Version 0.1.0 - Living the Dream



Can you believe we've only been working on MediaGoblin since March? The biggest news is that 0.1.0 is out! We want to take a few minutes to look back at how far we've come and how many people have been supportive and how many folks have become contributors. With all the excitement and positivity, you'd think we were shipping out bushels of free candy instead of building a free as in freedom media-hosting site. Fortunately, there are lots of folks who agree that a decentralized web is even better than a pillow case full of sugary treats.

We've completely redone the main website. We even have a new tour page! Thanks so much to Jef van Schendel for making our website a thing of beauty (and to Alex Camelio for adding the cute icons on the frontpage). Go ahead and check it out! Seriously, we'll be right here when you return.

You may find it invigorating to look at our Alpha goals to see how far we've come. While there are a few things we didn't get to (CAPTCHAs and featured works) but there are many more big ideas that we were able to turn into reality. We have a sophisticated "unframework" which is working beautifully for our needs. We have a great, consistent (and dare I say suave?) theme. We have an abstracted storage system which already is being used to interface with OpenStack's Swift storage system. Comments and tagging are working. We're also well on our way toward supporting multiple media types. We are living the dream and the reality is even better than we'd expected. Welcome to our alpha release!

As we get ready to start coding up federation, aka world domination, we added brand-new deployment documentation — take a look! Better yet, install it and let us know how it went. Last month we added cross site request forgery protection and lost password functionality. There was some significant internal restructuring this month as we gear up for caching and supporting more media types in the next release or so. The translations crew continues to amaze us with their volume and diligence. Watch out world, here we come.

Thanks to all our contributors! Aaron Williamson, Alejandro Villanueva, Alex Camelio, Caleb Forbes Davis V, Christopher Allan Webber, Deb Nicholson, Elrond of Samba TNG, Jef van Schendel, Jim Campbell, Joar Wandborg, Nathan Yergler, Sam Kleinman, Shawn Khan, Thorsten Wilms, Will Kahn-Greene... this month's release wouldn't have happened without your help!

What's around the corner? For one thing, video is nearing usability:


(Image from Sintel by the Blender Institute, released under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported)

and the exciting work on federation is in planning. We've got lots of small bugs for folks who are new to python, larger tasks for folks who want to immerse themselves in the challenge of federation and we are actively seeking opinionated web users to give us feedback on our test site. Join us on the journey!

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Version 0.0.5 - Visions of the Future



The whole world is invited to our vision of the future. You know the one with decentralized services, open standards and customized media hosting? In preparation for the whole world, also known as our imminent public instance, we asked for more contributors, and boy did we get them! We also managed to further our internal vision a bit by making great strides on our migration and storage plans. This may have been our most exciting month yet, especially if you go by the lengthy list of thank yous!

uchoMay ogressPray! Transifex is fully set up to handle translations and MediaGoblin has already been translated into 14 languages.* (If you can help us by translating another, we'd be very grateful!)



We've started conducting user experience testing -- many thanks to all the folks who responded to our call for testing! Caleb Davis is graciously hosting and running MediaGoblin's user experience testing server. We'll be collecting new data each month here. Got opinions? We'd absolutely love to hear them. Please ping us if you want in on the UX testing party.

There are a few new goodies for the users this time around, including the ability to delete media, and some smaller things (like now if you submitted an image wider than 640 pixels, clicking on the scaled down image brings you to the original size).



We're also supporting media attachments as an optional (but not enabled-by-default for security reasons) feature. Assuming you're on a site that supports it, you can now attach source files to your works, etc.



The internal roadmap also got some nurturing in the form of media-processing changes, a new site export/import tool as well as docs and wiki improvements. On the literally visual front, we made some progress on our logo and there's a new favicon. You can also take a look at our new tidied up homepage:



Loads of storage stuff! We're now compatible with OpenStack's "swift" file storage system, (so you can use Rackspace CloudFiles, for example, or connect to some other instance of the software) and we worked on an experimental "MountStorage" system for mounting multiple storage systems at once. (Sorry, there are no pictures of the storage systems.) You can however take a look at our improved 404 (not found) and 500 (internal server error) pages when you want something we haven't stored where you thought we did or something breaks:





We wouldn't have been able to glimpse the future without all of our contributors, so a hearty thanks goes out to: Will Kahn-Greene, Deb Nicholson, Joar Wandborg, Christopher Allan Webber, Jef van Schendel, Osama Khalid, Elrond of Samba TNG, Alejandro Villanueva, Caleb Davis, Karen Rustad, Alex Camelio, Thorsten Wilms, Jarred de Beer, Sam Kleinman, Jim Campbell, Aleksej Serdjukov, Mark Holmquist, Jacobo Nájera Valdez, Vinzenz Vietzke, Benjamin Lebsanft, Odin Hørthe Omdal, Jure Repinc, Jan-Christoph Borchardt, Shawn Khan, Justin Mantell, Jordyn Bonds, Larisa Hoffenbecker, Avery Morrow, and Transifex usernames: lasconic, osc, harryhow, Arder, gap and aleksejrs.**

Stay tuned, because next month we'll be living this month's future... and it looks very bright indeed! And if you want us to help make these dreams a reality, please join us!

