I’ve been working on the next version of Twitkut in whatever little free time I’ve had in the past couple weeks ( mostly weekends ). The next version of Twitkut will feature a number of new and exciting features, the most major one being support for OAuth. Some of the features have already been deployed on Orkut:

1. Displaying user tweets in the Orkut profile page (deployed): I had to rewrite the whole code for this due the new server-side templates and data-pipelining standards enforced by Orkut. It has certain limitations in that you cannot click on any link that links to any external source. Clicking on the user’s pic or username leads you to the application page.

2. OAuth Support: Twitkut will now enable you to authorize it with your Twitter account via OAuth. Doing this will enable you to post updates from Twitkut, add your Orkut friends as your Twitter friends and many more things (listed as separate features). I chose OAuth since then you won’t have to worry about me storing your Twitter passwords.

3. Post updates from Twitkut: If you enable OAuth, you’ll be able to post updates to your Twitter account from within Twitkut.

4. Follow your Orkut friends on Twitter: Enabling OAuth will enable you to follow your Orkut friends on Twitter from within Twitkut.

5. Selective Updates: This will be similar to the “Selective Twitter Updater” Facebook app. You will able to selectively display updates on Twitkut by adding a hashtag to the end of updates similar to “#orktw” or “#orkut”. I’ve still to decide upon the hashtag. Only the updates containing the hashtag will be displayed on Twitkut.

Unfortunately, the popular demand for automatic updates to the user’s activity stream ( without the user having to visit the application page ) won’t be possible due to the limitations enforced by Orkut. If Orkut ever allows it, it’ll be the first feature I’ll add.

I cannot promise if and when I’ll add all these features. There are too many variables, time being the biggest one. You can keep abreast with the latest updates to Twitkut by following @twitkut.

You can also suggest features that you’ll like to be added to Twitkut as comments to this blogpost or as @replies to @twitkut.

Enabling Twitkut with OAuth has been/will be a complicated task. I’ll probably write a separate blog on writing an Opensocial OAuth Gadget.

I created a short movie out of the still pics of our stay at Mussoorie and Rishikesh. A pinch of creativity and a couple of hours of work went into the creation/direction of this movie. Hope you like it!

The music used in the movie (in the same order):

Eye of the tiger by Scorpions
Bebot by Black Eyed Peas
The Hill by Markéta Irglová
Enter Sandman by Metallica

Mussoorie-Rishikesh ’09 Trip from Ankit Ahuja on Vimeo.

This previous weekend from 18th to 20th September was probably the most fun and adventure I have had for quite a while. While I was on leave from college on Thursday, my college friends were planning a trip to Mussoorie via Haridwar and Rishikesh for the weekend. After much vacillation from everyone, 5 of us finally decided that we were going to the trip! Part of the fun was that the final decision was made just hours before the actual trip began. So, none of us had any time to really think about the beautiful weekend that awaited us.

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Yes, I’m in (yay!) and I will be participating in Google Summer of Code this year with Joomla! For those of you who don’t know what Joomla! is, it is a Content Management System ( CMS ) used widely to create and manage websites. I will be working on an Enhanced front-end editor for Joomla! Ashwin will be mentoring me for the summer.

I am thankful to Sameer for inspiring me to take part in GSoC. I also thank Elin, Sam, Toni and all the other mentors and community of Joomla! for helping me better my application into something practical and at the same time useful. It has been a great experience interacting with the Joomla! community for the past 1 – 2 months and that is something that has really inspired me to work on the project.

Things have been moving very quickly since I got to know that I got selected on 21st April at 12:30 am. But, the journey has just begun. I will be coding this coming summer to complete my project and to validate my selection. At present, I have been getting myself familier with the Joomla! framework, finalizing the implementation details of my project as well as sorting out a few issues in my mind. I plan to give my best effort to the project so that it becomes a useful feature for all Joomla! users.

I see this as a terrific opportunity to work in collaboration with talented people from all over the world. I see now why people love open source so much. It feels great to be a part of the Joomla! as well as the opensource community and to contribute to a project that is used by so many users.

My heartiest congratulations to everyone who got selected for Summer of Code. You can have a look at the list of students who got selected for Joomla! here: http://socghop.appspot.com/org/home/google/gsoc2009/joomla

This post’s title makes my obsession with use of hash-tags in twitter updates pretty clear

My college wanted us to do a project as part of a “Bridge Course” this semester. In a way, I liked the concept as it was at least trying to convince some people to do something besides curriculum. Personally, it’s always good when you are working towards some objective like completing a project you have to submit. An example is last summer, when I had to create a project for the summer and I ended up doing a lot of fun stuff.

So, I thought, why not build a solution for a problem I have been facing for quite some time now. Those of you who know me personally or follow me on twitter, know that I am particularly unhappy about my college’s attendance criteria. It’s always been a headache for me trying to keep track of when I went to college and when I didn’t. I tried using Google Calendar but I thought it was pretty cumbersome to use for this particular purpose.

So, I thought, why not create a simple, easy-to-use and nice-looking webapp for exactly this purpose. That’s when ProxyCal was born. Even at the beginning, I had the idea in my mind of a calendar which used colors like green, red and yellow to denote the status for the day i.e. whether you went to college, took a leave or college was off. One more thing I wanted to do was to avoid anyone from creating a new account for using ProxyCal. So, I decided that I was going to store all the data regarding the attendance in a separate calendar ‘ProxyCal’ in the user’s Google Calendars.

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