MediaGoblin crowdfunding campaign launches!

Today we're excited to announce a crowdfunding campaign to support MediaGoblin run in coordination with the Free Software Foundation! You may have heard that I quit my job as senior software engineer / tech lead at Creative Commons to pursue MediaGoblin fulltime and fund development. Instead of using one of the more mainstream crowdfunding sites, we decided to team up with the Free Software Foundation, who is supporting our fundraising infrastructure. Turns out, the FSF is pretty excited to help us out:

We're excited about the GNU MediaGoblin project, and we're thrilled to be providing its grassroots fundraising infrastructure. Without a doubt, we need a decentralized, free software system for sharing our photos and videos. We need a system that doesn't require using nonfree software or handing our memories and artwork over to a single point of privacy-violating, proprietary ownership-claiming failure. MediaGoblin can be that system, and its future users can make it so. I look forward to the result -- and to the example this could set for funding other critical free software projects.
— John Sullivan, Executive Director at the Free Software Foundation

Of course we're thrilled to be partnering with the FSF as well since we have a lot of shared ideals! MediaGoblin is aiming to bring media publishing back to the people. There are other benefits to going through a freedom-loving nonprofit; for example, donations are tax deductible! We've been working hard to educate through this campaign, as you'll see in the video!

We've worked hard to explain issues, like automated censorship, with clear visual metaphors in the video

We encourage you to visit our campaign site and watch the video, and check out our rewards. There are some awesome things in there... sponsored commits, special edition postcards, t-shirts, 3d printed models of our mascot (even hand painted by me if you donate enough!).

We've got really exciting rewards that you *know* you want in on!

Most importantly, we need you to donate to help make the world's most beautiful media publishing future a reality! We (and the decentralization of the internet) are counting on you!

PS: If you want to get in contact with us, you can email press@mediagoblin.org. Or, if you want to get involved, join us! We love contributors!

GNU MediaGoblin talks: FaiFcast and Software Freedom Day

Heya all,

Things are really busy over here, but there's several exciting bits of news on MediaGoblin related talks. One is that I was recorded on the Free as in Freedom show; you can listen to the episode here.

Also, Deb Nicholson and I will both be giving MediaGoblin related talks on Software Freedom Day.

Deb will be speaking in Boston on decentralizing the web

I (Chris Webber) will be giving a talk in Chicago on MediaGoblin generally

If you're around, we'd love to see you there... please come up and introduce yourself!

MediaGoblin 0.3.1: A Whole New Look

MediaGoblin 0.3.1: A Whole New Look banner

Welcome to "A Whole New Look!" I know what you were told as a kid, that looks don't matter. And when it comes to figuring out who your friends are or taking the SAT's that's absolutely correct. But I'm here to tell you that when it comes to software, looks count! Really! So let's take a look at 0.3.1, shall we?

The most exciting news is that we're supporting theming now, which means you can make your MediaGoblin instance look any way you want. The dark theme is still default, but we now also package MediaGoblin with this lovely light theme called "airy":

Or you could even build your own! DIY all the way. For example, Chimo has this for his MediaGoblin instance (which you can use or borrow from!):

We can't wait to see what you come up with! Whether you're looking to build a new theme or build your own, you should check out our theming documentation!

Also, right up there on the list of exciting new features is the fact that we're now supporting plugins. Whoo! Plugins! This has been our summer project. Some folks watch birds or bake pies; we built a plugin system. (Some of us might've also baked pies, come to think of it...) Anyway, the first order of business is to switch some of our existing internal stuff to plugin form. (We have quite a few things we'd like to get switched over to plugins, such as OpenStreetMap support... if you're interested in helping, please do contact us!)

For practice, we've already written a flatpages plugin. If you want an about page or a Terms of Service page without any media, you can easily build one to match your chosen theme.

Some plugins we think it would be cool to see built; spam detection for comments (maybe via CAPTCHAs or a hook-up to Spamicity/ActivitySpam), support for various types of authentication like OpenID, and user quotas to keep the traffic at a manageable level on your instance. Or blow our minds and write something we never even thought of. Want to get started right now? Plugin docs are here.

We are all about communication. We know you like to know what's up, so we've added email notifications for comments, improved the documentation for installing different media types: https://docs.mediagoblin.org/en/stable/siteadmin/media-types.html and made it easier for you to tell how far along your media is in the processing phase, aka "are we there yet?"

