Stupid Currency Tricks: Group Currencies and Heroku
Like the last screencast, this one is a result of a feature request. About 9 months ago to the day, I met Johnny & Eva Barnett at Spiderhouse Coffee through Karen Gifford, a board member of ATEN. Johnny suggested a groups feature be added to oscurrency. This happened one week after Rich and I presented the idea of using insoshi for a currency server at One Web Day Austin and first started checking in code. Multiple improvements made to oscurrency have been a direct result of Johnny Barnett’s help.
In February of this year, Benjamin Bradley suggested some interesting use cases for this feature. The barn raising idea was interesting enough that Guillaume Lebleu blogged about it. If we’re going to have groups, we’ll need group currencies, too! This idea of easily created currencies is one of the components of the open money initiative supported by Michael Linton, the creator of LETS (unmoney convergence video).
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUeTYJNvGoM&hl=en&fs=1]
As luck would have it, there was already yuki’s group_option branch for insoshi that was relatively easily merged into oscurrency.
However, if one of the goals is to make currencies easy to create, we need software that is easy to install that does the job. Unfortunately, the search support that is included in insoshi (and therefore in oscurrency) is a bit too much for heroku.
Therefore, I found a brand new, lightweight blogging software that accepts OpenID called roll_my_blog and forked a copy which would talk to the OsCurrency API. This blogging software is easily deployed to heroku and that is how we can easily install software to create new currencies, etc.