Looking Forward to the 0th SpinachCon!

If you have been reading our blog for a little while, then you already know we love getting feedback from users. Later this month, we'll be participating in the first ever SpinachCon, a user feedback event for free software projects. The event will be hosted at a local Cambridge makerspace called Industry Lab the day before the Free Software Foundation's annual conference, LibrePlanet.

Like many small and medium free software projects, we rely on volunteers to fill in the gaps where a larger project would just hire someone. We're not at all opposed to paying more people to work on MediaGoblin. (See our in progress funding campaign, we would love, love, love to hire more people!) But before we can hire UX experts, we still need to improve our current user experience. Enter SpinachCon -- it's a hackfest for users. People try the software, answer a few questions and get a free lunch in return.

We'll be joined by Hyperkitty -- a user-facing Mailman application, Inkscape -- a fantastic vector graphics editor, and LibreOffice -- a free office suite. A wide variety of projects and such esteemed company! The event takes place on the Friday before LibrePlanet, so we'll be welcoming the folks who are in town early to start their weekend off with a nice, easy way to contribute to making free software more awesome. We'll also be welcoming them with pizza, courtesy of our sponsor, the Open Invention Network.

Thanks! Hope to see you there!

(Oh, and by the way, you have checked out our awesome campaign, right?)

Help spread the word on the MediaGoblin campaign!

So the campaign is off to a pretty good start! In just half a week we're over 20% of the way to meeting our first milestone. Of course, we'd love to do more than just meeting the first goal... we get to the really exciting parts of "decentralizing the web" once we hit the second milestone of our campaign. (See the campaign page for details on this!)

But we need your help. It seems that people who visit the campaign page seem to have a good chance of donating, which is great! That means that if we can get that message out to more people, all the better chance of getting the funding to pull off some really cool and important stuff!

Can you help us spread the word? Here's several ways you can help:

Write about MediaGoblin and post the video to your blog or website!
Share the MediaGoblin campaign on your social networks!
Try to get us in the news! If you can post about MediaGoblin to news sources you think are interesting, that makes a *huge difference*! Let them know that they can email press@mediagoblin.org if they want to talk!
Tell people you know about the campaign! Showing someone personally or sending an email to people you know who care about these issues really helps!

Support MediaGoblin! Help us take back the net!

Our best explanation for what we're doing and working on is our campaign video. Embedding the video is now easy! If you have the ability to embed raw HTML in your blog or website, just copy the text below:

Writing things in your own words is of course always best! But you can also feel free to borrow and modify the following as you see fit:

MediaGoblin is a publishing system for the web, it can host all your media of any kind (like a YouTube + Flickr + SoundClound + more that anyone can run!). Plus it's free software, so you can run it and adapt it to your needs. Want to help the project towards federation and privacy features? Check out their fundraising campaign!
https://mediagoblin.org/pages/campaign.html

If you're looking for some images from the campaign, I put together a campaign kit that you are free to use in your blogpost, article, whatever!

Thanks for your help! As always, MediaGoblin is powered by people like you, and we greatly appreciate your support!

Video Captions and Translations for the MediaGoblin Campaign

The best part of working on MediaGoblin for me is working with our amazing community. I'm regularly impressed by the kind things that people do and the kind of energy we have in the project. That's usually visible most on the main MediaGoblin project's codebase, but there are other ways that this becomes clear too.

Anyway, that's all to lead into the real topic of this post: we now have captions on the MediaGoblin campaign video! The work on this was done by Laura Arjona, who volunteered to do the work after I sent out a request to the mailing list for help. But Laura not only added English subtitles...

She added Spanish translations as well! All super cool. So let's give a big thanks to Laura for this awesome work!

But maybe you want to translate MediaGoblin's video into your own language! If you're interested in translating, you can look at the example English and Spanish files. You can email press AT mediagoblin DOT org and send me the file, or join our community and contribute in the usual ways. (You can even send us a patch... this website is easy to get up and running!)

Thanks to our friends over at Pitivi who gave pointers on setting up captions and suggested setting up the thing in the first place. Did I mention that they, too, are running a fundraiser? They're good friends of ours in the Python + GStreamer + libre graphics space, so check them out if you haven't already!

Thanks again to Laura for the great work! And if you haven't checked out the campaign page please do so... and please donate and spread the word. Everything you do helps!

MediaGoblin campaign for federation and privacy in 2014!

I'm excited to announce that MediaGoblin has launched our new funding campaign. We've got a wonderful new video that I think clearly explains our goals for the coming year... check it out!

This last year has been really excellent -- thanks to your support! We've pushed out five major releases, hosted six successful internships through Summer of Code and Outreach Program for Women. Plus, we began integrating federation into the main MediaGoblin codebase and making a general purpose federation library called PyPump.

