Monthly Archives: May 2009

SourceForge Projects Moving to WordPress

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Open source project hosting has long been a topic that interests me. I stopped recommending venerable SourceForge.net some years ago, as it’s proprietary stack (open source prior to 2001) became crufty and fell behind some of the newer and more agile offerings.

Well, I think it’s time to revisit.

I received an email on Tuesday from the “SourceForge.net Team” with the geeky and lame title of “SourceForge.net feature deprecation upcoming: forums, DocManager, TaskManager, Diary/Notes”. Deprecated should be deprecated from email subject lines, as should negative sounding email subjects.

The meat of the email is the second half (emphasis mine):

…

We will provide an easy-to-use migration path to move the data to the provided replacements.  We will also provide dumps of this data in case
projects want to do something different with their data.  Additional information on how to obtain or migrate your data will be provided when the
timeline is announced, in a future mailing.

The following applications are due to be deprecated, replaced by high-quality Open Source applications we have in our Hosted Apps offering:

* TaskManager will be replaced by TaskFreak!, dotProject and Trac
(tickets).
* DocManager will be replaced by MediaWiki and Trac (wiki).
* Discussion Forums will be replaced by phpBB.
* Diary and Notes will be replaced by WordPress.

To solicit your feedback on how the migration should be handled, and alternate options you would like us to consider, we are running a survey
for the next 30 days for the user base of each of these applications.  For links to the surveys, please see our Site Status post at:

http://tinyurl.com/q3g8o3

Trac and WordPress (really!) are two of my favorite open source web applications. And all of the applications in that list are highly regarded.

It’s fantastic to see SourceForge getting back to open source — ironic, no. It will be interesting to see how active they are in particulating in those projects. I dont’ think I’ve seen any SorceForge team members participating recently on WordPress’s Bug Tracker (Trac).

It’s also fantastic to see SourceForge engaging their community by posting this on a WordPress powered blog and also using surveys to solicite feedback about the migrations and the tool choices.

I would love to find out how long this change has been in the works and what people made it happen.

I also notice that SourceForge’s own documentation is now in a trac wiki. Wow, as well as Subversion, you can also use either Mercurial or Git.

The SourceForge team has done an incredible amount for open source, and I’m excited to reconsider using SourceForge.net again to future projects.

WordCamp SF Here I Come!

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Only two more weeks until WordCamp San Francisco 2009. I can’t wait!

This is the original WordCamp. Every year has been fantastic!  There is no other event that brings so many of WordPress‘s elite together.

They’re friendly people to boot! Thankfully, the elite are welcoming and generous with their time, knowledge, talent and bad jokes (puns). It’s a great learning environment.

The best kept secret about WordCamp is that the speaker line up includes many technology and web luminaries – Matt Cutts, Philip Greenspun, Tim Ferriss, Tara Hunt to name a few of the incredible speakers.

Can you believe it is near free — the $25 cost doesn’t even cover the cost of the food. Thank you sponsors!

Even if WordPress wasn’t your thing (shame!), if you’re in the web, it should be a must attend event. It’s a great event for all bloggers and anyone publishing online.

There is also an after party celebrating the sixth anniversary of WordPress!

And Sunday, we’re hosting a barcamp-esque WordPress developer day:

…expect more hardcore geek content like heavy WordPress performance optimization, BuddyPress internals, an intro to Erlang, a guide to secure coding, WordPress-as-CMS discussions, and more. If there’s a topic you’d like to lead start thinking about it now…

There are only 64 spaces left for WordCamp, so sign up now! (Already 536 people have registered.)

I hope to meet you there.

Budd Family helping at Genius Bar WordCamp SF 2008

Budd Family helping at Genius Bar WordCamp SF 2008, as seen at http://central.wordcamp.org/

Book Ends

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“Stop starting with hardcovers” eloquently argues Pat Holt. Many people respond on BoingBoing how much they love hardcovers. I don’t care if with the few years publishers have left that they keep starting with hardcovers, as long as they start with the paperbacks at the same time. I like to read in bed — comfortably. I don’t like the feeling of a sacred tome.

Lately, forwards and prefaces in non-fiction books have been bugging me. Like credits at the beginning of movies, forwards and prefaces are seldom executed well, and almost always too long. Also, the person writing the forward always makes sure to get in a plug for their own books or work.

Worse is an author’s preface telling you what you need to know to read the book or how to interpret it. The Head First technical books each start with a verbose section on how to get the most of the books. The material in each is near identical, but I feel required to read it in case it is not. If you are explaining, you likely have already lost.

If you must have it, move it all postface.

The best of books leave me wanting more, but they never include recommendations of what other books to read or resources to consider. I find this ironic considering the covers are filled with ego stroking recommendations of the book by her peers. Even if your opus, no book is an island.

And why are none of the recommendations by people that I can relate to? People that have been moved or raised by the book?

Java Developers, If You Say “Works on Mac”

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Please Play By the Mac OS X Rules

Today, I’ve been trying various password managers — seems like thousands of mostly complete solutions, all lacking polish. One of them was JPasswords, after I tried it I found a lone file in my home directory, jpws.ini.

Before iCal supported CalDAV, I tried Calgoo Connect to sync my Google and 30 Boxes Calendars. I laughed as it’s menu icon was the only colored one. Bonus was the “Calgoo Connect” folder in my home folder filled with logs and a “data” subfolder.

Java has come a long way from the “write once, debug everywhere days”, but still almost any Java application I try, poop in my home directory.

