Paul Swartz's PCF Devblog

The past few weeks, I’ve been refactoring the Guide to interact more normally with the rest of the Django ecosystem.  This has touched a lot of code, and while unit tests are helpful, they aren’t everything.

That’s why I need you, loyal readers!  The new branch is online at http://testchannelguide.participatoryculture.org/ and ready for you to poke at it.  It’s a slightly older copy of of the database, so if you’ve recently created an account on MiroGuide.com, your account may not be there.

If you run into problems (problems being anything that doesn’t work like it does on MiroGuide.com), just post a comment here and I’ll get to it as soon as I can!

As I’m sure anyone who reads this blog has noticed, Chris Webber and I released the brand-spanking-new version of the Miro Guide.  I’m incredibly proud of the work that we did on it, and I hope that you all like it too.

Translations: With a brand-new site come a bunch of new strings.  At the moment, the most-translated language (Slovenian) still has 116 untranslated strings.  If you’ve got some time, please sign up for Launchpad and translate some strings!

Features: Although I’ve got a bunch of ideas for where I want the Guide to go, I also want to hear from you!  Will turned on voting in Bugzilla, so go vote for your favorite features.  If you don’t see it there, feel free to add it to the list; maybe other people want it, too.

I got through 11 bugs this week, 10 of which were for Miro.  #10896 (Newly Available badge displayed too frequently) and #10988 (Chicklets don’t update counts for folders) were the hardest because I didn’t know much about the new messaging system.  Working on them was good, though, because now I know a lot more

Today I started working on Guide stuff again.  We’ve got 3 (really 2) P1 bugs that have so far eluded debugging and fixing.  I added some pretty verbose debugging in for #10993 (Feed Updater Running?) so hopefully that will generate something useful.  I also put up some new code for #10972 (Fix the Miro Guide Feeds) which hopefully will limit the number of new items that Miro tries to download.

I’ll be helping Chris out with Guide stuff next week, assuming no new cobranding bugs pop up.  I have one outstanding enhancement for the cobrander (uploading files to OSUOSL) but that’s lower-priority than MG3 stuff.

     556 text files.
classified 538 files
     499 unique files.
     180 files ignored.

http://cloc.sourceforge.net v 1.04  T=61.0 s (6.0 files/s, 772.1 lines/s)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language          files     blank   comment      code    scale   3rd gen. equiv
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Python              185      4403      2428     25212 x   4.20 =      105890.40
HTML                 89       198        87      8411 x   1.90 =       15980.90
CSS                   4       616        24      2752 x   1.00 =        2752.00
Javascript            6       109       545       754 x   1.48 =        1115.92
SQL                  65        94       130       504 x   2.29 =        1154.16
XML                   6        10         0       359 x   1.90 =         682.10
Bourne Shell         12        54       135       274 x   3.81 =        1043.94
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM:                367      5484      3349     38266 x   3.36 =      128619.42
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Guide was just accepted into Launchpad, so now I need your help. I’m mono-lingual in human languages, so I can’t translate the strings we use into the 34 different languages for which we have videos.

That’s where you come in! Help out by translating some of the Guide over on the Miro Guide Launchpad page, and be the first on your block to see all the cool phrases that are used behind the scenes.

The first iteration of the Miroguide API is out in the world! Visit https://develop.participatoryculture.org/trac/democracy/wiki/MiroGuideApi to check it out.

I’m starting to work on #9505 which allows a user to view the guide in a different language. This probably involves a couple things:

• translating the Guide
• only showing channels in the specified language
• choosing the default language based on what language Miro is in

But I don’t really know what people want from this feature. So I’m opening the floor up to you. What would you like a language switcher to do? How would you like to interact with it? Either add a comment to the bug or to this post, and you can help direct this feature!

I hacked together a quick feature that I’ve been wanting for a while: RSS feeds for the guide. Right now, there are three of them:

https://www.miroguide.com/feeds/features/
https://www.miroguide.com/feeds/new/
]https://www.miroguide.com/feeds/categories/[category name

Let me know what you think!

We just rolled out a couple new features onto the Guide.

1. Featured Queue: This is mostly relevant for moderators. Previously, to feature a channel on the front page, moderators had to manually unfeature an older channel before featuring a new one. Now, when a channel is featured, it goes into a queue with all the other channels featured by moderators. Then, once a day, the oldest featured channel is removed from the front page (but still visible on the Featured page) and replaced by an entry from the queue. It picks the channel round-robin style so that all the moderators get channels on the front page.
2. Adult Flagging: This is an oft-requested featured. Now moderators will be able to flag channels as Adult and they’ll be filtered (by default) from all views. If you want to see them, then you can visit the Adult category and agree to see them.

Matt moved the database onto its own server, which along with some new caching code has sped the site up a lot. Hopefully it’ll be able to handle the spike when Miro 1.0 comes out.

One thing that I’ve been thinking a lot about (esp. now that Miro is nearing 1.0) is an API for the Guide. I’d love for the Guide to be more directly useful from Miro (think rating channels, getting recommendations, etc), but also more useful for other projects. After all, the Guide is a great resource for Internet TV channels, regardless of the software ones uses.
So I’m posing a question to the developers/users out there: what would you like to see in a Guide API? What would you like to be able to do/access? And how would you like to be able to access it?