We just updated the sign-in panel in the margin to make it easier to sign-in via Facebook, OpenID (including Yahoo, Google, and AOL) and we added support to sign-in via our favorite upstairs neighbors in San Francisco, Twitter!

We are excited to announce the official full release of V2 from Reframe It. Reframe It has been completely redesigned from one end to the other in order to provide you with the most intuitive and powerful commenting platform on the market. V2 is compatible with Firefox, Internet Explorer 7 & 8, Safari, and Chrome (see the Bookmarklet for Safari & Chrome) at reframeit.com/download.

We have some cool new features that will make commenting on web pages and sharing your thoughts easy, fun and useful. Wherever you go on the web, you can highlight a sentence or drag a picture into the margin, and share your thoughts with any of your contacts on Facebook, Twitter or anyone with an e-mail address. You can create a group to share your comments in a central place for your colleagues, friends or family. You can communicate ideas about the web page you are on. You can use filters to see comments on a web page made only by the people that you trust or care about. Reframe Its V2 lets you see all of those comments made by your friends or fellow group members in real-time in the margin, anywhere you are. You can also show an RSS feed of your comments to your website or blog.

V2 also means that publishers can now integrate Reframe It directly on their web pages (please see reframeit.com/integrate). This will allow a site owner’s users to comment line by line on articles on their site’s web pages. Visitors to a site can be automatically associated with a publisher’s community, and can continue the conversation on external sites. Publishers can moderate groups, and create an editorial lens for comments on their published content. Publishers can also take custom feeds of user comments and place these on sub-sections of their sites. If you would be interested in collaborating with Reframe It as a publisher, please write to publisher@reframeit.com.

Reframe It is a technology that lets you talk about anything you want to talk about, anywhere you want to talk about it. There is a wide web out there littered with gems and nuggets of information that the people you know would love to learn about. Good luck treasure hunting. I look forward to reading your comments and receiving your thoughts about what Reframe It makes possible. I wish you the very best that 2010 has to offer.
Sincerely,
Bobby
CEO of Reframe It
ceo@reframeit.com

That’s right.  No internet.  You may have noticed a few issues with Reframe It the past few days, and we aren’t surprised.  Our internet provider - our ISP - made a few decisions without telling us first.   To summarize: they failed to pay their upstream provider, moved offices - to a whole new city, even, sold all their furniture, and then - as collateral damage - happened to turn the internet off for our entire engineering office. Not only was this not very nice for us, but we’re betting you probably haven’t enjoyed the experience either.

For our users, this meant no Reframe It blog to keep you entertained day and night, and you probably ran into a slow-loading margin a few times, too.

Needless to say, the irony of an internet company without internet was not lost on us, and we spent about 2 seconds laughing about our fly-by-night ISP.  Fortunately, we’re pretty quick on our feet:  Things are back in action now as we have found a more reputable solution for our bandwidth needs.

Sorry if you ran into any major issues because of this during the past few days.  We’ll try to keep our new internet provider on a tighter leash.

Let your friends and family know what you want this holiday season! Click over to one of your favorite online shopping sites, drag and drop the image of your “want” into the Reframe It extension, and leave a comment! Then share your comment with your friends and family, and discuss the hot holiday trends with Reframe It groups!

Some of our favorite shopping sites include:

Better World Books, Etsy, PetSmart, and Tiger Direct

We are excited to announce that Reframe It will soon be an add-on for Google Chrome. That’s right, you can add some extra shine to your Chrome browser with the Reframe It margin.  It works and feels just like our other platforms (IE, Firefox, Bookmarket, Publisher Integration) and looks great inside the Google interface.

Check back soon for the release date and link.

Something new and exciting is looming on the horizon here at Reframe It:  We call it Version 2.0.

That’s right - we have been working hard to develop a new margin based on your feedback, and it’s almost ready.  By providing us with such an incredible amount of insight, we have been able to design a simple and elegant commenting tool tailored to you, our users.  The new margin will make commenting as effortless as highlighting and writing on a real page; reading and writing annotations should always be an intuitive experience.

This means no extra clicking, no superfluous information, and no confusion.  We want to make Version 2.0 as easy as possible for you to use.

We can’t wait for you - our users - to get your hands on this new margin, and you won’t have to wait much longer.  We’re releasing Version 2.0 this month.  Get ready to read, write and organize comments better than you ever have before.

Take a look:

Hey All.

