Kakuteru, Semantic lifestreaming on Rails. Bye Mephisto!

For my blog, I have been using Mephisto for several years now. It’s a fine piece of Ruby, but I found it extremely difficult to customize (has everything to do with their Liquid templating engine). For a while now I’ve been meaning to write my own hackable blogging software. However, Kakuteru has become much more than just blogging software.

Luckily I started mashing this together after witnessing an awesome presentation by Yongfook. He developed Sweetcron, an open source Lifestreamer written in PHP. Sweetcron beautifully combines online micro activity with editorial blogging content. As you will notice, I ripped off Yongfook’s design almost completely (hence the attribution in the footer). Although greatly inspired by, Kakuteru is not just the RubyOnRails version of Sweetcron. Kakuteru is focussed on:

• integrating Semantic and intelligent services
• improving Machine interoperability
• keeping in mind SEO by conforming to web standards, pinging blog aggregators and inviting social bookmarking

Basic Features

• Uses Friendfeed.com as a core lifestream backend (tweets, video, photo and bookmarks currently supported)
• Uses Disqus.com to support comments on articles & stream updates
• Articles can be written using Textile, Markdown or HTML
• Published articles will display Tweet-this, Digg and Addthis.com if voting is enabled
• “Me on other sites” are automatically gathered from Friendfeed

Semantic features

• Autotagging of tweets and articles using Zemanta.com
• Built-in content recommendation engine (simple right now)
• Conforming to many Web Standards, Microformats and Nanoformats
• Pinging the Blogosphere through Technorati and many others

Open Source

Kakuteru is open source. There are still many things that need to be done, so please contact me if you’re interested in collaborating. However, the first version is stable and has basic lifestreaming and semantic capabilities. Also, the blogging works since this is the first entry I’m writing on it :]

Kakuteru Github source resitory

Kakuteru.com

There are many lifestreamers out there, but most of them don’t provide customization at a tech-savvy level. Also, most of them don’t reap the benefits of the upcoming semantic web. Kakuteru doesn’t do that either, but it tries to touch upon the folksemantic borders of the future web. Also, SEO and self-marketing are important aspects that are focussed on (which is the core value behind Sweetcron).

So yes, I’ve purchased kakuteru.com and pulled a branch where I can make adjustments to open up this service to anyone. This means that soon more early adopters can start reaping the benefits of Kakuteru!