Intelligent Design : Fellowship One

The Fellowship One REST API is alive!

FTProductDev — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 21:50:00 GMT

A year has passed since we announced the thoughts behind having a new API for the community. We spent a lot of time engaging you, crafting code, building applications, and working on solidifying what turned out to be a retro-revolution... read more at our our new developer community site.

Fellowship One REST API - OAuth Security Update

FTProductDev — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 07:43:00 GMT

NOTE: THIS UPDATE ONLY CONCERNS THE FELLOWSHIP ONE RESTFUL API BETA OAUTH IMPLEMENTATION

Yesterday a minor security threat was discovered in the OAuth protocol.

The OAuth community is aggressively working on the issue and have released an advisory update on this on 4.23.2009 at 12:00 am PST. We have been in contact with them on the details of this issue. After a close look at the threat and considering the risks involved, we have determined that we will not suspend the use of OAuth in our API. Instead, we will immediately implement additional mechanisms to further protect against potential attack:

Shorten the request token life time
Require any 3rd Party application to have a registered callback
Require additional warnings and details on the token authorization pages to clearly explain the intent of the Consumer application

We take all security-related issues seriously. Although the REST API OAuth implementation is only available in a beta environment right now, we want to take mitigating actions.These changes to our OAuth Service Provider implementation will be deployed soon.

We purposely chose OAuth as our primary authentication mechanism because of the security and iron-clad structure it provides. We are even more encouraged by our choice in light of the quick response and reaction from the OAuth community. Since there are thousands of developers and applications behind this protocol, there are thousands of people behind our implementation.

We would like to thank Chris Messina, Eran Hammer-Lahav, and the rest of the OAuth community for being so transparent and quick to respond and collaborate to solve this issue.

Please do not hesitate to contact us directly with any concerns or questions that you may have: api [at] fellowshiptech.com

More information: see OAuth advisories updates

Nick Floyd
Integration Architect

Fellowship One and Microformats

FTProductDev — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 00:53:00 GMT

Quietly for the last two years we have begun integrating microformats into the portal; beginning with the first iteration of "Add Household 2.0" when we incorporated the hcard microformat into people search results and household detail view. Now you can find the hcard microformat in group view, search across groups, and in the next version of people detail. This is just the beginning.

As described on their website, "microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards." Creating a standard way of describing specific data gets everyone (consumers, developers, vendors, browsers, plug-in creators) on the same page. An example of this is Michael Kaply's excellent Operator add-on for Firefox. If you're not using Firefox to run Fellowship One, you will be now (and shame on you if you're not already). Here is an example of Operator in action on people search results.

Here we have the results of a name search for all individuals whose name contains "McFedries":

Nothing special here, three individuals with address, phone, and email. But. Hold on a second, if you have Operator installed you'll see something special *is* going on here.

Here is a screen shot of Operator:

Operator has found three microformats for both "Addresses" and "Contacts".

Let's take a look at "Addresses".

Operator has found the addresses within my search results and provided me a way to map those addresses via Google or Yahoo! maps.

Now, let's take a look at the "Contacts" menu.

Just like "Addresses" Operator has found each individual in the search results. Choosing "Export Contact" will export the contact to vcard format and import into my contact management system (Address Book, Entourage, Outlook, Windows Mail) of choice. You could also import all individuals from the search results by choosing "Export All".

Operator is a great add-on for Firefox and a great companion for Fellowship One. Even Bill Gates agrees, "We need microformats".

- matt

Often overlooked benefit of CSS

mvasquez — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 19:27:00 GMT

I'm in the process of converting our portal (Fellowship One) site template to a standards-based css layout. Concise, simple and semantic markup is my goal. Recently I had a "duh" moment while pondering the benefits of css.

A lot to love..

There is a lot to love about css:

seperation of content and style
accessibility
code reuse
flexibile
scalable
diversity amongst devices (media, print, screen)

I know...I'm very much stating the obvious.

But what I failed to mention...

And this is my "duh" moment: SIZE.
The difference in the amount of markup it takes to create a table-based layout compared to a css-based layout is staggering. Let me share with you a few stats from my portal template re-write. (The following pertains to the template only.)

	Current	CSS
Lines of markup:	287	66
File size:	60K	8K

This blew me away. I knew much would be gained from moving to css but I did not realize how much we would gain in reducing page size. In listing the pros of css, amount of markup will always be near the top of my list.