Testing laconi.ca

I've set up a test installation of laconi.ca. Feel free to log in and give it a go. I'd love to have a few people testing it.

Why laconi.ca?

About 10 days ago twitter went down, so I decided to give identi.ca another try. I was suitably impressed. It's come a long way since I first tried it.

As you may know, identi.ca is built on the open source microblogging platform laconi.ca. In turn, laconi.ca implements the emerging OpenMicroBlogging specification.

More recently, Stephen Morgan wondered aloud whether there were any good private twitters, and posted a link to an article that mentioned Yammer and laconi.ca. I replied that I thought laconi.ca would be an obvious choice for Squiz.

Apart from using identi.ca, I haven't really gotten to grips with laconi.ca. I decided that if I was going to go around recommending this software to people, it was about time I actually used it. I also think the idea of an open source microblogging platform is pretty exciting.

How I did it

What follows is slightly geeky. You have been warned. At this point, it's mostly quick notes and pointers to the documents I used to set up laconi.ca.

Installing laconi.ca isn't as easy as installing WordPress, but it's not rocket science either. Between the official installation instructions and Ciarang's Debian Etch instructions, I had all the information I needed. There were a few gotchas, such as setting up the DB_DataObject ini file and some permissions changes, but I managed.

The hardest part was probably compiling the PHP5 GMP Module for Degian ETCH, but thanks to these php5-gmp package build instructions, that wasn't much of an issue. (If you want a precompiled version, you can always download mine).

Between compiling the debian package, some debugging and writing this blog post, the installation took about two and a half hours. If you have any questions, just ask in the comments (or on laconi.ca).