Soma FM is probably the best internet radio station around. Actually, the best collection of radio stations, as there are quite a few different channels they broadcast. Unfortunately their website is not so great for quickly listening to one of the soma streams. Until a month ago I usually ended up using some command-line wizardry to listen to groovesalad or dronezone.

I've been playing around with Meteor.js for about a half year. Meteor is an excellent JavaScript everywhere framework. It's super duper easy to build realtime web apps (just watch this screencast to get an idea). Of course I actually prefer to code in CoffeeScript, which looks and behaves much more like Ruby and Python.

I had already tried Phonegap before and somehow plugging Meteor stuff into Phonegap was definitely on my mind. I played around a bit and in (total) just a couple of hours I had a script ready that could take any Meteor app and turn it into an Android .apk. It's now available at github.com/guaka/meteor-phonegap.

Now back to Soma.fm. Enough of cli, I wanted to be able to quickly change channels and a web app built in Meteor seemed appropriate, even if just for the convenience of meteor deploy radio.meteor.com and just for the kick of being able to release something built with Meteor. (We reached Meteor's limits with the cool geo stuff we've been working on, so it will take a while before we can release that.)

Today I quickly changed the Flash based iframe provided by Somafm with an HTML5 audio tag. That was enough to try meteor-phonegap again and build an .apk I could try on my Nexus 7. It works pretty well and I even managed to upload it to Google Play. It will take another 48 hours before I know if my credit card payment came through this time. If so, you'll be able to find Radio Meteor on there.

Oh and I also made an app with Meteor.js documentation. Enjoy!

I only met Callum briefly in Melbourne in 2007, right after I stopped volunteering for couchsurfing, right before he started volunteering for couchsurfing. A brief encounter with Callum was enough to know you're dealing with someone very smart and special. Later we started opencouchsurfing.org and regularly communicated online. I was happy to meet him again last summer in 2012. He wanted to start a new project and we brainstormed a bit about this. We were both avid users of ping.fm. I think Callum actually got me onto ping.fm at some point in 2007 or so.

Ping.fm: post to 20-something networks at once

Ping.fm was pretty good. There were some minor annoyances but overall it was a great way to post once and spread your message to tons of different networks. Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, but also Identi.ca, Plurk and many other fantasy named sites not used by many. But for an Identi.ca fan it was a great way to update your status on more than just identica. (For the uninitiated, Identica is an open source, slightly decentralized alternative to twitter.)

Then some day Seesmic, the slightly bigger social networking company with a nice looking product, took over Ping.fm. And quickly thereafter slashed the main feature that made Ping.fm stand out from the crowd. Since then there was no easy way for me anymore to post to Identi.ca, Twitter and FB at the same time.

Thus I was very happy Callum decided to build an alternative for ping.fm: Composer.io.

Composer.io: Post to multiple social networks

Now, half a year later Composer.io has become quite usable and you can post on multiple social networks simultaneously. It's actually a bit smarter than ping.fm as it will already allow you to post longer posts that will be automatically shortened for platforms like Twitter that only allow 140 characters.

Why post to more networks at once?

Personally, I have a bunch of followers of my twitter, quite a few friends on facebook. Identi.ca is not that active but unlike on twitter the links are dofollow links, so for seo I prefer to put links to projects I want to support with google juice on my identi.ca, but for social networking reasons twitter and facebook are much better. Like this I get the best of both.

Composer.io is a work in progress and your input is very welcome!

Yesterday I met up with Paxus and we had a chat about many things. Naturally CouchSurfing and its B C corporatization was one of them. It reminded me I had to post something about the origins of hospitality.

Since 2007 I prefer to host and be a guest through BeWelcome (since 2007). I've been hosting and staying with people through online hospitality networks since 2004 though. I've hosted people and stay with people before that as well though, usually because they were friends or friends or friends. Servas goes back a bit more and has been around since 1949. And hospitality is usually thought of as a very common concept in the Islamic world (6th century). It goes back way further than that still.