We're not going to stop here! With censorship and spying on the rise, this last year has also shown just how important our work to decentralize media publishing on the web is. And we've got big plans to tackle these issues and even work on tools that all sorts of projects can use to improve decentralization on the web.

So we're asking for your help. We've partnered up again with the Free Software Foundation, and we've got a lot of cool things planned: wrapping up federation support and releasing 1.0, adding new privacy features, podcast support, making MediaGoblin even easier to run and deploy!

We're also offering some sweet rewards, and a pixel-art-illustrated list of funding milestones. See for yourself!

Did I mention that since the FSF is a 5013c charity so your contributions are tax-deductible in the US? This also means that if your employer does contribution matching, MediaGoblin is an option! And finally, for folks who dig our work all year round, we're set up for monthly donations.

Anything you can do to spread the word of the campaign REALLY helps! Word of mouth from our supporters is the most effective way to get our message out there, so if you can tell your family and friends, post to your blog or social networks... we'll be able to build the future of the web!

Thanks again for your help! You make this possible!

MediaGoblin 0.6.0: Lore of the Admin

MediaGoblin 0.6.0: Lore of the Admin banner
A system administrator reflecting on her work, surrounded by various goblin-computer-interfaces.

Welcome to MediaGoblin 0.6.0, Lore of the Admin! This release has a lot of cool stuff in it, but we've especially added plenty of tools to make things better for site administrators and moderators. (And sites that are easier to administrate are better for everyone!)

Site administrators and moderators have a whole new set of features they can make use of. Assuming you have the right user privileges, you can see these tools from the top dropdown menu.

You can see here one of the new administrative tools that are built in, a user administration panel. From here a moderator or administrator can take various actions, such as modifying a user's privileges. We've also built in new tooling so that site administrators running more public instances can properly moderate problematic content or even ban problematic users.

Speaking of which, it's now possible to submit reports on media which is problematic...

... administrators can then view and resolve such reports appropriately.

Your users might also not know what's acceptable and what isn't on your MediaGoblin instance, and of course you want to let them know! As such we've included a default terms of service (which can be disabled or changed as needed) based on the Wordpress Terms of Service.

A long requested feature from system administrators setting up custom sites is a command line upload tool. We're happy to announce that this release includes such a tool! Check out the command line uploading docs for more info!

You may also remember that in our last major release we got an authentication plugin system. In this release a new authentication plugin has been added for LDAP! So if your organization runs an LDAP-powered single-sign-on solution, MediaGoblin can now integrate with it!

We've got some other nice features in this release too. It's now possible to set upload limits per user or per uploaded file. We've also upgraded our version of video.js that ships with MediaGoblin. And more! Check out the release notes to get the full scoop!

Thanks to all who participated in this release: Asheesh Laroia, Christopher Allan Webber, Deb Nicholson, Devan Goodwin, Josephine Bartholoma, Lenna Peterson, Natalie Foust-Pilcher, Rodney Ewing, and Sebastian Spaeth! Special thanks also to Simon Fondrie-Teitler for his awesome sysadmin assistance!

That's it for this release, but stay tuned... as always we're working hard! (Can you believe this is our fifth major release since last year's campaign ended? Wow!) We hope to make some more exciting announcements shortly! And if you're thinking about getting involved in the MediaGoblin community, please do join us in trying to make the Internet a better place! Happy goblin'ing, everyone!

Update: We also just pushed out a smallish followup release, v0.6.1. This release is very minor, it just fixes a couple of things with the default terms of service and makes it off by default so we can get a chance to give it more community review. Otherwise, it's mostly the same release. Happy admin'ing!

Pump API progress video

Hey all. Things are busy here in MediaGoblin-land, but we're making great progress. Since our last update several things have happened, including Natalie Foust's branch being merged! So administrative tools have officially hit git master. That's great news!

But I'm here to talk about a different feature today: federation work, and what's going on with it. Another one of our outreach program for women students, Jessica Tallon, has been working on this for the last many months. Most of the work initially came on rewriting PyPump into a more powerful and general purpose library for applications making use of the Pump API for federation.

But Jessica has been working also on integration of federation and pump support in MediaGoblin itself. When it lands, the Pump API should be usable for more than just federation... it'll also be able to be a general API for writing desktop and mobile applications which connect to MediaGoblin!

