buddycloud blog

The Realtime conference goes from strength to strength and we’re excited to be invited to present there.

The conference is a smaller, more intimate gathering of experts and that means that there are limited tickets. To join us, get your’s at http://realtimeconf.eu/

Feb 11

Feb 01

The buddycloud FOSDEM release

We’re be demoing the new software at FOSDEM and ready to help you setup your own buddycloud instance.

Jan 29

Easily Upload Pictures and Video Into Your buddycloud Channel

Abmar threw together a quick Android upload intent that will post to your channel. Nothing more, nothing less.

Jan 28

buddycloud Debian Packages Built Nightly

Along with the rapid updates on Github, we have started doing nightly builds of Debian packages for all buddycloud software.

Our goal is to make installing buddycloud as easy as possible. Good packages also mean that updating your buddycloud server is pain-free.

The current packages are designed for Ubuntu 12.04 and Debian Sid.

Packages are generated nightly using the buddycloud build scripts and all packages are downloadable from: downloads.buddycloud.com.

It’s almost as good as bacon rolls covered in butter and swimming in bacon juice.

Jan 22

buddycloud team at FOSDEM

In just over a week some of the world’s best software developers will be attending the FOSDEM conference in Brussels.

FOSDEM is the world’s largest open source conference brings together developers from around the world that are working on projects like Postgres, Mozilla, and… buddycloud.

This year buddycloud is part of the Realtime Lounge: We will be presenting and demoing buddycloud.And we’re going further - talking about how buddycloud enables the Personal Cloud OS and changes everything you thought you knew about social network design. The Saturday Presentation in the XMPP room will reveal all!

To install your own buddycloud server and meet some of the smartest minds in distributed social networking, meet us in the Realtime lounge on Saturday and Sunday.

PS: FOSDEM is a busy and chaotic conference: to set up a meeting around the conference of if you can’t find the Realtime Lounge, ping donna.smith@buddycloud.com

PPS: Some of the buddycloud team will also be at the XMPP summit which runs for two days before FOSDEM. We will be running breakout sessions on buddycloud, and the road to standardising buddycloud into a protocol that everyone can build on

Jan 21

Running buddycloud on Firefox OS

Mozilla invited three of the buddycloud team to a Firefox OS developer event in London. Their aim is to get buddycloud working on the world’s newest mobile OS. And in time to be showcased at Mobile World Congress.

The first day was spent covering what Firefox OS could do, the second spent hacking on porting the buddycloud webclient to and installable Firefox OS package. The second day was spent developing.

The neat thing about Firefox OS is how you distribute applications: Simply adding a maifest.webapp file to the root directory and some javascript to download the project files means that any website can be ported to a phone application.

This means that anyone running a buddycloud website could also run and distribute their own mobile app together with customisations.

We need a nice way to do push notifications and wake up the buddycloud webapp when activity (like a post in one of your channels) happens. The push notification server is still being built but *should* work nicely with Abmar’s pusher component.

For the moment we have Rodrigo’s offline message counters which make discovering new messages in your channels easy.

Mozilla is also sending buddycloud some prototyping Firefox OS phones. So if you are interested in working on finishing buddycloud for Firefox OS, let me know and I’ll make the necessary arrangements to get a loaner phone out.

All the changes from this are hosted in github.com/buddycloud/webclient. The thinking is to keep the same codebase as the existing “widescreen” webclient although work on styling to get the UI more mobile-screen friendly. This is currently being achieved with a media-query and custom mobile CSS files.

Jan 10

buddycloud Now Running on 60 Different Domains

I’m really excited to announce that buddycloud is now running on 60 different domains. It’s a huge achievement and we see more and more sites installing their own buddycloud site.

The buddycloud crawler runs every few minutes and crawls public channels for followers and then crawls these domains or subdomains. From this regular crawling we have a fairly good idea of distinct domains that are federated and running buddycloud.