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Time for some early AbiCollab.net testing
For those of us who couldn't attend GUADEC this year, let's build our own lil' party!
Martin, Better.be and I (all three of us founders AbiSource Corporation B.V.) have been hacking away at our new online collaboration service called AbiCollab.net. Tons of kudos to all the work done by Foddex as well; it was a good idea to talk him into joining Better.be :)
The AbiCollab.net service allows you to store and collaborate on your documents online using AbiWord. You can use the service free of charge.
Now this service is still very much a work in progress (especially noticable by the still rather technical user interface), so we don't want to bother the general public with it at the moment. However, if you don't mind compiling software, and don't mind the occasional service outage, we welcome you to try it out!
To use it, you'll need to do 2 things:
1. Compile AbiWord 2.6.x, together with the AbiCollab plugin (make sure you have at least the libsoup, gnutls and asio developer packages installed; Ubuntu users: see update 2 at the bottom of this post):
svn co http://svn.abisource.com/abiword/branches/ABI-2-6-0-STABLE/ abiword-2.6 svn co http://svn.abisource.com/abiword-plugins/branches/ABI-2-6-0-STABLE/ abiword-plugins-2.6 cd abiword-2.6 && ./autogen.sh --prefix=<your_prefix> && make && make install cd ../abiword-plugins-2.6 && ./autogen.sh --prefix=<your_prefix> \ --with-abiword=../abiword-2.6 --disable-all --enable-abicollab \ --with-abicollab-service-backend && \ make && make install
Don't forget to replace <your_prefix> with the prefix you want to use (or just leave out the option alltogether).
2. Register an account. You'll need an invite key (so be quick):
All keys taken. More to come soon! :)
Then start uploading some of your documents. You can open and edit them directly from the website (make sure to register *.abicollab files with AbiWord), or directly from within AbiWord using Collaborate -> Shared Documents. Note: If you use the second method, then you'll need to create an account first using Collaborate -> Accounts.
Nifty feature of the day: Upload your CV to AbiCollab.net. Then create a permalink to the latest version of your CV in PDF form. Use this link on your homepage, just as I did on http://uwog.net/resume/. Now as soon as you hit CTRL-S in AbiWord to save some changes you've made to your CV, the PDF will be automagically updated to reflect your changes.
Feedback would be very much appreciated!
Update: Feel free to drop me a line if you want to try it out but didn't get hold of a valid invite key.
Update 2: The libasio-dev package in the Ubuntu repositories misses the libboost-date-time-dev and libboost-regex-dev dependencies. Make sure to install those as well before you compile the AbiCollab plugin.