But what's better than a bunch of words that simply say as such? How about a demo! Jessica has kindly provided a brief screencast showing off uploading media to MediaGoblin via PyPump. Probably only interesting to developers, but if so, hey, screencasts speak louder than blogtext:

Summer of Awesome Wrapup

So the summer has come to a close! I've written before on the Google Summer of Code and Outreach Program for Women programs we participated in. We had a really great summer... I thought I'd give an update on things. In the same order as our Summer of Awesome post, here's a recap of how things went:

Summer of Code projects

Aditi Mittal's blogging media type works, and we are polishing it up before we get it merged into master. Some things still need to be done, but several exciting things came out of her work, including efforts to generalize media types as plugins (which they now are!). We use this new plugin infrastructure with the blogging media type, which now has its own panel and view. More updates to come.
Praveen Kumar got his search plugin up and running using Whoosh; efforts will be made to merge and polish up with the present codebase shortly.
Rodney Ewing went above and beyond all expectations for the summer. Not only did he finish pluginifying authentication (adding multiple plugins, including LDAP, OpenID and Persona), he helped immensely with code review and did many other projects, like most of the work on the previously mentioned pluginification of media types.

Outreach Program for Women projects

Emily O'Leary worked on various testing tasks: improving the speed of unit tests (merged!), working on a Jenkins testing setup set up for MediaGoblin, and on getting a functional testing setup with Selenium. In the process, we also discovered some issues about how hard it is to get functional testing working nicely with MediaGoblin; many lessons learned!), as well as the bonus task of ticket triage!
Jessica Tallon worked on federation support in MediaGoblin via the Pump API. Jessica wrote a wrapup post which can give you some sense of things, but things have continued even after that blogpost was originally written!. PyPump has been rewritten and works really well, can do all sorts of new things! Updating MediaGoblin to include the appropriate endpoints for the Pump API is currently in progress; much work to be done still, but an image has been successfully submitted to MediaGoblin via PyPump! Commenting via PyPump works too! This work has been done in a separate branch, but we are anticipating merging these changes with MediaGoblin incrementally.
Natalie Foust-Pilcher’s administrative interface work is now in place and pending review. The new admin interface includes new features such as the ability to set the terms of service / code of conduct for a site, the ability to submit reports on problematic users, and the ability to review and take actions on said reports. Great stuff! Additionally, some work has been done under the hood, including a nice new, "foundations," framework for adding default values into the database, and a new permissions/privileges system. All thanks to Natalie’s work!

Overall it was a great summer. Thanks to the hard work of all our students we are much, much closer to 1.0 than I would have dreamed. The only "downside" after all this is that I have a large pile of code to review and get cleanly merged with mainline MediaGoblin. Talk about problems you can't complain about!

Once this happens though, we will have nearly everything needed for 1.0. How cool is that? Talk about summer of awesome, indeed!

Thanks to all our students mentioned above... you all rock! And thanks also to our mentors: Sebastian Spaeth, Joar Wandborg, Aeva Palecek, and Aaron Williamson (well, and myself). Without you all this summer would not have been possible. Thanks to everyone! And now, onward to use all this summer of awesomeness to make MediaGoblin the best media publishing software ever!

Jessica Tallon on Wrapping up OPW

This is a guest blogpost from our Outreach Program for Women participant Jessica Tallon. Thanks for your participation Jessica, and for this great post!

As most who read my blog know, over the summer I have taken part in the Outreach Program for Women. I have been working on GNU MediaGoblin federation and the PyPump library which allows you interact with the new GNU MediaGoblin API I'm building and Evan's Pump.io. The time however has come that the outreach program has come to it's end. This is my "wrap up" blog post and for any prospective future applicants to Outreach program to Women, I can't recommend it enough, it's a fantastic opportunity.

I have learned many things over the summary from the inner workings of OAuth to database migrations. I've had to work with OAuthlib to interact with pump and GNU MediaGoblin servers and implement OAuth support for GNU MediaGoblin so that my client and others can authenticate with it for it's API. I've also learned a lot about the various technologies MediaGoblin use: Werkzeug, SQLAlchemy, unit testing, etc. There are also many things to learn about being in a large project with many contributors, working with users who want to utilise the work you're doing.

Both Chris the project lead, and my mentor Joar, have been fantastic throughout it all. Every step of the way throughout the summer they have offered their help when needed. I can't say enough how great they are, future candidates of OPW for GNU MediaGoblin are very lucky there is such a fantastic team. I also want to thank the other developers including the other Google Summer of Code and Outreach Program for Women people, and also the great community they have.

So, what is the result of all this work? PyPump has been rewritten, it's now supporting liking, sharing, deleting, posting notes, images and has a easy ability to test as well as some of the core parts tested, not to mention documentation of a lot of PyPump. GNU MediaGoblin's Federation is not complete but, I have made some good progress and there is now a solid groundwork which to build upon. GNU MediaGoblin has OAuth1 support and support for some of the API endpoints pump provides (User endpoint and image endpoints).

So, where does this leave GNU MediaGoblin? Don't fear, while the summer programme is over, I will continue my work until we have robust federation (and probably for a long time after). My near future goals are to finish up the image uploading API and get it fully tested. I am hoping that this will make it into the next release of GNU MediaGoblin allowing everyone to be able to easily do mass uploads of images to GNU MediaGoblin, a well requested feature. After that I will continue to work on federation including web UIs and more API endpoints.

