.            .
 .___    ____ _/_     ___  _/_     ,   .   ____
 /   \  (      |     /   `  |      |   |  (
 |   '  `--.   |    |    |  |      |   |  `--.
 /     \___.'  \__/ `.__/|  \__/ / `._/| \___.'

rstat.us is a microblogging site built on top of the ostatus protocol.

The differences between rstat.us and other microblogging networks are simplicity and openness.

Simplicity is a core 'feature' of rstat.us. We pride ourselves on saying 'no' to lots of features. Our interface is clean, and easy to understand. We give you just enough features to be interesting, but not enough to be complicated and confusing.

Openness means the programming code that makes up rstat.us is available for anyone to download, free of charge. Programmers can use that code to run their own websites just like rstat.us, and you can subscribe to your friends on any site that supports the OStatus protocol, like identi.ca. This also means that you can own your data; we'll never stop you from having full access to everything you've put into rstat.us.

How to get help

• If you think you've found a bug, please file a new issue and include:
  • What happened
  • What you expected to happen
  • Steps to reproduce what happened
• You can send questions, problems, or suggestions to the mailing list
• Chat with us on IRC in #rstatus on freenode

Helping out with rstat.us

If you'd like to contribute, we'd love to have you! Here are some details:

• The stack: ruby/rails 3.1/mongodb
• The code
• The documentation (We could use lots of improvement here!)
• The Issues list
• Tests are written using minitest and capybara
• Documentation is generated using docco (rocco)
• We follow GitHub flow, as a workflow. Basically:
  • Please fork the project
  • Create a feature branch
  • Make your change, including tests and documentation as appropriate
  • Submit a pull request from your branch
  • A member of the core team will let you know they are looking at it as soon as they are able. We will review the code and run the tests before merging.

Development Roadmap

In the first half of 2012, we plan to work on:

• Fixing user-facing bugs or cutting buggy parts of the app
• Fixing OStatus support
• Implementing a RESTful API
• Supporting and documenting running your own node

Please see the Issues, anything without an assignee is up for grabs! Don't hesitate to ask for help or clarification either on an issue itself or through one of the contact methods listed above.

Source code documentation

We have documentation that explains our source code using rocco. You can view it here.

Setting up a development environment

Getting a local version running

First off: you will need MongoDB (www.mongodb.org). They have a quickstart guide for getting it installed and running.

Then do:

$ git clone https://github.com/$MY_GITHUB_USERNAME/rstat.us.git
$ cd rstat.us

Then update your gemset:

$ gem install bundler && bundle install

And start the server:

$ rails server

Bam! Visit http://localhost:3000/ in your browser, and you'll be good.

Local Twitter configuration

Rstat.us allows you to sign in using a Twitter account or link a Twitter account to your Rstat.us account. If you'd like to enable that functionality in your dev environment, you'll need to obtain a consumer key and consumer secret from Twitter. Here are the steps to do that:

• Go to https://dev.twitter.com
• Sign in using a valid Twitter account
• Hover over your username in the top right and select "My applications"
• Select "Create a new application"
• Fill in all the required fields (you can use made up information if you'd like) and be sure to add a "Callback URL" - e.g. http://rstat.us
• Go to the settings tab and select "Read and Write" for the application's access type
• If you haven't already, create a personal config/config.yml by copying config/config.yml.sample
• Copy the consumer key and consumer secret (found on the details tab) and put them in config/config.yml in the development section
• Restart your rails server

Now you should be able to sign in to your development version with Twitter!

Running the tests

To run the tests you may want to make use of bundle exec so you don't get mixed up with different versions of gems that might or might not work with the current rstat.us branch.

Run all the tests:

$ bundle exec rake test

You can run convenient subsets of the tests during development; run bundle exec rake -T to see all the options. You can also run one test file (for example, test/models/author_test.rb) by specifying the filepath in the TEST environment variable:

$ bundle exec rake test TEST=test/models/author_test.rb

Please run all the tests before submitting a pull request!

Running your own node

We're working on making this super easy, but right now, we're not quite there.

If you do run your own node, please keep current with upstream.