(*Pig Latin is not one of them.)

(**Transifex doesn't currently let us easily view translation history. If we didn't mention you, we're sorry and we still really, really appreciate your help! Drop in IRC and we'll fix the error.)

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Now open for translations!



MediaGoblin is now ready to accept translations! Do you speak a non-English language? We could use your help! Head on over to the MediaGoblin page on Transifex and join a team / request a new language team and start translating!

A big thank you to Osama Khalid who took the time to mark all our templates for translation! Between this and recent updates to our codebase MediaGoblin is fully ready for translators to jump in.



We already have one complete translation! Joar Wandborg has gotten Swedish translated to 100%. We could use more translations though, of course! Why not put your skills to use and jump in?

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Version 0.0.4 - Inward Reflections

You know how you feel when you make a couple of big decisions, clean your whole apartment including "that" closet and finally build those shelves? MediaGoblin totally had that month! This release is called "Inward Reflections" because the lion's share of progress was made on internal stuff, although we did find time to knock out a few external goodies.



Tagging! Users can tag photos:



And then they can click on those tags and see similar pics:



We made the user registration process clearer and added the ability to disable registrations.



In addition to lots of general design tweakage, bios are now enabled with markdown and pagination is much improved.



And about that closet, we spent some serious time improving our migration code and unit tests. We extracted some key documentation from Chris's brain and generated new docs from Sphinx. We threw out all the unstringed tennis rackets and galoshes with holes. We've got a new mailing list and a new wiki. In general, the codebase and the project is significantly spiffier and more approachable than it was last month.

In the magic contributor-thank-you-mirror, the MediaGoblin sees; Chris Moylan, Caleb Davis, Odin Hørthe Omdal, Joar Wandborg, Elrond of Samba TNG, Chris Webber, Aaron Williamson, Rasmus Larsson, Deb Nicholson, Will Kahn-Greene, Vinzenz Vietzke, Jim Campbell, Jef van Schendel, Thorsten Wilms and Osama Khalid!

Best of all, we're on track for our goal of launchable-site(s) in September/October!

August will be spent finishing that and maybe getting in a few cool extra tools and planning for federation and multiple media formats. We could use your help! In particular, this month we could use a few testers that are not already familiar with the codebase. No actual python expertise is required for testing. If you've been waiting for an entry point that doesn't require mad coding skills, this is it! Please, join us!

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Version 0.0.3 - Talking in Rainbows



Welcome to GNU MediaGoblin 0.0.3, codenamed "Talking in Rainbows". This release is a huge milestone for us! While this is still a developer's release, we're rapidly approaching usability to where we'll be able to run public instances of the software. This last month has been full of various improvements and features, so without further ado, let's get to what those are!



First of all there are a lot of small things, some of them just small UI changes, some of them small things on the backend. Here you can see that we now allow users to set their own bio on their profile and their home URL.



Above you can see a few other niceties on the media viewing page. (Like, we actually properly resize images now...) We have a new sidebar, and likely exciting things will go into it soon such as various bits of metadata, etc. For now it's just some buttons.

What's really exciting here is that we now have rich descriptions via Markdown! This means you can easily embed links, mark things as bold and italics, etc.

You may also have noticed that edit button on the right...



It's now possible to edit some metadata about your media after-submission. Here you can see that (as well as the markdown used to generate the HTML in the previous entry's submission).



But one of the most exciting user-visible changes in this release is the addition of comments! Logged in users can comment and even mark up their post with Markdown, similar to media entry descriptions.



We also have some nice infrastructure in place for sending messages to users even after a redirect, etc, similar to Django's messages framework. Testing this with the different levels/types of messages (debug, error, warning, etc) lead to the "rainbow of messages" above, and also to the name of this release. Now you know why, and knowledge is power.