Watch Videos Online? I Download Later When the Tubes are Clear

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I’m a web worker. My work is online, and it all slows to a snail’s pace if I’m streaming or downloading a video.

I have “High-Speed Xtreme-I” which promises “up to” a-lot, but the metered download rate is much, much lower than advertised, about 1.5-2Mb/s up and 0.75Mb/s. Fire up a video download and I’m in slowmo.

I want my favorite online video content delivered to me. Some of it is available on iTunes. Others like WordPress.tv is available on Miro.

Currently, I download a batch at the end of the day, but for my family the web is no fun if I’m downloading video podcasts in iTunes.

Is there a way to self-throttle or meter specific streams, downloads or applications on Mac OS X?

Unfortunately, there is a lot of content that isn’t even available for downloading. Mostly, I imagine because the content is supported by web page ads. I’d pay for that content, why is there no Audible.com for video podcasts? Or is there?

Even if available on iTunes or Miro, there is not even a link back to the online discussion, let alone comments, inline comments and tags (Viddler), and other resources. I would like it all to be pulled into my video player, except for YouTube comments ;-)

Am I alone? Any help fellow web workers? Any help from NewTeeVee pros?

BC 2009, No Election In My Riding, Swan Lake

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Advanced voting started today in the BC Provincial Election. I hope to get my vote in tomorrow. There is no contest in my riding Swan Lake. NDP candidate Rob Fleming‘s election will be a land slide!

Liberal candidate Jesse McClinton, like party leader Gordon Campbell, appears to lack integrity.

McClinton admitted Friday he was the person behind the wheel in the 2006 case and was charged with driving while impaired, driving while over the legal blood alcohol limit and dangerous operation of a motor vehicle.

He was not convicted on those charges but instead pleaded guilty to driving without reasonable consideration and was fined $200 and given a one-month driving probation.

“I was a scared, you know, young 26-year-old, and perhaps if I had more money or … I would have taken the case a little bit farther,” McClinton told CBC News Friday.

McClinton said he has had a clean driving record since and will not quit the race over his youthful indiscretion.

Not surprising this isn’t one of the 24 “too close” ridings at the Election Prediction Project.

It’s unfortunate incumbent Rob Fleming doesn’t have opposition, so we could focus on the issues and who can best represent our area.

Regardless of the expected outcome, vote and make it happen.

Mozilla SEO & Firefox Tips & Tricks Web Page Bugs

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Update Thurs, May 7th (2 days later): Mozilla is working on the issue for Mozilla.com “Bug 491985 – Title tag changes for select product pages on Mozilla.com to help SEO rank “. To clarify, the improvement is more search engine clicks than ranking.

I provided some feedback to Mozilla just over a month ago about the Mozilla Firefox Start Page tip of handy tips & tricks (how meta):

“Get the most out of your Firefox! Improve your skills with some handy tips & tricks.”

I’m sure web browser developers share my passion for these web page details, but nothing has changed yet.

As I often see other sites with similar issues, I might as well share this web development tip & trick ;-) and other suggestions.

<Title> Tags

First, the <title> field is bad SEO. Says
<title>Mozilla Products | Tips &amp; Tricks</title>
instead of including “Firefox”:
<title>Firefox Tips &amp; Tricks | Mozilla Products </title>

Actually, all the product pages are likely in need of switching the “Mozilla Products” to the end.

This made a big difference for WordPress.com search traffic way back when.

I work with many of our WordPress.com VIP new customers on this issue. Their instinct is to always have their brand or blog name first. But think of which search result you would be more likely to click on? In fact, WordPress historically made it to easy to get this wrong, so in version 2.5 a 3rd parameter ‘seplocation’ was added to wp_title() to make it easier to do it correctly.

So http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/products/ title would become

<title>Firefox Web Browser &amp; Thunderbird Email Client | Mozilla Products</title>
(Plus title case for the win.)

I suggested they give it try and see what happens ;-) I’d be surprised if it does not squeeze a little more juice out.

Wow, there are lousy <title> tags all over their sites ;-)

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/ title is just <title>Featured Projects</title> Hopefully, David Boswell will have a chance to coax out of someone some work here during the current redesign ;-)

Firefox Tips & Tricks

The Manage Your Downloads is an advanced tip? Say what?

“Find it a Flash” intermediate tip reads:

The Find As You Type feature is another handy timesaver. Rather than
using the “find” bar to search for a word on page, just click anywhere
on that page and start typing the word you want. Your cursor will
immediately jump to the first instance of that term.

“You can use it for links, too. For example, instead of moving your
mouse across the page to a “learn more” link, just start typing the
word and when the cursor finds it, press enter.

It does not say that this is disabled by default, and can be enabled at Advanced > Accessibility or any other hint or tip ;-) Also, the phrase “on page” feels awkward, maybe “on a page”.

PS. I would not recommend enabling this, because it breaks some web apps that have click to edit.

BC Elections 2009, the Political Dance Is Over, the Political Circus Begins

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British Columbia, the Canadian province where I live, is in the final weeks of elections. The general election is May 12th.

Everyone can vote in advance on their own schedule — which is pretty cool — from May 6th through 9th.

There is a referendum on what voting system to use as part of this election.

This week the campaigns will go into full gear with huge media blitz.

It’s each person’s duty to vote, so it’s time to decide what issues are important to you, and how you will use your vote.

I’m tuning into http://www.cbc.ca/bc/ for my news, and http://en.wordpress.com/tag/bc-politics/ and http://en.search.wordpress.com/?q=bc+elections to get personal views.

What issues are important to you? Where do you get your information?