We have just launched a new feature that allows you to publicly display your tarpipe activity.

The main difference from services that aggregate your feeds is that on tarpipe all the actions taken when executing a workflow will belong to the same context. This means that people watching your activity on tarpipe will always know that single actions on each service are part of a broader action giving them more meaning.

To activate this new feature, after you have signed in on tarpipe, go to your settings and fill the “Nickname” field, check the “Public activity” box, and don’t forget to save!

Now you can share your activity on http://dev.tarpipe.com/user/yournickname. As an example, check out what I’ve been doing lately: http://dev.tarpipe.com/user/vitor.

We are planning some exciting features for the public activity, and as usual we’d love to hear your suggestions!

We just released the flickr connector. From now on you can use it inside your workflows.

I’m sure you have plenty of workflow ideas, but here are two suggestions:

1. Send a picture from mail to flickr and announce it on twitter;
2. Send a picture to flickr and photobucket in one step.

To start using it, you need to give tarpipe permissions to upload pictures to your flickr account. As before, you can do that on the accounts tab.

Do you like to try things before other people? Do you feel happy when you find a bug? Do you code until you fall asleep on your keyboard? Do you know that 1337 is not really a number? Then you’re the one.

We’re still developing tarpipe but we’d like to share with you everything that’s going on behind the scenes. That’s why we decided to invite a number of developers (like you, right?) to start experimenting early on, when there’s still room for lots of changes.

So, if you’re a developer, introduce yourself and we’ll get back to you with an invite code so that you can try tarpipe from the beginning. Remember that this is an alpha version, which means that everything can stop working or behave unexpectedly. Just don’t use our API inside any production code. Yet.

Oh, by the way, the screenshot is from our workflow editor. In case you were curious.

We’re thrilled to announce that tarpipe is releasing eCouch as an Open Source project. eCouch was developed because other CouchDB Erlang applications didn’t satisfy our needs. eCouch is being released under the LGPL license, which means that you can use the code in proprietary software.

In a nutshell, eCouch is an Erlang application that provides an API to a CouchDB server. eCouch follows all the OTP design principles and can run stand-alone with its own supervision tree or be included inside an existing supervision tree. For more information, please visit the eCouch Google Code project.

Big thanks to:

• LShift, for their RFC 4627 (JSON) Erlang implementation
• Serge Aleynikov, for his fantastic article “Building a Non-blocking TCP server using OTP principle“