This is Denby.

I mention in the video that it’ll end up being “like TweetDeck”. I breezed past that a tad too quickly — it’s definitely not going to be an HTML5 clone of TweetDeck! (Turns out they’re working on one of those already.)

Instead, it will take inspiration from the multi-column approach, but hopefully improve the user experience on a number of levels:

• It’ll be 100% Free Software / Open Source… and one hopes, peer produced.
• JavaScript on the server, JavaScript on the client, with liberal doses of “HTML5″ (the platform your platform could be), whatever that means to you.
• No Adobe AIR, and thus, no vicious memory and CPU abuse! Seriously: Firefox TweetDeck is wasting more CPU time sitting “idle” than Chromium and node.js are using to run Denby. Oh, and node.js is 12MB resident.
• It can work a bit like a desktop app… use the “web page as application” tool your browser provides. Firefox has Prism, Chromium has… a menu item. Denby will support things like desktop notifications, audio bleeps, drag-n-drop (for media uploads), inline display of media, etc.
• Run local or hosted. Once I’m happy with the user experience, I’ll start thinking about cool things the server could do while you’re not connected to it! For now, it only maintains the connection to Twitter while a client is connected.
• I want to build delicious multiple account support, without complicating the single account experience. It’ll merge streams, detect the context you’re acting upon (click reply and you’ll be replying from the appropriate account), etc.

Please comment if you have any thoughts or suggestions… crimes committed by other Twitter clients, ideas for lovely web/desktop integration, and so on. Thanks!

HELLO DENBY.

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Note that I’ve already had questions about StatusNet and identi.ca support. Thus far, they don’t have user streams, which was one of the main reasons behind building Denby. That said, it is entirely possible for the Denby server to poll the REST API (given that it already talks to Twitter’s) and send the results down the WebSockets tube… so, we’ll see.

Hmm. Perhaps this is the best way to build a user streams API for StatusNet anyway? The web app could send JSON messages to node.js, which could relay them to the intended users… via multiple protocols! Long-running HTTP, WebSockets, whatever. If anyone is inspired to do this, StatusNet could have a bi-directional WebSockets API before Twitter does!

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Update: I made another quick video, showing a few improvements (including update bleeps — no chicken noises as yet), Denby in Firefox’s Prism environment, and sharing some thoughts about the web as a development platform. Enjoy!

“No Twitter sex for you” by ChipX86.

• WordPress and WordPress MU (multi-user)

  It’s hard to make recommendations related to WordPress without mentioning the project itself, and its twisted sister, WordPress MU. Both are improving in leaps and bounds, and it’s a pleasure finding all the cool new things as I track their development trunks. WordPress 2.6 is the latest major release, with lots of cool new goodies… Donncha is rapidly catching up to those changes with WordPress MU. I wrote nice things about them on my Projects that make GNOME rock! post, too.

• Sandbox

  I am a minimalist at heart, but with a fondness for cleverly expressive minimalism, so the Sandbox theme blows my mind. If you just look at the theme on the surface, it seems like a very boring, no-frills blob of unstyled HTML. But the genius lays waiting beneath the surface, in the highly evolved markup. Cunningly generated classes deliver extraordinary flexibility to a designer working with CSS. Just look at the body and div.post tags to get a good idea of what you can do. Be the signal is 100% Sandbox + custom CSS, with no added ingredients… and it changes colour every hour!

• Akismet & Bad Behavior

  The one-two punch in my anti-blog-spam regime. Bad Behavior protects against abusive hosts and patterns of use, while Akismet does content filtering. As such, with an MTA analogy, they’re like a great combo of solid Postfix policy as front-line defense, plus DSPAM content filtering. Like my mailservers, I might not run both in every situation, but it’s great that they’re both available to protect the innocent.

• Twitter Tools

  Keeps my tweeps up to date with my blog, and lets my blog readers (bleeps?) know that I use Twitter and what I’m up to. I don’t use the daily blog archive feature, but lots of people enjoy that… despite it being one of the latest controversial content issues on Planets. I really ought to add identi.ca (or most likely “generic Twitter-style API”) support and see if Alex accepts the patch…

• OpenID

  It’s great that companies and sites like Sun, AOL and MySpace are becoming OpenID providers, but the web really needs more consumers. So pretty much every WordPress blog I set up has Will Norris’ WP-OpenID plugin installed. A while back I hacked it up to work with WordPress MU (always on, in mu-plugins), which was great for GNOME Blogs. I need to update that to the latest versions and see if Will might accept a nicer patch than the last one.

• Typogrify

  As a card-carrying Font Fascist, it delights me that so many folks are working hard to improve typography on the web. I know that sounds a bit like “folks are working hard to improve oxygen on the moon”, but we’ll get there. Typogrify filters your posts to provide some cute ways of draining your own swamp, such as adding helpful markup to improve styleability of things like allcaps words, initial quotes, etc.

• My own cheesy plugins

  I’ve only managed to upload a few of my custom plugins to the WordPress Extend repository (which is a fantastic way to manage plugins for a widely-used platform, by the way), and thus far they’re kinda simple and cheesy.

  • @reply automagically adds Twitter-style replying to your comments.
  • Bug Links adds stylish links to common FOSS bug tracking systems — this was mainly written for GNOME Blogs, so I’m particularly happy that Thomas uses it regularly for his very cool metacity blog.
  • OpenSearch* adds OpenSearch discovery to your WordPress site, so users can add your site to their search dropdown (in, say, Firefox). I need to improve it further to support the whole OpenSearch specification.
  • Tango Smilies makes your emoticons not look like arse!

Thanks, of course, to all of the developers and contributors to these projects.

Here’s the script if anyone else wants to play (it also demonstrates how to post to twitter with wget, which may be handy for other automation projects):

#!/bin/sh
MB_POST="http://identi.ca/api/statuses/update.xml
  http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml"

MB_USER=state your username
MB_PASS=state your password

IZ="$(find Maildir/cur/ Maildir/new/ -type f | wc -l)"
if [ $IZ -gt 0 ]; then
  IZ="$IZ"
else
  IZ="ZERO"
fi
IZ="inbox zero status: $IZ"

for MB_HTTP in $MB_POST; do
  wget -qO- --delete-after \
    --user="$MB_USER" --password="$MB_PASS" \
    --post-data "status=$IZ" $MB_HTTP > /dev/null
done

Update: Fixed script to use any Twitter-style microblog API, and included example URL from identi.ca. Go freedom!

Update: Even better, just post to all of them at once! Also fixed anchor… Despite switching to the visual editor weeks ago, I’m still not 100% used to the convenience of it.