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Category Archives: Announcements
Composer speaks Tumblr
Just deployed Tumblr support. My last tumble was in July, so it’s great to be back on the platform. Took me a while to figure this one out, but it turned out to be pretty easy. It’s all based on oauth and a simple API. Using the existing oauth library, everything was provided for me. All I needed was to find the url forthe API call, the parameters, and bolt together the oauth authorization scheme. Easy peasy.
Do you tumble? Click here to add a Tumblr account to Composer now. Quick word of warning, right now, we only post to the first blog in your account. If you want to post to multiple blogs within the same account, shoot over an encouraging comment and I’ll see what I can do…
As with WordPress, Tumblr posts are appended with a little “Posted via Composer” link.
WordPress links
As part of the same deploy that introduced plurk, I also snuck in an update to the WordPress service. If you post a url in a message, it will now automatically be converted to a link before being posted to WordPress.
Also, all posts to WordPress are appended with a small “Posted by Composer” link. Eventually premium users will have the option to disable this, but right now that’s not a feature I’ve built! If you’re passionate about this issue, and don’t have the coding skills to remote it on the WordPress end, shoot over a comment and offer me a $50 Amazon gift voucher, then I’ll build it just for you!
Composer speaks plurk
Fergus put a survey together asking folks what services they’d like to see supported. Google Plus was the front runner, but their api is read only, so that’s not an option. I scanned the list for other votes, and figured I’d take a bash at plurk.
Took a couple of attempts, first I tried the plurkoauth library, as recommended by plurk themselves, but that required pecl_http, which was a PITA to install. After a bit more searching I found EternalPlurk. It threw up a few fatal errors and a bunch more warnings. But after a few quick bugfixes, it seems to do the job. Thanks to the author.
The code is now live on production, and I’ve successfully linked my plurk account and posted a plurk. One thing, we automatically use the plurk verb “says”, there’s currently no option to change that, either per message or per account. If it’s something you feel passionately about, shoot a comment and I’ll what I can do.
Plurkers, welcome to the Composer family… 🙂
Building This Because We Miss Ping.fm
Callum built Composer last year as a personal replacement for ping.fm because he missed the ability to post to WordPress, Twitter and Facebook from a single place. We both used to use ping.fm for that, and when it was taken over by Seesmic, they dropped WordPress support (and heaps of other services).
After talking about Composer for a while, Callum built it and we both started using it. A couple of other people started using it and he added Indentica support for one of those users as it was a must have network.
We’ve had a few chats about what to do with it – whether we should keep it as a service that we use as it solves a problem for us, or open it out to the public and let anyone use it.
We decided on the latter! Today, I’m starting to get involved in the project and we think that the first step is to get a few more users on board to use the service and get their feedback. Since doing some research, it’s become clear that lots of users really miss ping.fm, so there’s definitely a group of people out there who might not have found an alternative service yet, and might find this useful.
Hopefully we’ll get a few more users on board who can provide some feedback on features/networks they’d like to have. If there’s a must-have network that’s not currently supported, please get in touch – we may be able to add it quite easily and if so, hopefully quickly.
On reading about why ping.fm closed and why hellotxt closed, it may mean that at some point we will need to charge for the service to cover operating costs, however, at this point we have no plans to do so, and accounts created while the project is being developed will be free forever.
Want to help create an awesome ping.fm replacement? Sign up and join in!
New Bootstrap theme
Composer has been given a bit of a facelift. The stock CakePHP design has been augmented (it’s not fair to say replace, much of it remain) with Twitter’s Bootstrap.
In theory, this makes the whole design far more responsive. That’s true for the menu, but not so much for the other parts, yet. The pieces are now in place, so we’re a step forward.
Also, a big boon for me personally when posting on my phone, I’ve changed the flash messages to be colour coded, so now green box means succeeded, red box means failed. Yay for colour coding!
Also, the new responsive theme makes text much bigger on my phone, puts the menu behind a button, and so on. If you haven’t already, head over to Composer and check out the new design. As always, thoughts on a postcard (or comment)… 🙂
Remember me and other tweaks
The remember me function now works. If you’re having issues, I recommend clearing cookies for this domain. The “remember me” text on the login page is also now a label, so clicking it will tick the checkbox. The devil’s in the details.
I’ve also deployed some behind the scenes changes that bring encryption to the application. If you created a link to WordPress before today, then the data you submitted was stored in plain text in the database. From today forward, this data is encrypted.
There was some discussion about whether or not this feature is important. Most people felt it was overkill to focus on security so early. I’m a big fan of the “better safe than sorry” philosophy when it comes to security, so I’m pleased that this code is live.
I also found a new deployment process, so bzr-upload replaces good old rsync! Deployments are now as simple as `bzr upload`.
Remember me fix in the works
Fixed the remember me feature yesterday, big thanks to the folks at CakeDC for their help. I found and fixed a couple of bugs in their users plugin and they were super responsive in fixing another issue. Hoping to deploy the change in the next few days.
Composer speaks SMS
Today I built an SMS API for Composer. It’s very basic, but it works. I just sent a text, had the message published, and got an SMS reply telling me which services succeeded (and sadly, failed).
Twitter failed because it wants to make every domain a link, and then wants to “shorten” that link to a 20 or 21 character t.co link. Very stupid. So twilio.com (10 characters) became http://t.co/Mnj6d4ZX (20 characters). With 3 domains (not urls) in my message, I gained at least 20 characters, and went over the 140 limit. But that’s another story!
I started out this morning (technically afternoon, but my morning 😉 ) building an SMS API for Composer. I wanted to be able to post from my mobile, without internet, and update my statuses. I chose Tropo because they’re free while in development. I figured it would be a while before I’d have the whole thing production ready, so a few months of free SMS gateway seemed appealing.
Alas, too many hours later, none of my texts reached Tropo, I couldn’t get a reply to work by IM or SMS, and so finally I decided to get agile and instead try Twilio. Bingo. It just worked. No issues, no bother. There are a couple of downsides. First, I got $30 bonus when signing up, but to “activate” my account I need to add a credit card. Second, it’s not free, it’s $1 a month per number plus 1c per text received and 1c to 7c or more per SMS sent, depending on the destination. But it works, and it worked in less than an hour.
I hard coded the mobile number to account id link, so if you want to use the SMS API, just let me know, tell me your mobile number, and I’ll add you to it! I’ll work on a better system where folks can register in time, but for now, it works. This is an MVP after all! 🙂
Now I can send one text message to Composer and update Facebook, Twitter, Identica and WordPress all at once. Happy days.
Deployed Google Analytics
I’ve created a new GA account and added the javascript tracking code to both WordPress and the core Composer app. It should be live now.
I’m not the biggest fan of Google Analytics, and I myself both nullroute and block it with ghostery (thanks Kasper). However, it is the industry standard, and it gives independent validity to our traffic numbers, which might be useful if the service becomes popular.
Thoughts on a postcard? (Or a comment?)