As many of you might have noticed I have not done much with StakeItOut for the past half year.

I have decided that it broke way to many rules of good product design, chiefly the “explain your service in one sentence” rule was bust.

My original plan for it was to be a unifying service between my WideWord, WideBlog etc. family of collaborative productivity apps, but it then ended up heading in the direction of a “poor mans SOA” service and essentially lost it’s thread.

I will be returning with a very similar service that will be a unifying service between independent web apps including my own. This will probably look a bit like StakeItOut, but be much more focused.

Anyway the certificate expires on the 20th of May, 2006. I would like to let it expire and dismantle the server it sits on. If however you are actively using it and would like to keep using it please comment below or send me an email at [email protected].

So please let me know as soon as possible if you are using it.

One of the applications I had in mind for TimeCert was 3rd party timestamping of blog posts.

I have updated the TimeCert code to make it easier to do so.

For example see the time stamp below this post. This is an embedded timestamp that should currently be relatively easy to integrate by programmers in their blogs.

I am working on some tools to make it easy to integrate for non programmers as well.

In the mean time what you need to do is simply create a SHA1 digest of your blog post. There after insert that into the snippet found at the TimeCert home page.

I am now officially launching TimeCert which is a trusted third party service for proving the existence of a file, object or document at a certain time.

Applications

Lets say your application managed confidential documents or emails. You could use TimeCert for maintaining a proof that a document or email existed at a certain time. As this timestamp is generated outside your own server, it is evidence that you did not manipulate say a contract after the timestamp.

You could also use it to timestamp a sourcefile to help out with Intellectual Property issues.

Technical details

It was written in about an hour the other morning using the new Camping micro web framework and the Mongrel.

There are full open API’s. You can read all the nitty gritty about how it works over on
Neubia my tech blog

Talk.org is all about free speech. But after a few bouts of spam attacks and a bit of adolescent sausage fumbling I need to figure out where to draw the line between censorship and spam blocking.

Believe me it is a very thin line. Do I search for bad words? If someone wants to talk anonymously about the benefits of cXalis vs vXagra. Shouldn’t they have a forum?

I already have a simple technical approach that I am testing bit, by bit. But I need more.

The first thing I will have to revise is the front page. Right now it is just the latest active conversations. This should probably be filtered somehow, similar to Digg differentiation between front page news and their diggall view. What algorithms I will use I am not sure of yet, but we will see.

I am also thinking of implementing an adult flag. Where messages specifically set with an adult flag enjoy fully uncensored posting.

Whatever I do I will keep you posted here and on Talk.org.

Congratulations to David and all on the excellent Rails 1.1 release. I have already been using it for a while and love it.

Come discuss your favorite new features at the Rails 1.1 release conversation on Talk.org which is running Rails 1.1.