We’d always planned to put the JIM (Javascript Injectable Margin) in our blog, but had been busy making the rest of our product great, until now. As it would turn out, Wordpress makes writing plugins extremely easy. They have action-hooks, so you can just tell Wordpress to call a function when it performs a certain action. That’s exactly what we did.

You can see from the Integrate Page that the JIM only depends on just a few lines. From the Wordpress Plugin Documentation we used the actions ‘wp_head’ and ‘loop_end’ to output the necessary lines at the necessary time.

With this and a bit of PHP, we whipped up a bare-bones plugin in a matter of minutes. You can download our plugin here: Reframe It WP Plugin. Download it, unzip it, and put it in your Plugins folder.

As you can probably expect, we’ve gone and closed up the Wordpress comments, so enjoy using the Margin!

Last weekend, 3 Reframe It Engineers (David Kovsky, Ben Taitelbaum, and Chris Runyan) participated in Citability.org’s Citability Codeathon in Washington, DC. We had lots of great conversations with lots of very dedicated people whose goals for the web align very nicely with Reframe It’s. The opportunity to spread the word about Reframe It and learn more about what other passionate people are doing in similar areas made the trip well worth it. We also created some open-source software to make it easier to cite specific data published on government websites.

The Goal
The primary goal of the codeathon was to create open source software and standards so that governments can make their websites easier to cite. In simple terms, here’s an example of the problem we aimed to solve:

A nonprofit publishes a report. The report includes information about government spending published on Recovery.gov, so it includes a link to the page containing the cited information. Then somebody at Recovery.gov realizes the information is incorrect and fixes it. Now the nonprofit looks like a liar. Mayhem ensues. Fingers point all over the place.

If there were an easy way for the nonprofit to link to the version of Recovery.gov as it existed when they wrote their report, making it clear that their report is based on that version of the data, without Recovery.gov having to do a lot of extra work to make this possible, then there’d be a lot more trust to go around for Recovery.gov and the nonprofits that cite it.

This is exactly what the codeathon was meant to create. And obviously it should work just as easily for any website at any level of government.

The Codeathon
The pace of the codeathon was very fast. The entire group met for dinner Friday night for a chance to get to know each other better. Silona Bonewald, the codeathon’s excellent organizer, then led a presentation and brainstorming session to kick off the effort. We went back to our hotel late that night and let the ideas sink in. We all returned early the next morning and after a little bit more group discussion, we broke out into teams and worked feverishly until late that night. And of course we started again early Sunday morning. Finally, at 4pm Sunday each team presented its accomplishments.

The 3 of us worked on the HTML parser team along with Firoze Lafeer and Robert King. We created a simple microformat that publishers can use to specify what part of a web page is or is not citable. Why should any part of a government website not be citable? Because it might be a widget that contains a feed from, say, Reframe It, Twitter, or some other external data. The microformat also allows the publisher to specify the server that is used to store the archived data.

Chris Runyan put this presentation together for our demo.

We were able to demo an IE extension and embeddable JavaScript code that works alongside the IE extension and in all major browsers. Each showed what parts of a page are citable with a small button. Pushing this button sent a request to the archive server, which checked its Bazaar repository to see if the information was already archived or if it had changed since its last archive. Ultimately, the user received a link that uniquely identified the information at that point in time on the archive server. We also wrote the server code, which talked to Bazaar, and a Sinatra facade to let us replace Bazaar with Git or some other tool as soon as the requirement to use Bazaar is dropped.

I should mention here that Ben Taitelbaum wanted me to give a shout out to Test-Driven Development with QUnit. Even in the fast-paced, sleep-deprived codeathon, he had the discipline to use TDD and was rewarded for it with high JavaScript productivity and confidence.

What’s Next?
I would encourage anyone who is interested in this project to check out Citability.org and get involved. I only mentioned the project we were involved in at the codeathon but there were several others. They were all very cool and helpful. I can’t wait to see them in action. We worked hard over the weekend but we knew it wouldn’t end there. As I mentioned before, everything created at the codeathon is open-source. We expect to continue to work on it….

On behalf of our entire team at Reframe It, I want to thank you for being a part of the Reframe It community and tell you about your chance to win one of several great prizes. We sincerely appreciate your using Reframe It’s commenting tool and hope that you have found it useful for communicating and sharing information with your family, friends, and colleagues.

We just launched our latest version and hope that you have had the chance to download it; if not, you can get it here: http://reframeit.com/download/. New features such as in-margin access to your feeds and bookmarks, and a simpler, cleaner user interface are just some of what you can expect to see in Version 2.0.

We want you to know that we are making changes that we hope will be beneficial to you, and we have updated our Terms of Service after listening to your feedback http://reframeit.com/terms/. We would also love to hear more from you about your likes, dislikes, and views on how we can improve Reframe It’s tool and our company to better suit your needs. On that note:

Below is a SURVEY that we’d like your feedback on!

We will have a weekly drawing for several 500 GB Seagate Personal Hard Drives that you will automatically be entered into – just by filling out the survey! As always, any information that you provide will be kept strictly confidential. So speak up and tell us what you think! http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/ReframeIt_Questionnaire

Please know that our team and I are always available to discuss any thoughts, comments, and ideas that you have which can help us to better serve you –our users– so that you have a better experience using Reframe It.

Our Sincerest Thanks for your time and for using Reframe It.

Bobby Fishkin

CEO, Reframe It

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

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

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:

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.