Known

Known is based at 421 Bryant St in South Beach, San Francisco - right around the corner from AT&T Park, home of the San Francisco Giants.Normally, it's a beautiful place to be; we're a short walk away from the waterfront, and we'll often ... [More] take some time in the afternoon to stroll over to the marina. It's well connected by both BART and MUNI, and heading elsewhere for a meeting is a piece of cake.That is, unless it's game time, when the streets are filled with enthusiastic, orange jersey wearing fans and every transport method becomes a sardine-tin-like nightmare. More than a few times, we've left the office after a hard day's work only to fall into a nightmarish commute home.No more! We now have Is It Safe to Leave South Beach?, a simple, mobile-friendly site that lets us know if it's a good time to head out for our commute. And the best part is, it took us about half an hour to write. Here's how we did it.1. Get the game timesMLB produce iCal feeds for baseball games in all the major cities. Here's the page for the Giants. We could just subscribe to this in our calendar applications, but I don't want my list of meetings to be polluted by baseball game times. I want to be able to proactively check to see if it's safe to leave the office, not be notified whenever there's a game on.Nonetheless, the "home game" calendar feed is a useful database of when those games are, so let's keep that.2. Parse the game timesThere's no point in reinventing the wheel. There are lots of calendar parsers on GitHub, but I used this one by Martin Thoma, which incorporates some modifications by John Grogg. It's very simple, which is exactly what we need: a lightweight way to turn a feed into structured data that we can filter internally.Once we've converted our calendar file to structured data, we can loop through it in order to find any games that are either starting or ending at a time close to now.While the game is set to start and end at particular times in the calendar file, I've noticed that these may have some variance in real life, and the streets are full for a while both before and afterwards. To be safe, I've set a window:If the game starts later than an hour ago, and earlier than an hour from now, then we consider the game to be starting If the game ends later than an hour ago, and earlier than an hour from now, then we consider the game to be ending With a two hour window for both the start and end times of the game, we can be pretty sure we won't be caught in a traffic storm when we leave the office.Importantly, we do this processing in a library function which sets the following variables:$safe - either the word "YES" or "NO". $subtitle - some explanatory text, for example "A game is starting". $description - either some more details about the game, or some details about the next game if one isn't happening right now. This is directly taken from the calendar file, but only the first paragraph of the description is displayed. 3. Display the game timesWe display these variables in a simple HTML page. $safe gets displayed in an h1 tag; $subtitle is in an h2; $description is in a paragraph tag underneath.Using CSS media queries, we make sure that the text is big enough to be prominent on the user's screen, but not so big that it appears off-center or that words are unnaturally wrapped.Because we created our content in a library function and saved it in a set of variables, we can create different versions for free. I created a JSON version, which means anyone in South Beach can create their own interface or application that uses this information if they want to. PHP's JSON encoding function makes this easy:create a data structure containing our variables pass a Content-type: text/json header to the browser pass the data structure through json_encode and echo the result to the browser 4. Never board a MUNI train crammed full of baseball fans againAnd that's it! The whole hack took me about 30 minutes, including registering the domain name and setting up some hosting space. It's pretty simple, but now I have an at-a-glance way to know if it's safe to go home.Photo by Manny Hernandez. [Less]

The latest version of the open source Known software has left the building.Among various fixes and improvements, the release contains support for Convoy - our new service that makes connecting to social media services a snap.There's no need ... [More] to create API applications individually: Convoy makes connecting to social media servies from your self-hosted Known site into a one-click operation. As we add new services (like Google+, Tumblr and WordPress), you'll automatically be able to post to them from your Known site.Convoy isn't just about syndication. We know that many people want to run Known from their own server, but don't want to have to deal with APIs, notification servers, websockets, search infrastructure and other complicated technical administration tasks. We've got big plans.Convoy requires Known 0.7.7 or above. You can download the Known 0.7.7 package from our open source page.If you prefer, you can get a free Known site on our fully-managed service. [Less]

The latest version of the open source Known software has left the building. Here are some of the new things in version 0.7.6:Better bookmark page title handling Improved session handling Thumbnails are higher quality Further improvement to ... [More] Open Graph tag handling Improvement to PubSubHubbub HTTP headers A number of fixes across plugins Experimental release of WordPress importer You can download the Known 0.7.6 package from our open source page.If you prefer, you can get a free Known site on our fully-managed service.#releases #opensource [Less]

