7 months after version 2.0, the new PubwichFork 2.1 comes with improved support for responsive mobile layouts and updated social media service classes.

After saving original Pubwich from death, PubwichFork 2.0 was downloaded appr. 350 times, installs from the repository not included, it attracted attention in some weblogs for web developers, PubwichFork powered sites were shown on barcamps and featured in a professional journal.

Now PubwichFork 2.1 comes with some minor but nice improvements.

Download and installation

That’s easy! Just download the PubwichFork 2.1 archive (we provide Zip and Tar), unpack it in your webspace and follow the config instructions from the manual.

Improvements made in PubwichFork 2.1

• Fixed Bugs: correct some strict PHP errors that were shown in some cases
• Added service class for Identi.ca
• Updated service classes: Github, Twitter (1.1 API), Delicious
• Mobile styles included: the default theme now includes responsive mobile styles for smartphones and tablets

Check the changelog for a detailed list of changes.

Links

• Project website
• Demo with more than 19 data sources
• Repository, documentation and issue tracker at Github
• All project updates (subscribeable via feed reader, email, …)
• Screenshots at Flickr

About PubwichFork

PubwichFork aggregates your latest Social Web and Social Media content across multiple service websites, e.g. your Twitter stream or Flickr photos. Then it renders one single website featuring all your content. PubwichFork is written in PHP and licensed Open-Source under a GPL.

PubwichFork was featured in WebResourcesDepot, La Ferme du Web, PHPspot and Hot Scripts Blog. (only to ping that sites about this realease :)

Currently Pinterest is one of the better known curating websites, users can curate images and pictures there, pinning them on their user profile site, organizing it via channels, combined with short or no comments. As this is not just a link to a image, this process raised a lot of copyright discussions and legal problems. Pinterest gives you the chance to prevent the pinning of your images via an HTML meta tag. What is wrong with that?

The problem

The usage of Pinterest (and other image curation services) fires up a lot of legal problems: using images you don’t have the right to use. People infringe both, copyrights and exploitation rights. It’s not just that they do not have the right to use the images, they have to give some legal rights to Pinterest that they can publish all that stuff on all their channels. So people give away rights they do not own. But I’m not a lawyer and I don’t care about this. Second, Pinterest was criticized because of this situation, and that they might invite their users to infringe other peoples right, just because pinning the images is so easy.

The solution

In February Pinterest added a mechanism how right owners can get opt out their images. I just found it out recently that they introduced a new meta tag:

What if I don’t want images from my site to be pinned?

We have a small piece of code you can add to the head of any page on your site:

<meta name="pinterest" content="nopin" />

When a user tries to pin from your site, they will see this message: “This site doesn’t allow pinning to Pinterest. Please contact the owner with any questions. Thanks for visiting!”

(Pinterest Getting Started)

This raises the question if already aggregated content will be removed from the Pinterest index if a website owner adds this meta tag, or if just new content cannot be pinned. It even does not clear the situation: no website owner can be forced to use special syntax just to help only one web service not to infringe rights.

Are you nuts?

Is Pinterest so narcisstic that they think they could have their own meta tag? If other service providers go the same way we need to use a dozen of similar meta tags soon, one tag for each service.

I guess that they have guys with technical knowledge, at least I hope it. They should know about all the other processes how to check if a resource can be aggregated:

• use the ROBOTS meta tag element
• check the HTTP header x-robots-tag
• read the robots.txt

I know, some of that stuff was developed to resolve legal problems with search engines but nowadays it is widely used and vendor independent. Pinterest should just tell their crawler name, and respecting rules in robots.txt, additionally they could:

• request the image URL for another content type, maybe there is used content negotiation what leads to meta data with license information
• check the outer document for RDF and RDFa snippets

I’m aware that only a few sites are already using those tech but Pinterest could have take the pressure as opportunity to inform people about possibilities, thinking together about a good solution what would work, even for other web services. Pinterest, curators and content/website owners would have been profited from this discussion.

But we just got a lousy <meta name="pinterest" content="nopin" />.

That is how people and companies breaking the web, and I really would like to know why. Are you too stupid, or too good to follow simple standards. I really hope that nobody is forced to use a pinterest meta tag still in 2 years.

I promised that I release the final PubwichFork 2.0 version while CLT2012 (Chemnitzer Linuxtage) and even if the CLT2012 is almost finished (the last sessions just ended): PubwichFork 2.0 is here!

What is PubwichFork?

PubwichFork is a PHP web application that aggregates your latest Social Web & Social Media content across multiple service websites (e.g. your Twitter stream or Flickr photos), and it renders one single website featuring all your content. You can create your own themes, add new services (or just use the built-in services) and it is possible to add filters on data streams. I already wrote about PubwichFork earlier here.

How to install?

That’s easy! Just download the latest PubwichFork archive (we provide Zip and Tar), unpack it in your webspace and follow the config instructions from the manual.

Upcoming development

As PubwichFork 2.0 is currently an original Pubwich + bugfixes + stable feed import + data stream filters, there is room for improvements and enhancements planned for upcoming versions:

Pubwich 2.5 (planned for end 2012)

• Activity stream service: merging various social media service sources to one merged stream, useable additionally to the single service boxes.
• Google+: adding a service class aggregating your Google+ stream
• Improve theming: adding regions to template, improve grouping of service boxes
• Change license to GPL2+: currently Pubwich and PubwichFork are licensed under GPL2, I hope that I can convince other developers to provide their code under GPL2+ which would bring some advantages

Pubwich 3.0 (planned for 2013)

• New project structure: new folder organisation, separate core components, libraries and user extensions.
• Improved configuration process
• Enabling multi sites in PubwichFork

Links & Resources

• Project website
• Repository, documentation and issue tracker at Github

PubwichFork is an open-source PHP web application that allows you to aggregate your published data from multiple websites and social services into a single HTML page.

Update: PubwichFork 2.0 is now released.

As the original Pubwich software is not actively developed anymore, my maintained fork is probably the better option to use. It fixes a few bugs, adds filtering methods to the data streams and brings a performance boost compared to Pubwich.

• Official project website
• Fork it on Github

Current development: release candidate & final version

End of November 2011 I’ve released a release candidate of PubwichFork 2.0, in between I made some changes to it. I thank everyone for testing (committing bug reports and feature requests is still very appreciated), especially to Valentin Bachem raising so many user questions :) Check out Valentins PubwichFork powered site, including his weblog, photography, Twitter posts and Youtube videos.

The final PubwichFork 2.0 version will be released soon, probably within the next two months.

How to contribute

• Blog and twitter about #PubwichFork
• Install PubwichFork, file bug issues and feature requests
• Add documentation and manuals
• Fork it, play around and send pull requests

The poster

Get the PubwichFork typography layout at Flickr.