Re: Web Site is Down

["John Stowers" <john stowers gmail com>]

On Feb 13, 2008 3:38 AM, Brent Gueth <creeva gmail com> wrote:
> I am using 0.3.6 development version -
>
> 1. Now this may be taking the long way around - but help deliver you
> some shortcuts (or at least shortcuts to your users) have you thought
> about plugging conduit into the plaxo API?  Since the plaxo API is
> open, it would give users of contuit an enhanced choice on syncing.
> Since you can sync contacts and calender info across aol(bleh),
> hotmail, yahoo, Mac, outlook, and Macintosh native programs (without
> looking I don't know which ones this could be the cheater method to
> providing quicker support for all of those platforms.   I'm glad the
> calender bug is being looked at, it seems to be working, it's just
> annoying that it continue to churns away.   I assume I should just go
> back to the two way sync instead of two one way syncs then.

Thanks for the link to plaxo - I had not seen it before.

> 2.  The documentation is vague saying RSS feeds with enclosures, not
> stating only the enclosure info.   This is fine and I can accept that
> answer.  Since you chose the very easy for grandmothers interface -
> would it be possible to add a check for data types that won't work
> together?  That way you couldn't sync RSS feeds (or anything else) to
> another sync point that is not supported or wouldn't work.

I am not familiar with how icals are delivered over RSS, but in the
general RSS enclosure case, it is not possible to know the type of the
enclosure until the RSS feed is read. Consider the case where a rss
feed contains photos and videos, but you only want the photos to go
into FSpot. Conduit handles this case by only passing the photo data
to FSpot, and silently ignoring the rest. Without completely changing
how conduit deals with mixed types, or adding more configuration to
the RSS data provider, the best I will be able to do (for RSS feed ->
calendar) is silently ignore non ical enclosures.

Is this what happened or were there mysterious errors?

> I had been looking for a long time for something that could bring an
> RSS feed into a calender, I had found it (kind of) with the gcaldaemon
> program.  I run it on a server on my home network and it takes RSS
> feeds and converts them to ical - the annoyance is that evolution
> handles calenders subscriptions as an overlay calender and not into
> the calender directly.   This means I could sync the overlay read only
> calender into gmail - but at that point I will have double events on
> my local calender.  (I know I'm too picky).   What I do think though
> is that you could look at the gcaldaemon's code for the RSS to ical
> conversion maybe?  Just figured it would be good to suggest as a
> reference point.

Thanks. I will look into it. Like the plaxo note mentioned above, all
of these bugs and limitations exist due to my finite time to spend on
conduit. While I test as much as I can, the infinite number of sync
combinations possible makes it really difficult.

For example while introducing the (N+1)th dataprovider may sound cool,
it just introduces (2N) new possibles sync scenarios.

> 3. Thank you - I had some photos uploaded accidentally that weren't
> mine because of this bug, took about 1-2 hours of clean up from my
> flickr account.

No worries

> 4.   Could it be that since I hadn't uploaded any pictures to flickr
> in a couple weeks the data didn't count as new.  I wasn't getting any
> pictures to come across?

Or that you entered the wrongly named photoset? Do you have flickr pro
or free? I know that flickr free only allows a few photosets. Every
time I upload a new group of photos to Fickr using Conduit, I put them
in a new photoset.

 Also another annoying bug I didn't mention,
> every time I reboot facebook needs to re-authenticate even when I
> click save password information.

This is a facebook limitation, not ours. They dont let desktop apps
cache login tokens. The same applies to box.net. I guess this should
be mentioned somewhere in the docs (perhaps on the section on
configuring those two dataproviders)

> Since I didn't reply to the other e-mail last night.  I'll be happy to
> start some documentation, I should have time tomorrow.   You
> responding like this is definitely helping me get a better grasp of
> intentions and design though.   I wish I was more of a programmer to
> be of use on that side of the fence.

Dont worry about it. Trust me, I appreciate documentation
contributions the same, if not more than programming contributions!

Looking forward to your help,

Regards,

John
>
>
>
> On Feb 12, 2008 5:37 AM, John Stowers <john stowers gmail com> wrote:
> > Hi Brent,
> >
> > I just checked out your blog post at [1] and had a go at fixing the
> > problems you mentioned.
> >
> > 1) Is currently a known bug and is filed at [2]. There is much still
> > to test WRT to google calendar and how it handles ical data.
> > 2) Is a current limitation. The docs should mention that the only RSS
> > data we currently support is audio/video/picture enclosures. I will
> > need to do some reading to learn how calendar data is shared via RSS
> > 3) I fixed this annoying folder bug in revision 1300 and tested with a
> > large folder of pictures uploaded from a folder on my desktop
> > 4) I tested this by syncing a number of photos from a photoset (the
> > one I just uploaded) to Facebook. It worked fine (see attached)
> >
> > What version are you running? I am going to do a Conduit 0.3.7 release
> > this week, or in the weekend, so that should make it into Hardy soon.
> > I also hear that someone in team conduit is setting up a launchpad PPA
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> > John
> >
> > [1] http://creeva.com/2008/02/11/gnome-conduit-oh-how-i-hate-to-love-you/
> > [2] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=510097
> >
>