In conjunction with the release of the new 1.5 version of the Reframe It margin we have also decided to release an iGoogle gadget. If you already use iGoogle as your homepage then you will find it super easy to add the Reframe It widget and keep up to date with comments from the Reframe It community and your Reframe It friends.

To install the iGoogle gadget simply visit http://www.reframeit.com and log in. From there select the Sharing tab located between People and Bookmarks tabs. The Sharing tab includes a tutorial on how to load the Reframe It widget into your iGoogle homepage as well as tutorials on sharing by email, Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, Friendfeed, WordPress, MovableType, Widgets, and RSS feed.

This is a quick tutorial and picture explanation of the iGoogle widget and how you could add the widget to your iGoogle homepage.

Once in the Sharing Tab and under the subsection iGoogle the user will see a image containing a link as posted below. Click on this image.

Clicking on this image will bring you to the widget download page. Your now one step away from being instantly connected to Reframe It and the Reframe It community through iGoogle.

Now click the Add To iGoogle button and the Reframe It widget (posted below so you can see what it looks like) will show up on your iGoogle homepage instantly alerting you to new comments made within the Reframe It community, groups that you are a part of, and your Reframe It friends.

We hope you love the iGoogle gadget almost as much as we do, since it’s a lot. Give us some feedback through commenting, get satisfaction, or even our blog on how much you like the iGoogle and the next gadget you would like to see implemented into the Reframe It margin.

Best,

The Reframe It Team.

Hey Reframe It Users,

We’ve got interesting things brewing here in our labs. After months of collecting the necessary crystals and potions from the furthest corners of the earth we’ve finally reached a high enough wizard level to release version 1.5 of the Reframe It margin! This new version is packed with plenty of appetite whetting features and some new visuals I am sure you are going to dig.

For starters the color scheme has been completely changed. We feel like blue is out and white is in. Hopefully this will make things seem less cluttered to you, the user, and enhance your margin experience to make you feel like you’re surfing the Internet of the future. When highlighting text and when scrolling to referenced text in the margin you will notice increased speed and less lag. This means increase load time for your comments, a smoother interface, and stronger comments overall (yeah we’ve had ‘em in the weight room, and no, we don’t use steroids, sorry).

We have also included an Auto complete feature at the bottom of the margin. You will notice the text box with the Share Comment option tab set to open. This tab lets you know how many groups you’re sharing with, how many friends, how many e-mails (contacts), etc. By clicking the blue button underneath the text box you can view the old fashioned list option that shows every possible avenue available for you to share your comments. Enough with the nitty gritty stuff already; let’s get to Auto complete. By typing just a couple letters in the text box, lets say F-a-c for instance, Auto complete will automatically read your mind through ESP and complete the rest of the sharing avenue for you, in this case: Facebook.

Besides those amazing features we even threw in a couple more goodies for you. The new Reframe It margin now has spell check (I knew you wanted it, well at least I need it), cut/paste, and comments shared to social networks (Facebook & Twitter) will share directly to your wall or tweet stream - never giving you nasty pop up windows asking you those annoying “are you sure you want to share” questions!

Not only did we give you all of those great in-front-of-the-screen features we also took care of some behind the scenes stuff too so that Reframe It is faster for you, the ever important commentator. Reframe It can share to MetaWeblog (Wordpress & Moveable Type) so that all of you bloggers can integrate easily with Reframe It. Also any of the error and notification messages you’ve seen in the past will now be popping up from the bottom of the margin in tiny collapsible windows within the margin, all to enhance your browsing experience.

Take the margin for a test spin, see how it works, but more importantly mark the internet up with your voice! After all, that’s what this is all about, isn’t it?

Best,

The Reframe It Team

I thought I’d jot down my notes from getting the experimental rabbitmq erlang amqp client to work, since http://hopper.squarespace.com/blog/2008/1/12/introducing-the-erlang-amqp-client.html is a little out of date.

This assumes you already have erlang (I’m using R13B01), OTP, eunit, and mercurial installed.

