Category Archives: Software

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opengraphlogoThe Open Graph protocol is a way of providing rich content information for pages when shared on social networks.

This is quite powerful, and there’s a lot you can do with it, but at the basic level it provides a way for content creators to control how the share stub looks when shared on networks like Facebook or Google+. Support for this has been missing from Elgg for a while, so I dusted off some old code and built a plugin to add support!

The Elgg Open Graph plugin adds Open Graph meta headers to your Elgg site (with reasonable defaults), and provides a framework for you to add specific open graph headers to object pages and specific URLS.

» Visit the project on Github…

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OpenPGP is an encryption technology that is primarily used to secure email, although sadly it is not as widely used as one might like.

Doing my bit to counter the “Summer of Surveillance”, and in a bid to make encryption more omnipresent (and because I had a need for this for a client), I quickly put together a plugin that adds OpenPGP support to Elgg.

The plugin does two main things; provide a mechanism where by a user can upload the public key for their registered email address, and secondly, provide an email handler that will attempt to encrypt any outgoing messages using that key (where possible).

Enjoy!

» Visit the project on Github…

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A long time ago, in a galaxy not too far away, I took part in a JISC funded research project. The purpose of the project was to investigate and develop solutions for some of the issues associated with securing email.

It was a fun project to be involved with (not least because I got to pretend to be a student again for a little while), and I believe the solution we built – the Secure Email Proxy – was a good one with a lot of potential.

The project finished in 2003, and the website (hosted on an old Sun Pizza box in my lab) has long since vanished, along with the code for the project. I think this is a shame, so I’ve stuck my old development code up on Github. The proxy was under active development since I left the project, but I’ve not go access to the code. If you do, then please feel free to fork and update it.

Anyway, the proxy works by sitting on your local machine between your mail client and your mail server. It manages keys on your behalf, and encrypts/signs/verifies/decrypts messages and attachments on the fly as email passes through it. This means that you don’t need to have any native plugin to work, and it’ll work with virtually any mail client.

Enjoy!

» Visit the project on Github…