IN (*.xml) DO (
iwextattr -s “TeamSite/Metadata/Locale=en-gb” %f
)
Now I know I’ll need to re-use this in the future, so it’s safely added to the blog now 
. I hope you all have a good day.
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