In a common base directory (~/rabbitmq), clone all the necessary tools:

~/rabbitmq> hg clone http://hg.rabbitmq.com/rabbitmq-erlang-client
~/rabbitmq> hg clone http://hg.rabbitmq.com/rabbitmq-server
~/rabbitmq> hg clone http://hg.rabbitmq.com/rabbitmq-codegen


Then build the rabbitmq-erlang-client:

~/rabbitmq> cd rabbitmq-erlang-client
~/rabbitmq/rabbitmq-erlang-client> make

(Note: if you don’t see the file ebin/amqp_client.app, run: make ebin/amqp_client.app)

Now test the client out. This assumes you’ve already started rabbitmq with the default guest user:

~/rabbitmq/rabbitmq-erlang-client> erl -pa ebin -pa ../rabbitmq-server/ebin
1> amqp_connection:start_network().
<0.35.0>


Next, I want to be able to use the client from other projects, so I can either copy over the ebin and include files (look in rabbitmq-erlang-client/dist), or create symlinks into system erlang directories.

Now, assuming we have all our paths setup correctly so that we can compile against the amqp_client and rabbit_common apps, how do we start writing and reading messages? Coming from the ruby world, and being used to STOMP messaging, I was surprised by how many steps are involved in just doing basic gets and publishes (the ruby amqp gem is simple to use, btw).

After spending a bit of time studying rabbitmq-erlang-client/test/test_util.erl (A great resource!), I’ve distilled some simplified code to see the basics of this client library, and start writing and reading messages quickly. Most of this code was copied right out of the test_util.erl file, and many details are skipped (take a look at that file for more detailed code!):

-module(amqp_test).
-compile(export_all).

-include(“amqp_client.hrl”).

t() ->
    Connection = amqp_connection:start_network(),
    Channel = amqp_connection:open_channel(Connection),
    Q = <<“a.b.c”>>,
    X = <<“x”>>,

    setup_exchange(Channel, Q, X),

    Payload = <<“hello, world!”>>,
    ok = basic_publish(Channel, X, Payload),
    {ok, Payload} = basic_get(Channel, Q),
    {ok, []} = basic_get(Channel, Q),

    amqp_channel:close(Channel),
    amqp_connection:close(Connection)

% sets up the queue and topic exchange, and ties the exchange to the queue
setup_exchange(Channel, Q, X) ->
    amqp_channel:call(Channel, #‘exchange.declare’{exchange = X,
                                                   type = <<“topic”>>}),
    amqp_channel:call(Channel, #‘queue.declare’{queue = Q}),
    Route = #‘queue.bind’{queue = Q,
                          exchange = X},
    amqp_channel:call(Channel, Route),
    ok.

basic_publish(Channel, X, Payload) -> 
    Publish = #‘basic.publish’{exchange = X},
    ok = amqp_channel:call(Channel, Publish, #amqp_msg{payload = Payload}),
    ok.
basic_get(Channel, Q) ->
    case amqp_channel:call(Channel, #‘basic.get’{queue = Q, no_ack = true}) of
        {#‘basic.get_ok’{}, #amqp_msg{payload = Payload}} -> {ok, Payload};
        #‘basic.get_empty’{} -> {ok, []};
        Other -> {error, Other}
    end.

Fear no more.  Our interns cannot and will not hack into your Twitter accounts and start tweeting about how cool Reframe It is and how everyone should start using it (of course, that’s what you - our wonderful users - are supposed to be doing).  Why you ask?  Because we’ve updated our system so that we no longer need to store your Twitter passwords for you to tweet your comments.  Now, that really is cool, isn’t it?

As long as you’ve updated your Twitter settings via http://reframeit.com/sharing/twitter, then we don’t need your password to connect you to your Twitter account.  In fact, it’s already been deleted.  If you’re not sure whether we still have your password stored in our system, just go to http://reframeit.com/sharing/twitter and click “Update Twitter Settings” and we will delete your password on the spot.  And for those of you who don’t feel like updating your settings just yet, don’t worry - we’ll hold onto your password for a little while longer so you can keep posting your comments as tweets.  But remember:  Once we delete our treasure trove of Twitter passwords, you’ll have to update your settings then if you want to keep tweeting from Reframe It.

Now, you might be asking yourself, “Why was Reframe It storing my Twitter password in the first place??  That’s private!!!”  Indeed, it is.  Unfortunately, Twitter didn’t support Open Authorization (OAuth) until recently.  So, if you wanted to post your comments to Twitter, we needed your password to give you access.  (But don’t worry, nobody actually read it.)  Now that Twitter supports OAuth, we don’t need passwords and can just use an OAuth key to connect you with your Twitter account.  Much easier - and your password stays just the way you want it: a secret.

So, I guess we won’t be selling all your passwords to the CIA, after all.  We hope this makes you feel better.  They sure will be disappointed, though….