A lot more things have also changed under the hood that are mostly unnoticeable to end-users, but which are significant from a developer's point of view. More than this happened, but to name the big ones:

• We have a brand new config system which simplifies application initialization, makes it easy to add new configuration options, handles auto type conversion and validation, etc. Thanks to Bernard Keller for proving this is a good idea.
• Improved infrastructure for testing the web application and more tests
• Command line tools for managing users
• "Workbench" code for media processing
• We're also cleaning HTML via lxml.html.clean which is rather important now that we have rich text via markdown, but will be extremely important when we move into federation. (It's not necessarily true that all instances will use Markdown for markup. Also, we're fairly certain we did the right thing with this HTML cleaning, but if you or someone you know is an expert in this type of area of web security, consider joining us! We'd love more advice here.)
• Switched from mongokit's indexing to our own indexing setup
• Improved documentation on how to use git as a MediaGoblin developer
• And tons of other code refactoring, cleanup, and minor changes.

Several infrastructure changes have been underway also. We owe a lot to FooCorp for quickly bootstrapping us in numerous ways in the first couple months of this project (Rob Myers joked to me that MediaGoblin is FooCorp's first successful incubator project), but we've quickly grown to the point where it makes sense to run things on our own servers. Will Kahn-Greene has been doing the hard work to move things over... thanks, Will! For now, most things are moved over except the bugtracker. And thank you again to Matt Lee and Rob Myers for believing in our project, helping us get started, continued infrastructure support, and being good friends and good people.

Massive thanks to all the people who have made this release possible, and there are many! On the graphic design front, Jef van Schendel continues to do amazing work (thanks also to Karen Rustad, Aaron Williamson, Jarred de Beer, and Thorsten Wilms for helping us work on designing our logo, which hopefully can be wrapped up next month!). On documentation and infrastructure, thanks much again to Will Kahn-Greene. On the organizational front, thanks much to Deb Nicholson who's helped figure out a lot of stuff for us and answered a lot of my stupid questions. On the programming side, thanks to Aleksandar Micovic, Elrond Elvenlord of Samba TNG, Jakob Kramer, Caleb Davis, Chris Moylan, Joar Wandborg, Bernard Keller, and Alejandro Villanueva (well, and me). I am extraordinarily grateful that we have such a vibrant team. This has been an awesome release, and it's been awesome because of all the people who have worked on it. So thanks again.

So what's next? Right now we're trying to tie up all loose ends so we can get up an actual instance of this site in the next couple of months. This is going to take a tremendous amount of work, and quite simply, we could use your help! Help of all sorts is appreciated, so please... join us and help us build a beautiful future of federated media sharing!

(PS: Special thanks to Mairin Duffy for letting us make a nice profile example out of her photos!)

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Version 0.0.2 - we can haz pages

First of all, thanks to everyone who worked to get us to 0.0.2! GNU MediaGoblin is much further along than we'd even hoped it would be by this point. We're especially grateful to those of you who have become regular fixtures (dare we say goblinistas?) - in particular Jef van Schendel (our new graphic designer!) who's made 0.0.2 look great, Rob Myers and Matt Lee at FooCorp for their support, everyone for their feedback, and a ton of people sending in patches (Aleksandar Micovic, Jakob Kramer, Joar Wandborg, Bernhard Keller, Elrond from Samba-TNG, Sebastian Spaeth, Aaron Williamson, Daniel Neel (on docs), and of course Chris Webber and Will Kahn-Greene). The influx of contributors here are what has made this month's release of GNU MediaGoblin (our first month of public development!) an awesome one.

In short, it's starting to look like the real deal. We have basic galleries with pagination, email verification, feeds and friends. There's also lots of nitty gritty stuff like MongoDB data migrations, Celery integration, and etc that you can ask Chris to explain to you in extravagant detail if you join us on IRC. But pictures speak louder than words, particularly in a software project related to media publishing. And so, behold!









The quality of work that's gone into 0.0.2 makes meeting our lofty-yet-humble 0.1.0 goals look quite achievable. The past month's work on 0.0.2 shows that we can do this, but that there's a ton of work left to do. Which leaves us looking forward to 0.0.3. There's a lot of work to do, but also a lot of fun to be had doing so. Sound up your alley? Why don't you join us?

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Join us for the upcoming GNU MediaGoblin hackers meeting!

GNU MediaGoblin 0.0.2 is almost out the door. More on that in an upcoming post, but in short we've had a lot more success and excitement in our first month of public development than even we anticipated.

But next month's release should be even better! Are you interested in working on the project, helping us figure out the goals and directions for next month, etc? We're going to have a meeting on Monday May 30th to figure out all these things, help people get started and involved and work on things they find interesting. And you should come!

• Monday, May 30th 10AM US Central (3PM UTC)
• Main meeting will last 1 hour but we will be around the rest of the day to help people get involved
• join #mediagoblin on irc.freenode.net (or see the join us)

Be there and help us build the future of free, decentralized and beautiful media publishing!

