Stake Ventures

While StakeItOut is history now OAuth would have been a godsend when I was developing it’s web service bookmarking feature.

StakeItOut was a secure bookmarking service. Kind of like Magnolia but encrypted and private. I had a neat feature that would allow you to create map certain URL’s to WebServices. Thus allowing you to perform various actions on them.

I already allowed user defined url mappings via a regex pattern. The big problem was that I had to hand code the web services support for each web service.

The authentication bit was the most annoying part of this as I had to hand code it for each kind of service. OAuth would have let me to handle it with a single API.

Anyway considering that Larry Halff the founder of Magnolia is one of the authors of OAuth standard I can see cool similar things happening there soon.

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I have now updated various minor usability issues throughout the site. Thanks for your feedback.

Main change now is that the “Edit Web Services” page has been simplified in some respects and made a bit more logical.

Before it was organized with Web services by the fairly geekish “Asset Type”, which I realise was confusing.

Now it is organized by web service instead. The concept of “Asset Type” is way to geekish to take such prominent part in the gui (See my article The Snowblind Solopreneur). This will now be part of a whole new developers area.

Now when you use the bookmarklet it does not ask you for the user name or password (or web service id) to start with.

Now you enter it (and change it) via the before mentioned “Edit webservices” screen. If a web service requires authentication it will ask you for it.

On a much lower level (and more technical level) authentication data is now associated with the web service and not with the asset. This solves a concern I had about possible future security issues. I needed this solve before letting people plug there own web services into it, which will now finally make it into the next release.

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I’ve listened to the feedback I’ve received from you and have now hopefully improved the usability of StakeItOut for new users. Thanks everyone for the very constructive feedback.

It has not been obvious what to do once you’ve signed up. To improve this, I’ve added 3 step displays on various screens, to guide you through the first part.

We still need to do more and also do some screen casts showing various common usage scenarios.

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As promised I have now added a bunch of new features for web service use. The web service engine has been pretty much rewritten.

If you use a particular type of url a lot or you run your own web service, you can add Asset Types to set them up for future use with web services.

I still need to finish the gui where you can add support for your own XMLRPC style web services.

I have added support for E-Gold (An electronic currency) as well as for Pingomatic and Weblogs.com.

Next week I will document this a bit better, but feel free to play around with it.

I will be leaving shortly for Estonia, so I may not be too responsive to emails until Monday evening.

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I’m busy on the next release of StakeItOut, which will have some very cool features.

First of all look at this view of the portfolio:

This shows entries for 3 different asset types:

• This blog
• My E-Gold account
• One of my backpack pages

The buttons beneath each one are various web services I have enabled for them.

You enable your web services by clicking on the “Edit Webservices” link, which takes you to this screen:

This lists all the web services currently available for your assets asset type. You can then enable them or disable them by clicking on the red or green led. If you enable them other members in your venture can use them.

Asset types

Asset Types are basically a way of typing URL’s. It could be a product page at Amazon, a web log, a backpack page or simple a web page. You will be able to define your own on this page:

Currently you will need to have a simple understanding of Regular expressions to define these, but I will create a wizard guiding people through it later. In your regular expression you can actually extract parameters from the URL, that you can name and use later in web service calls.

I am working on a web services editor right now, where you can go in and define your own web services, that you can keep private or hopefully share with the rest of us.

As I will be traveling to Estonia next weekend I expect I will have this up in about 2 weeks time. However I will try to get the Asset Type editing functionality live this week.

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