I am lucky to be flying out to Boston later this week, to celebrate the 30th birthday of the FSF and to attend the GNU MediaGoblin hackathon and their "GoblinCon" for the MediaGoblin developers! I hope to see you there but, if you can't make it I am always in MediaGoblin's IRC channel. (Edit: This post was written before the GNU 30th "GoblinCon" hackathon, which has now happened; see the FSF's wrapup post!)

A final and last thanks to the Gnome foundation for enabling the Outreach Program for Women to happen and all the work that's gone into that. I'd also like to say another thanks to everyone involved with GNU MediaGoblin, developers and users, it has and no doubt will continue to be a pleasure working with you all.

MediaGoblin 0.5.1 Release

We've released MediaGoblin 0.5.1. This is a minor bugfix release... it's a pretty minor release, pretty much the same as 0.5.0 Goblin Force. There's a couple of bugfixes related to restoring python 2.6 support and also fixing the release notes for the last release. Release notes here!

MediaGoblin 0.5.0: Goblin Force

MediaGoblin 0.5.0: Goblin Force banner

Do you remember when all the best superheroes were part of a team? Sometimes they had a clubhouse and went out on missions together and sometimes they actually formed one mega-super-hero. (I'm apparently on some sort of nostalgia kick this month...) Anyway, that's basically what we've been doing with MediaGoblin. We want all the parts that we build to be able to do awesome stuff on their own, and be part of one huge decentralized web super-force.

In this release we move closer to federation by shifting our OAuth code to be pump.io compatible. Not only that, many of our longstanding pluginification goals were met. We are working towards a more modular web and building a very modular codebase to make it happen. (So meta!)

Firstly, authentication has completely moved over to a plugin system. Thanks go to Rodney Ewing for this awesome work! We're now able to support multiple authentication systems including the standard login/password system,

...and OpenID...

...plus Mozilla Persona.

Maybe *your* customized login system will be next? The framework is flexible and ready for you to build on.

Secondly, all the media types are also now plugins! This means that new media types will be able to all kinds of things. We could support blog posts as a media type or a tumblr-like thing (which is in the works!). Let us know if you want to code up smell-o-vision support. (Just kidding, no one wants to smell the internet!)

The grammar goblins got their wishes granted in this release. The rest of us can use this snazzy new comment preview feature to keep from offending their delicate sensibilities.

Userland gets some nice social improvements too. You'll get notified when someone comments on your media which means you can follow up right away if you want to.

We also eliminated some potential pain points for Admins! If you upload something and it fails mid-processing, it's now possible to send it back to process again. Admins can also tweak media that's already been uploaded. Want to convert a video to a new format or resize all your images? You're going to love the new reprocessing framework. A web interface for reprocessing is coming next.

We also added support for Unicode filenames. Running an international MediaGoblin instance? You won't have to worry about choking on non-ASCII filenames.

We are so lucky that all the best super-heroes are part of our team here at MediaGoblin. Check out all the great folks who helped make this release possible: Alon Levy, Brandon Invergo, Christopher Allan Webber, Duncan Paterson, Dan Callahan, Deb Nicholson, Emily O'Leary, Jakob Kramer, Jessica Tallon, Jim Campbell, Joar Wandborg, Kenneth Dombrowski, Kushal Kumaran, Laura Arjona, Marcel van der Boom, Natalie Foust-Pilcher, Rodney Ewing, Sam Clegg, Sebastian Spaeth, Starblessed of Viewskew (hosting help!), sturm, and Tran Thanh Bao. What a list! Thanks to everyone... we couldn't do it without you.

We especially want to thank our meta-superheroes for this summer's amazing output! On the intern/student side, thanks to Aditi Mittal, Emily O'Leary, Jessica Tallon, Natalie Foust, Praveen Kumar, and Rodney Ewing (RJ). On the mentoring end, thanks to Aaron Williamson, Aeva Palecek, Chris Webber, Joar Wandborg, and Sebastian Spaeth. We could not have done this without Google Summer of Code and Gnome's Outreach Program for Women. We promise you a thorough post-summer report on our energetic mentees very soon.

Okay, excited and want to give things an install? Check out our docs! And if upgrading, be sure to read our release notes. There's some important stuff for you to do in there... plus a more complete list of updates for this release!

Meanwhile, our mentoring schedule is about to go from breakneck to merely brisk. Maybe the upcoming 30th anniversary of GNU is inspiring you to find an exciting GNU project to contribute to? At MediaGoblin, we love new contributors! Visit us in IRC; #mediagoblin on freenode.net! Or sign up for regular updates here! Got ideas or questions about our work? Email us at press@mediagoblin.org -- we look forward to hearing from you!

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