We also fixed a bunch of bugs, improved testing and fixed some temporary space problems. Users will be seeing fewer errors and if you're writing code for us, you've got lovely new unit tests making it easier than ever to vet your new code.

Thanks to everyone who gave us their time this summer: Aleksej Serdjukov, Brett Smith, Christopher Allan Webber, Deb Nicholson, Derek Moore, Elrond of Samba TNG, Jakob Kramer, Jef van Schendel, Joar Wandborg, Jorge Araya Navarro, Will Kahn-Greene. We really, really can't do it without you.

MediaGoblin will continue to update it's appearance and we promise to keep you in the loop. Want to help us with user experience or write a plugin or translation? Swing on by! We're nearly always in #mediagoblin on freenode.net Or you can join the mailing list or even send us email us at press@mediagoblin.org.

MediaGoblin 0.3.0: Rise of the RoboGoblins

MediaGoblin 0.3.0: Rise of the RoboGoblins banner

It's our birthday!! A whole year of writing the decentralized media future. We can't wait for year two; new challenges, new opportunities and new technologies. We're rolling out a set of awesome features in this release to raise a legion of RoboGoblins! The three biggest milestones for the 0.3.0 release are:

The database switch is finished, YAY!
Audio support is achieved, YAY!
Mobile layout - take one!

Organizationally, we continue to grow. In particular, we have some exciting news about our level of professionalism and for-realness. But first, let's take a look at all the new code.

The massive time-consuming Mongo to SQL database conversion is finished! SQL scales down more gracefully, making lighter-weight deployments possible -- a critical feature for federation. We also think that SQL's popularity will make it easier (or at least less daunting) for people to install and tweak their instances. A SPECIAL thanks to Elrond, without whom this Herculean task just would not have happened.

We have audio support! MediaGoblin can handle MP3, FLAC, Ogg, WAV, M4A. We convert them all to Vorbis and run them in a WebM container. All played through HTML5 audio!

We're on your phones, serving you media! We've written an alternate style sheet so users can reasonably check out media on the go. True mobile-app-dom for submitting media will have to wait for the completion of our API. In the meantime, here's our first stab at a mobile layout:

We worked hard to make video smoother and the look of MediaGoblin nicer. We added video.js which is basically a style sheet functionality for HTML5 video players. Then we made a custom skin so our player would match the rest of the site. Take a look:

Video pre-buffering is also smarter now. A little bit loads (not the whole video) and then it waits for the user to press play. Numerous enhancements were also made to the theme for this release. For instance, the top bar is nicer and user comments render cleaner. Take a look:

We made improvements to the testing and installation processes, all with the end goal of making it easy to set up and debug your own instance. Our new lazycelery.sh script should make testing and deploying with celery a bit easier. We've added ipython support in the gmg shell subcommand and removed the pygtk dependency. You don't have to install X Windows just to have video support on your server anymore, whoo! We also refactored the processing pipeline code (image resizing and transcoding, etc) which will make things easier to develop moving forward.

We also have release notes now! If upgrading from an older version of MediaGoblin you should check these out, especially given the recent database change.

Thanks to our wonderful and generous contributors! Jorge Araya Navarro, Elrond, Will Kahn-Greene, Deb Nicholson, Christopher Allan Webber, Jef van Schendel, Svavar Kjarrval, Luke Slater, Joar Wandborg, Sacha De'Angeli, Bassam Kurdali, Derek Moore, Brett Smith, Jacob Kramer, Hugo Boyer and chrono --thanks!

We also have our first paid contributor! Joar Wandborg is getting funding from the Icelandic government to build our API. We are officially a for-real, grown-up project. Congratulations to Joar, major thanks to Tryggvi Björgvinsson for coordinating things, and Takk fyrir to Iceland!

What's next as we write the RoboGoblin future? Our plugin system is getting close. Plus, there is loads to do to make federation a dreamy, bug-free user-experience. In the coming months we'll be working on better ActivityStreams and PubSubHubbub support. We're also working towards using the Salmon Protocol to handle comment notification, favoriting, and so on across instances. These are the nuts and bolts of federation and many of these bits need some creative tinkering to make them work flawlessly with media hosting. If that sounds like your kind of fun, then we would love to meet you.

