brilaps, llc http://brilaps.com

Insignificant step for humanity, but a giant step for the MiaCMS project. MiaCMS has been selected as a finalist in the PacktPub 2008 Open Source CMS competition. Our precious project will compete in the the "Most Promising Open Source CMS" category. MiaCMS project is only about 5 months old, but we have worked hard and are quite proud of the results and the interest in the project. The official list can be see here: http://www.packtpub.com/2008-open-source-cms-award-finalists The official voting (the real thing) starts Monday September 1. Your nominations helped get us to this point, and we are thankful for that. However, we need to ask you one more time to show your support for MiaCMS project.

Another cool gadget from Brilaps just hit the wires.

iMia is a web application focused on bringing a standard iPhone web interface to the MiaCMS, Mambo, and Joomla! content management systems. Yes, the iPhone does have a full web browser that is capable of displaying any site, so it is possible to use these content management systems without iMia. However, the experience is often less than appealing since users must constantly zoom in, zoom out, pinch to expand and contract, etc. As with most web sites and/or applications, these content management systems were coded with the desktop browser in mind. This is were iMia comes in...

iMia brings a simple web interface to the MiaCMS, Mambo, and Joomla! content management systems for iPhone users. The application is designed in accordance with the recommended iPhone interface design guidelines laid out by Apple. iMia makes use of the iui project's fabulous efforts in this area.

Learn more on the product page here - http://wiki.brilaps.com/wikka.php?wakka=iMia.

I started playing with Google AppEngine a few months ago. First, tried to port over my work in SillyDomainNames.com into AppEngine, but gave up on it after a short while. Always being on the lookout for new and interesting ideas, I somehow came up with this experimental-mash-up-site concept; NewsXperiment. Not your everyday mashup site, something different and unique. I spent some time experimenting with the code locally and after I brought the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) into the mix, it immediately gained some traction. Brilaps was looking for a project to test out the new Google AppEngine and it made sense to let newsXperiment.com be the guinea pig. Google AppEngine turned out to be a great idea and it didn’t take long for me to bring this project from an idea to the first beta release. I haven’t come across anything similar yet, so if anything exists, please let me/them know.

So what is NewsXperiment? What can I do there? What is the roadmap and what were the challenges during development? I’ll try to answer those questions in this blog post.

What is NewsXperiment?

NewsXperiment is a news scrambler/generator site. In the possible simplest terms, NewsXperiment reads a bunch of RSS feeds, approximately 200, from a number of highly respected sources and scrambles their news’ titles and summaries using Natural Language Processing techniques. The idea is to create interesting, funny, and/or timely new stories based on actual real-time events as reported by news sources of all kind across the Internet.  The mash often produces comical stories such as “Princess Di Dancing with the Polar Bears at Golden Gate Bridge”. How would it come up with such a story?  Well at that time of our scrambling there was probably some unrelated news about Princess Di, Dancing with the Stars, Polar Bears, and Golden Gate Bridge.  We randomly select and break apart each story, scramble them up, and rebuild them to construct amusing and well structured stories.  The magic is in the reconstruction.  The engine is still in beta and thus the scrambled Title/Summary text still needs some refinement, but it is worth a bookmark and glance every day or so, as it already generates some pretty interesting mashups several times a day.

We have released moseasymedia 2.0 a few months ago, but didn't notice much traffic being routed to the new demo sites from here.

So here are they;

http://mambo.mambojoomla.com

http://joomla15.mambojoomla.com 

See and enjoy the beauty of moseasymedia 2.0 for yourself ;)
  

The MiaCMS Story

MiaCMS is a fork of the Mambo CMS. Why a fork? We felt that the policies, processes, and priorities of the official Mambo Foundation were having a negative impact on the code and the community. Innovation, creativity, and team spirit have all but been eliminated. Thus the fork. Much of the same crew that built you Mambo 4.5.3+ through 4.6.3 are here now continuing development on the same award winning software base that everyone has come to know and love. Let us make clear we never gave up on the product or the community, but rather just the Foundation which controlled it.

The MiaCMS project was initiated by four individuals with profound knowledge of the Mambo CMS system. The founding team includes Al Warren (alwarren), Chad Auld (cauld), Ozgur Cem Sen (ocs), and Richard Ong (arpee). Together we have held the following roles within Mambo over the years; project leader, board member, steering committee member, core team leader, quality team leader, documentation team leader, and server administration. Those who know the project well will recognize those listed as what was the majority of the current core Mambo development team. Who is left to carry on Mambo development? The answer is not many. We plan to continue down the revolutionary path we laid out for Mambo before ultimately cut our ties to the Mambo Foundation. Just that we will be doing it as MiaCMS from this point forward. So again... this is a fork, we do give credit to Mambo for past work done, and we do aim to make MiaCMS even better (in fact we think it already is) !

You can find more about MiaCMS on http://miacms.org .