The business model of the internet as it functions today isn’t compatible with privacy.That’s the message Andy Yen conveys in his TEDGlobal talk. Filmed this past October, Andy, a CERN scientist, shares the motivation behind starting ... [More] ProtonMail. “Today, the average person has an astounding amount of personal information online, and we add to this online information every single time we post on Facebook, each time we search on Google, and each time we send an email. Now, many of use probably think, well, one email, there’s nothing in there, right? But if you consider a year’s worth of emails, or maybe even a lifetime of email, collectively, this tells a lot. It tell where we have been, who we have met, and in many ways, even what we’re thinking about. And the more scary part about this is our data now lasts forever, so your data can and will outlive you.” We've lost control of our dataAndy says that we’ve largely lost control over our own data, and there’s a new, younger generation being raised to share everything online. They may grow up with a completely different concept of privacy.Encryption could help make email a more private means of communication, but PGP as an encryption method is too complicated and inaccessible for the average person to understand and use. ProtonMail is trying to solve this problem for consumer email.They also want to change the norm from an internet focused on maximizing ad revenue to an internet with data protection and privacy at its core.Andy says, “…we need to support a different business model for the Internet, one that does not rely entirely on advertisements for revenue and for growth. We actually need to build a new Internet where our privacy and our ability to control our data is first and foremost.”You can watch the full TED talk here. [Less]

Upgrade your site. Own your domain. Known Pro is here. https://withknown.com/pro/

The best way to reach your audience from a single platform: Introducing Known Pro! https://withknown.com/pro/

Today, we're excited to introduce the world to Known Pro. With unlimited social media connections, including Facebook Pages and LinkedIn Companies, no other platform makes it as easy to publish on your own site and share with your audiences ... [More] across the web.More and more people are learning to be media companies to promote their businesses or build a reputation online. We're all creating profiles on sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Not only is it painful to visit every site to post content multiple times a day, but keeping track of all your replies and interactions takes even more time. We created Known Pro to give you a single website for all your content, and an easy way to share it across the web.Last fall, we sold access to Known Pro through a special pre-sale that allowed us to gather feedback and validate our idea. Thanks to those customers, we're now able to make it available to everyone, starting right now.Get started with Known ProKnown Pro lets you connect to an infinite number of social media profiles. Connect all the Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn pages and profiles you need - as well as Flickr, Foursquare and SoundCloud. Google+ Pages, Tumblr and WordPress are coming soon.Our responsive, mobile-first interface means you can post on the go wherever you are. We post updates about Known from the road, on our commute, while out in the city - all to multiple social media profiles, with the touch of a button. You can too.Use your own CSS and JavaScript. Want to include Google Analytics on your content, or add your own advertising? You can do that - and all from a domain name of your choice.Connect Slack and other software to your site using webhooks, so you can let your team know when you've published something new, or build new workflows for your content.Easily gather your interactions in one place using brid.gy. Today, you can include all the Twitter and Facebook replies to your content on your own site, giving you an at-a-glance look at all your community interactions.All this, and we're the only web service that will give you a full database export of all your content, including interactions, and let you move it to your own server.We're very proud of Known Pro, and we're looking forward to introducing you to many new features over the next few months. Get started publishing on your own site and syndicating everywhere.Our sincere thanks to everyone who participated in the Known Pro pre-sale. We couldn't have made this product without your feedback, responses and enthusiasm. We're excited about this new chapter - and we can't wait to show you where we're going next. [Less]

We just released Known 0.7.5 for self-hosted users.This release contains lots of fixes and improvements including:Easy links to import your comments, likes and reshares from sites like Twitter and Facebook Full SQL export of your Known site ... [More] data Better support for secure email Improved open graph tag handling Import from Blogger More efficient user session handling Source code highlighting in blog posts You can download Known 0.7.5 in two different archive formats: .zip .tgzIf you prefer, you can get a free Known site on our fully-managed service.#releases #opensource [Less]

A very happy birthday to chief Knownist and robot leader @benwerd!

1 min read Ben's in Europe editionWe did it again! Thanks to those who joined us live for December’s office hours. For some reason, Ben is the only one who shows up in the video. So I (Erin) am just a mysterious ... [More] voice. Sorry about that. Next time Ben and I will be in the same time zone and the same video screen.Today we talked about Pro features, hashtags, and upcoming features. We also have a new developers mailing list. You can join the discussion here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/known-devStay tuned for a community site and an IRC channel.If you have a question or would like to get in touch, send us an email at [email protected]. [Less]