Additionally, we need help testing social features like favoriting and other curation tools. MediaGoblin aims to be functional, gorgeous and user-savvy. If you have opinions about user experience and how media should be served, then we absolutely want to hear from you! As always, we're beeping and whirring away in #mediagoblin on freenode.net. You can also join the mailing list. One way or another we'd love to have you around, so join us!

Very Busy Goblins

MediaGoblin's been very busy. It's almost like it was our birthday! We went to some parties, people said very nice things about us, there were gifts and there might even be some cake coming our way. (It's actually very close to our one year anniversary!)

We went to PyCon where we presented a poster. A video was shot very early in the morning. The MediaGoblin team had already consumed a good deal of free coffee and had been talking about dungeons and dragons while waiting for our turn in front of the camera, all of which somewhat explains my dumbfounded response about the "player." At any rate, I am happy to report that at least one of us is a morning person so the rest of the video is both energetic and informative. Check out the video about the poster on YouTube. We are such fine connoisseurs of irony that we'll be linking to them again later on in this very post!

You can also take a look at the actual poster which we would totally hang in the MediaGoblin office, if we had one.

We gave out our brand new stickers, which people enjoyed quite a bit. If you are going to be at any events with any of us in the near future, be sure to get one! This is Chris giving one to Rob who works at Collabora on GStreamer.

After the main conference, Will and Chris stuck around to sprint with folks. Thanks to Bassam Kurdali, Sacha De'Angeli, Derek Moore, Matt Bone, Michael Helland, Hugo Boyer and Mark Buttenhoff who stuck around to sprint with Will Kahn-Greene and Chris Webber! We made a lot of progress on ipython support and some nice improvements to look and feel of video player. We really appreciate everyone who pitched in or tried to get MediaGoblin going on their laptop. Swing by the channel anytime to say hi!

Here's a picture of the 3D printer we sprinted next to:

We also attended LibrePlanet, which is the Free Software Foundation's annual conference. Chris spoke about MediaGoblin briefly on the second day. Evan Prodromou from Status.net spoke about decentralized social web services. After the conference, Evan, Chris and Brett hacked on federation. There are more details and a diagram from that meeting of the minds if you're curious.

Chris gave a talk at Flourish in Chicago about MediaGoblin a week later which went really well. You can watch the whole talk here:

What's coming up? Deb will be at Linuxfest Northwest in Bellingham, Washington. She'll be giving a talk about the importance of decentralized web services. If you live in Seattle or Vancouver, make the trip and she will also hook you up with MediaGoblin stickers.

You don't have to wait for a sprint though, MediaGoblin is always on the lookout for more testers, translators, coders, documenters and bug filers. We're happy to get you up to speed anytime!

Help us test the SQL move!

Hiya all!

We're currently in the process of moving MediaGoblin over from MongoDB over to SQL(alchemy). We're pretty close to landing it, and would like to do so for the next release. But we need help testing!

We can use both:

People who are already running MediaGoblin (test) instances who are willing to help test conversion
People who are willing to help test setting up new environments

Interested in helping? Follow these docs and join us on IRC to help us get rolling!

We appreciate it!

Interviewed about MediaGoblin on Frostcast

Note: this post originally appeared on my personal blog.

I got interviewed about MediaGoblin on the excellent Frostcast of FrostbiteMedia. This happened over a month ago, but life has been intense, and better late than never in blogging it. Anyway, I talked to Jonathan Nadeau who runs the podcast, and even though FrostbiteMedia doesn't specifically say so, this episode is released under Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported. (mirrored here)

Anyway, I've given it a few listens, and I'm super pleased with how it came out. We talk about the motivations behind MediaGoblin, the underlying architectural decisions, and even a bit of my own free software personal history. It went by really fast... hard to believe the show comes out to about an hour. (It was also my first time being interviewed on a podcast or anything of the like before, and I had some dumb self-inflicted technical difficulties. Luckily, Jonathan was very patient.)

By the way, I have a lot of respect for Jonathan Nadeau. Jonathan is not only a free software activist, but also a blind user of free software. He's also starting a nonprofit called the Accessible Computing Foundation which aims to make the life of computer users with various disabilities better by improving the state of accessibility in free software. Very cool and noble goal. There's a good interview with him on this Linux Outlaws episode. Best of luck to you, Jonathan!

MediaGoblin 0.2.1: Gearing Up

MediaGoblin 0.2.1: Gearing Up banner

Welcome to MediaGoblin 0.2.1: Gearing Up! This release has largely been about paving the way forward for MediaGoblin's future and restructuring under the hood. Nonetheless, a good number of awesome features got implemented for this release.

