cares

cares

Cares is a microblog application written in the Go language. It supports posting to a single microblog on your site.

Readers can subscribe to your feed, while readers with supported software can subscribe to immediate notification of your posts. (Cares currently supports RSS cloud, for readers using River2.)

Cares' name is inspired by another Go microblog application, nobodycares.

Requirements

• Go 1
• PostgreSQL
• a web server

Installing

Cares is a web application that runs on your server, so it's probably a little fiddly for most people.

Install Cares to your Go environment with go get. (You might want to make a new environment manually or with gowork first.)

$ go get github.com/markpasc/cares

Set up a PostgreSQL database, and run Cares to initialize the database and make your user account:

$ createdb cares
$ createuser cares
$ psql -c 'grant all privileges on database cares to cares' cares
$ cares --database 'dbname=cares user=cares' --init

Cares will ask for a login name and password for you to use when using the site, and set up the database. Then Cares is ready to run. You can check by invoking cares manually and connecting directly on its port:

$ cares --database 'dbname=cares user=cares' --port 8080

Yay, now Cares is built and running. Open it in the browser to mess around.

Usage

Once installed and running, your site will appear on the web. To post, go to the home page and type p. A new post will appear that you can type text into. Type return to make the post. (The web site will ask for the username and password you entered when you installed Cares.) To cancel the post, press the escape key instead (or leave the page).

Customize your site by editing the HTML templates (in the html/ directory) and the static web files (in the static/ directory) as appropriate.

Really installing

• Use a tool like Supervisor to keep the server running. See extras/supervisor.example.conf for an example Supervisor configuration.
• Run the Cares app as an “app server,” behind a web server like Nginx. See extras/nginx.example.conf for an example Nginx site configuration.
• Have the web server serve over HTTPS instead of HTTP.

Future enhancements

• following and reading others' streams
• Atom & PubSubHubbub
• JSON Activity Streams
• as much of tent.io as is feasible