During the first semester of this year I’ve been playing with the idea of creating a “Share” dataengine that would support scriptable plugins. This idea came from the fact that there were a lot of hacks on the pastebin dataengine that at the time were the only “fast” solutions to the problems I was facing. I was also motivated by the amount of bugs/wishes on bko regarding new services.

I started to hack on this new dataengine and now it’s ready! Since some weeks ago I moved from kdereview to kdebase and now you can write plugins for your favourite services using any of the scripting languages that Kross supports today. Later I will enable GHNS on the pastebin applet so if you have a special service that you want to write a plugin you don’t have to wait for a KDE release (that’s what happened with the old dataengine), you will just write it using JavaScript/Python/Ruby/etc and upload to kde-apps.org . Neat! 😀 I hope that a lot of users will use this feature and that this dataengine will be specially useful for mobile devices.

To complete the cycle, yesterday I finished the port of the pastebin applet to use the new dataengine and I advice everyone out there that is using the “pastebin dataengine” (I really don’t think there is anybody, but….) to change your plasmoid to use the new one. People running trunk are already experiencing the new dataengine 🙂 Ah, almost forgot: now it supports remote files because I use KIO for all the file operations. So just grab your samba/nfs/webdav files and share them using your favourite text/image service!

Playing with dataengines I started to hack on another topic: sharing of articles on Akregator. I started to feel too much dependent on Google’s infrastructure and decided to move some of my stuff “out of the cloud”. I started with Google Reader and put all my feeds on Akregator. Kudos for Google for allowing me to export my list of feeds and kudos to Akregator that imports the file. Everybody is happy and Google is not evil trying to hold my data.

The next step was the “share” feature of Google Reader that I like very very much. First, to read my friend’s shares I could just get the URL from their “details” on Google Reader and put the URL on Akregator. Kudos for Google again for using rss feeds into this “share feature”. It made my life easier and I could subscribe to my friend’s shared items.

The missing bit was my shares! How could I share with my friends articles that I wanted? I started playing with Plasma’s  Microblog dataengine and successfully started sharing articles using my microblog account on identi.ca. Thanks to identi.ca the shares also went to my twitter and could also go to facebook!!!!! When I shared an article it made a post with the title of the article plus the URL to access the article and the tag “#share”. People interested in reading my shares can subscribe to my dents or tweets or go to http://identi.ca/morpheuz/tag/share or even subscribe to http://identi.ca/morpheuz/tag/share/rss on their feed readers. Identi.ca did a great job here providing feeds for everything. I couldn’t find the feeds for my tags on tweeter but maybe it was just me lacking knowledge. By the way, thanks to Lydia for helping me to figure out this URLs. I couldn’t have done without her hehe 😛

Update: to have feeds synced between my different computers I’m using automated scripts with unison. Every time I login and logout unison syncs the feeds with a server. So I just need to login on a different computer of mine and I have the same “status” for my feeds.

Right now I started to move all the code to a proper Akregator plugin and I hope that soon it’s finished and merged into trunk so everybody can enjoy this feature!

As I was playing with dataengines I decided to fix some bugs on the weather dataengine as one of my friends (Aloisio) just migrated to KDE and faced this annoying bugs related to network and retrieval of the weather. There were a lot of small issues here and there but at the end of the day (after a lot of hours hacking and not so much lines of code =/) I could fix the problems and some others that I found on the way.

Summary: 5 pastebin bugs/wishes closed + 3 bug fixes on weather that were not reported yet (I couldn’t find them at least).

Busy, busy, busy day!!

Next post: a little surprise that I received for joining the game 😉