We've brought some old-school awesomeness with ASCII art support to go along with our video support (which you may remember we were pretty jazzed about adding in our last release). You have to specifically enable it, so see this documentation for details. In the future, you can expect to see support for all sorts of media types, including 3d models, slides, and presentations!

There are plenty of nice UI tweaks, including nice, tidy-looking comment areas. You can now easily apply Creative Commons licenses to your MediaGoblin media.

We're now able to provide a customizable EXIF metadata display. EXIF data means all the little tags that modern media recording devices include inside your image files. If your camera records it, you can display it: location, camera manufacturer, what the camera model was, the focal length, etc. If you took a sideways picture (and your camera is fancy enough to detect it) then MediaGoblin will rotate your image in the right direction for you. The default setting is hidden (but not scraped) metadata. Since this is MediaGoblin, it's easily customized for your instance -- just turn on exif_visible option in mediagoblin.ini.

GPS support is working! Does your camera have a GPS in it? Then you can haz maps. We worked hard to build compatibility with another great FLOSS project, OpenStreetMap. Again, this feature is off by default. You can enable option geolocation_map_visible in your mediagoblin.ini to show GPS info.

What about "under the hood" news? If MediaGoblin were a car we were building from scratch, then we recently decided to replace the engine. After significant discussion, we decided to switch from MongoDB to SQL using the python SQLAlchemy library. The SQL code is actually already very close to full deployment in the main repository and many parts have already performed well in tests. Huge props are due to Elrond who has made herculean efforts towards the Great Database Migration of 2012. The transition is already well on its way!

We're smoothing the way for federation. We're kicking off Kuneco (which means "togetherness" in Esperanto) is the collection of libraries we're building so that OStatus, the software that drives our inspiring forebears at StatusNet/identi.ca, will play nicely with python webapps. We also implemented PubSubHubbub (push) support in this release. We can now "push" notifications of our feeds out to the PubSubHubbub servers. One small step towards federation, in a series of many steps that will one day add up to a large step. More on this soon!

MediaGoblin is coming soon to a device near you! We want your phones, desktop applications and tablets to be able to submit media. We're putting together an API that will allow programmers to hook their applications into MediaGoblin. One day we'll be part of a massive decentralized ether and having a great API for interoperability is one way we start to get there.

So much amazing work happened to make this release possible! We could not have done without all of our amazing people. People worked over the holidays. Their paid jobs said, "Hey take a break this month." and our contributors took that time off and gifted it to the 0.2.1 release. Thanks so much to: Aleksej Serdjukov, Aaron Williamson, Christopher Allan Webber, Deb Nicholson, Elrond of Samba TNG, Jef van Schendel, Joar Wandborg, Karen Rustad, Michele Azzolari, Will Kahn-Greene! (If we missed you, let us know so we can correct the post!)

Get on board! MediaGoblin is actively seeking testers, translators, coders, and bug filers. We'll save you a seat as we set out on on the road to federation!

MediaGoblin contributor drawings

Happy Holidays and a happy upcoming new year from the MediaGoblin team! Today I kick off something I've been planning for a while. Contributor drawings!

Machalus, Duke of Time. Contributor drawing for Matt Lee. Thanks, Matt!

This is the first contributor drawing I made, near the start of the project. It's been my intention since nearly the beginning to do artwork to thank various contributors for their hard work on the project. Recently I took the time to make several more:

X11R25 robot. Contributor drawing for Caleb Davis. Thanks, Caleb!

Shaquannah, a magician of arts. Contributor drawing for Karen Rustad. Thanks, Karen!

Spencer, a punkish goblin of sorts. Contributor drawing for Joar Wandborg. Thanks, Joar!
(Note, I don't endorse smoking, even if Spencer does it!)

If all goes well, I'll be making more and more of these for various contributors for various types of contributions. I think this could be a nice way to incentivize contributions (somewhat along the lines of the famous Knuth checks), but more importantly, to both give me a way to thank various people who have significantly helped the project and as a way for me to find an excuse to unwind a bit and spend some time on my artwork.

