The Bugs That Haunt Me

A few years ago I found an article pointing out how spammers had figured out how to abuse some code I wrote back in 2001 or so. I’d put it on the list to fix and even started a blog post so that I could take my lumps publicly.
Now I’ve rediscovered that draft post…and that [...]

The Economist on Open Source

From The Economist in 2006: Open-source business: Open, but not as usual.

Usability vs. Open Source

This article comparing the usability of Joomla vs. WordPress has already been linked by everybody’s uncle, but it’s still worth a look.
I find it amusing, however, that none of the comments so far on that blog post mention the commitment that the core WordPress team appears to have on making blogging fun. If you start [...]

MySQL 5.1 Released, Community Takes Stock

MySQL 5.1 is out as a GA release, but with crashing bugs that should give likely users pause. Perhaps worse, the problems are blamed on essential breakdowns in the project management: “We have changed the release model so that instead of focusing on quality and features our release is now defined by timeliness and features. [...]

Fiddling With Open Source Software for Libraries Theme

I generally liked CommentPress, but when the Institute for the Future of the Book website went down recently, it started throwing errors in the dashboard. So I decided to re-do the Open Source Software For Libraries website using Derek Powazek’s DePo Masthead.
I think it’s a beautifully readable theme, and I only had to make a [...]

Many Eyes, Bugs Being Shallow, All That

WordPress 2.5.1 added a really powerful feature to register_taxonomy(): automatic registration of permalinks and query vars to match the taxonomy. Well, theoretically it added that feature. It wasn’t working in practice. After some searching yesterday and today, I finally found the bug and worked up a fix. I made a diff and set off to [...]

BuddyPress: The WordPress Of Social Networks?

Andy Peatling, who developed a WordPress MU-based social network and then released the code as BuddyPress has just joined Automattic, where they seem to have big plans for it. I’d been predicting something like this since Automattic acquired Gravatar:
It’s clear that the future is social. Connections are key. WordPress MU is a platform which has [...]

Chris “Long Tail” Anderson On Open Source

Open source and the Long Tail: An interview with Chris Anderson
The shift of software from the desktop to the Web will really be the making of open-source software. The Long Tail side of software will almost certainly be Web-based because the Web lowers the barriers to adoption of software. There will always be some software [...]

People Make Scriblio Better

It’s way cool to see Lichen’s Scriblio installation instructions translated to Hungarian. Even cooler to have Sarah the tagging librarian take hard look at it and give us some criticism (and praise!). But I’m positively ecstatic to see Robin Hastings’ post on installing Scriblio (it’s not easy on Windows, apparently).
Part of it is pride [...]

How Expensive Does Commercial Software Need To Get Before We Consider Open Source?

Open source software of the free as in free beer and free as in free speech variety has matured to the point that there are now strong contenders in nearly every category, though that doesn’t make them easy choices. It’s often revealing when people criticize OSS as being free as in free kittens, which is [...]