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Goals for our first alpha release

I just got back from Libre Graphics Meeting 2011 where, among other things, I spoke on a panel about free network services. One thing made clear during the conference this year is that interest in GNU MediaGoblin is clearly high!

We should couple this excitement with realistic expectations. We've mentioned that we're planning on having a public alpha in September / October of 2011. But what can users expect in that alpha release?

To start out with, here's what we have at the time of writing:

• Rather good infrastructure
  • MongoDB basic integration
  • A hopefully-extensible storage interface (though we only have basic files supported yet)
  • a good custom "unframework" that matches our needs very well, very Django-like
• You can register
• You can submit an image and that works, but barely, and it's boring
• User galleries
• Individual media pages
• Good docs
• Some project public facing & communication stuff like docs, website, bugtracker

Not bad for a project that merely announced itself publicly two weeks ago! But there's plenty left to do.

Here are goals for the September / October public alpha:

• Be able to upload and display images (just images for the alpha, and this mostly already works)
• Have a really slick theme (Jef van Schendel is making this look very likely!)
• RSS / Atom feeds you can subscribe to
• Translation infrastructure (in progress!)
• Commenting (threaded??)
• Database migration tools
• Creative Commons licensing ability
• Decent homepage including "featured" photos/artwork
• A way to check conversions: ones that are in progress, ones that fail, etc (currently images convert fast so not a huge deal, but no way to check on things that might take longer like video
• Password recovery
• RDFa markup
• Some way of culling spammers? An audio/visual CAPTCHA? :(
• A hosted example on mediagobl.in (with heavy warnings that things are likely to simply break, don't use this for your permanent stuff yet)

Things I would love to see happen but doubt we'll get done by then, but useful to think of as near-future things:

• A watch-list of other users you want to follow (think a StatusNet timeline, but for media)
• starting work on OStatus integration (presumably simply PubSubHubbub support to start with)
• Slicker, in-place AJAXy uploading
• An API
• Multiple media types, especially video

If you haven't seen Jef van Schendel's mockups for https://mediagoblin.org/ you really ought to see them now. These aren't permanent designs, but I think they show that we're already well on our way toward looking awesome. (I'd note that I've also made some ASCII art mockups of the frontpage and an individual view but it's possible that only a limited portion of our audience would appreciate this.)

I'm fairly optimistic about us meeting our goals, but that is largely dependent on how many people step up and contribute. If you're interested in helping with the project, we could really use your help There's plenty to do... graphic design, code, and so much more... even just spreading the word can help! But please, seriously, do join us and help make the dream of GNU MediaGoblin a reality!

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GNU MediaGoblin: Free and Decentralized Media Sharing in Development

GNU MediaGoblin is a new software project that will provide users with freely licensed and distributed photo sharing. Lead developer Chris Webber says, “We believe people should be able to own their online data and that means someone has to build the tools to make it possible. We decided that someone would be us.” For the past two months, Webber’s been laying down technical foundations and assembling a team of contributors to start building GNU MediaGoblin.

GNU MediaGoblin is being built by free software activists. Chris Webber and Will Kahn-Greene, both longtime Miro contributors, are leading the Development Team. Matt Lee and Rob Myers from FooCorp, the makers of GNU FM (the software that powers Libre.fm and GNU Social, are providing infrastructure. Deb Nicholson, founder of the Women's Caucus is helping with community outreach. As of this announcement, GNU MediaGoblin is actively welcoming new contributors

"Development couldn't be launching at a better time, given the recent high-profile failures of so-called cloud services, which have reminded us of the danger in relying on faceless corporations to store our cherished possessions and mediate our personal interactions." says John Sullivan, Executive Director of the Free Software Foundation. GNU MediaGoblin has the official support of the GNU Project and will be licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License and federated using OStatus, making it compatible with other free network services such as GNU Social, StatusNet, and GNU FM.

Mike Linksvayer, Vice President of Creative Commons looks forward to the launch, "GNU MediaGoblin is free software and has federation built-in, removing the barriers of proprietary software and closed networks faced by anyone who wants to offer customers superior media hosting, to experiment with new features around sharing, curation, and creation of media, or to simply have full control over their web media portfolio."

An alpha release of the distributable photo-sharing system is planned for this fall. Later versions of GNU MediaGoblin will include support for video and other media as well as tools to encourage user collaboration on media projects.

We're looking for contributors to help build, run and promote GNU MediaGoblin. Join us! More information is here or email press@mediagoblin.org for questions. We look forward to hearing from you!

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