I'll put more formally what to expect about contributor drawings on the wiki, but here are the basic rules of it to keep things interesting both for contributors and myself... nothing too formal, but:

Originally, I intended to do these as incentivization for people to do copyright assignments to the FSF, but it turns out that optional copyright assignments are not presently an option with the FSF, it's all or nothing. So all you have to do to be eligible is to do some significant work on MediaGoblin.
Don't contact me, I'll contact you and let you know if I'm thinking of making a drawing for you.
To keep things from becoming a chore, drawings are not "made to order". You can't tell me precisely what you want in a drawing, I'd really like a lot of freedom here. But I'll probably give you a choice between a couple of themes. Right now I'm doing "unique creature" or "a brand new goblin". The themes might change at some point. I'll let you know.
The drawings are not made for you, but they will be dedicated to you. The drawing will not be intended to represent you... I might draw some sort of miscreant, and I don't want you to be offended thinking I'm insulting you. If I worry about that stuff, I'll spend too much time worrying about it and then my artwork will become terribly bland. (However, I might think of what sort of drawing you might like while making it, of course.)
When the drawing is done I'll email it to you and you can tell me if you like it or not and whether or not you're willing to have this drawing be dedicated to you. If so, great! If not, oh well, I'll dedicate it to someone else or possibly just post it without any dedication.
Lastly, I'm doing this for fun, so hopefully it will be fun! I'll do these as time permits, and I don't know how much that will be. Don't be offended if you've done quite a bit and I haven't gotten to you yet... I probably intend to. I hope this ends up being something enjoyable for everyone, and a nice way for me to combine a bit of artistic release with a community that I care about deeply.

If it stops being fun, I'll stop doing the drawings, but I suspect that won't happen for some time. In the meanwhile, hopefully I can put up some fun stuff, and people will enjoy it!

MediaGoblin 0.2.0: Our Tubes

MediaGoblin 0.2.0: Our Tubes banner

Welcome to Our Tubes! The 0.2.0 release enables you to turn on video and run your own HTML5 video hosting site! Whose tubes? Our Tubes!

Below is an example video that's been transcoded and uploaded using MediaGoblin. The magic comes from GStreamer!

Sintel, by the Blender Foundation, CC BY 3.0.

Our video hosting is html5 standards compliant! That means you need a standards-compliant browser like a recent Firefox or Chromium to see video. (If you aren't seeing anything, go upgrade your browser.) Video is resource intensive and requires extra dependencies like GStreamer so it's disabled by default. If you want to run a video hosting site for your friends and family, now you can! To enable video hosting on your site, check out these docs.

MediaGoblin's big picture goal is to support loads of different media types, so video is just the beginning. In the near future MediaGoblin will be able host slide sharing, three dimensional model uploading and viewing, even ASCII art. You can already check out this experimental branch and showcase your rad ASCII art.

What else? This month we fixed it so that when you resize an uploaded image, it retains the same file format. PNG images are still PNG images and GIFs are still GIFs. This is particularly good news for fans of semi-transparent PNGs. There were also some small styling improvements this month, including better navigation. Take a look:

With our MediaGoblin instance hosters in mind, we made it a little easier to customize stuff and we also improved the documentation for larger volume instances, especially video hosters.

Thank you to everyone who helped with Our Tubes! We had some new folks join the project this month (Yay!!) and there was lots of great work and support from our returning contributors. We're especially grateful to the people who stepped up to review each other's code this month. Best. Team. EVER. Seriously! Give a round of applause to: Aaron Williamson, Christopher Allan Webber, Corey Farwell, Deborah Nicholson, Elrond of Samba TNG, Jakob Kramer, Jef van Schendel, Joar Wandborg, Larisa Hoffenbecker, Manuel Urbano Santos, Nathan Yergler, Pablo J. Urbano Santos, Sam Kleinman, Will Kahn-Greene, Pierre Geoffroy, Harry Chen, George Pop, Aleksej Serdjukov, osc (transifex.net), and martin (transifex.net). Thanks folks... we couldn't have done it without you. (PS: It's possible we missed you; if so let us know and we'll correct this post.)

What next? More media types! And we've got a roadmap for federation now. Look out uncharted territory of decentralized web, we're coming! In fact, enough new stuff is on the horizon at MediaGoblin to warrant its own whole post. Be sure to check back in with us soon. Or if you like spoilers, come see us in IRC (#mediagoblin on irc.freenode.net) and see who you can shake down for hints of what's coming next. Better yet, infiltrate us and find out from the inside. There's a ton to do and we would love your help!

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