Through my interest in languages I came across an excellent book about the origins of Indo-European languages, "The Horse the Wheel and Language", where I found some more information about the origins of the words "guest" and "host":

The Yamnaya horizon is the visible archaeological expression of a social adjustment to high mobility - the invention of the political infrastructure to manage larger herds from mobile homes based in the steppes. A linguistic echo of the same event might be preserved in the similarity between English guest and host. They are cognates, derived from one Proto-Indo-European root (*ghos-ti-). (A "ghost" in English was originally a visitor or guest.) The two social roles opposed in English guest and host were originally two reciprocal aspects of the same relationship. The late Proto-Indo-European guest-host relationship required that "hospitality" (from the same root through Latin hospes 'foreigner, guest') and "friendship" (*keiwos-) should be extended by hosts to guests (both *ghos-ti-), in the knowledge that the receiver and giver of "hospitality" could later reverse roles. The social meaning of these words was then more demanding than modern customs would suggest. The guest-host relationship was bound by oaths and sacrifices so serious that Homer's warriors, Glaukos and Diomedes, stopped fighting and presented gifts to each other when they learned that their grandfathers had shared a guest-host relationship. This mutual obligation to provide "hospitality" functioned as a bridge be- tween social units (tribes, clans) that had ordinarily restricted these obligations to their kin or co-residents (*h,fr6s-). Guest-host relationships would have been very useful in a mobile herding economy, as a way of separating people who were moving through your territory with your assent from those who were unwelcome, unregulated, and therefore unprotected. The guest-host institution might have been among the critical identity - defining innovations that spread with the Yamnaya horizon.

In 2008 I built my first Drupal site. It's also proven to be one of the more successful sites I've done, saving the family business in times of economic downturn. My brother broke his leg in Spring, started building some prut with some web building software. Then I quit working for Hyves in May, later I registered as an independent freelancer and thanks to some random events, such as a ride towards the ferry to Denmark with Drupal expert Hans Rossel during a hitchhiking trip towards Nordkapp, I decided to work with Drupal.

Since then I learnt tons about Drupal. It's an amazing system with of course some issues that come with being amazing. In 2008 I still thought multilingual Drupal sites are cool. We added versions in German, French and English. Later I learned otherwise, especially if you care about search engine optimization. You can end up with tons of duplicate content.

So in 2010 or so we decided to split up the sites. We're still dealing with issues related to that but overall I'm happy with it. We also tried building something with Ubercart, which turned out much less nice than expected. It's a very boxed system and finally we decided to not even use its e-commerce features so we ended up with a weird site based on Ubercart without any shopping functionality.

Early 2011 Drupal 7 was released so we had to come up with a strategy to move forward. It took some time to decide upon Drupal Commerce. I'm still not 100% convinced about Commerce but meanwhile we managed to take our D6 site and upgrade it nicely to D7. There were quite a few issues that we had to solve on the way, even in the standard upgrade procedure. Our pretty standard site appeared to be not that standard after all and even a simple thing such as permissions needed some hacking to fix. And even now that we released a brand new site for teak furniture on the German market there are some loose ends that need to be fixed.

Back in 2008 we used tons of image nodes, which I managed to upgrade with some fiddling around. Unfortunately the images are not showing anymore! Drupal Commerce is nice but when we started building with it still wasn't ready to use out of the box. I decided to take a course with Commerce Guys, which learned me a lot and which also seemed a good way of giving back in the form of funding Drupal development. Unfortunately there was a set back in the form of a broken arm and I wasn't about to get as much out of it as I would have with 2 hands to type. In general I can recommend CG trainings, but only if you're fully able to type and concentrate (pain doesn't help).

Looking back almost 4 years I think Drupal has been an excellent choice. Not just for the furniture business but also for the big conversion project from ASP to Drupal I did for one of Israel's biggest and most serious NGOs and many other smaller projects. And consequently I managed to establish myself as an expert in SEO, Drupal and other free software systems without being tied to a cubicle.

Next post something about how I finally made money thanks to FB by entering the heart of capitalism.

Right after coming back from an excellent trip though the West Coast and Mexico I got an interesting message from London, through LinkedIn. Funny enough it was for a gig in Utrecht. Helping out the Dutch tax authorities with a MediaWiki project. I wasn't sure if I really wanted to do that so I came up with a silly daily price. Two days later I was in their office. In my jeans. In the first 5 minutes there was mention of Trashwiki which somehow was actually appreciated! So my finances were set for 2012. Very nice to start the year like that.

In April we planned to hitchhike to the South. I was somewhat seriously joking that we would find a ride to Morocco from Luxembourg in less than one hour. And then we actually did. Unfortunately Erga needed a visa to get into Morocco. And then even more unfortunately I broke my arm after arriving in Sevilla late at night, after a night without sleep I fell backwards and broke the fall with my arm. And then I broke my arm. Which has given me plenty of time to study 中文 and a bunch of other languages - mostly through Memrise, an amazing way to learn languages. I'm addicted. As soon as I bought another keyboard to type with both hands again I started picking up the idea to build an app. There's some progress there and together with Kenny... Hoping to show something awesome before Summer!

P.S. Meanwhile I also did some good work on a new version of teakmoebel.com, thanks to the Drupal Commerce training with Commerce Guys.