A while ago I nominated Habari for the SourceForge Community Choice award for Best New Project. Unless you're a first-time visitor, it should be clear that I think Habari is a great tool, and I'm really happy to say that we've managed to make the cut of finalists for the award! So now I need your help...
It's actually one of my goals to get myself nominated for a web award. But technically, this award isn't for me -- It's for the community of folks who have put together a really great blogging package. Allow me to live a bit vicariously and suggest that winning the award for Habari would be just as thrilling for me as to be nominated for my own award (which seems a long way off in coming, if ever).
If Matt Asay would stop by any of the places where our group congregates, he'd learn how deserving of such an award both the software and the community is. We're not fringe, we're up-and-coming!...
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Over the weekend, I visited Columbus, not just to hang out with skippy at ComFest and buy too much crap at Origins, but to attend and lead a session at PodCamp Ohio.
The side dishes to this entrée are actually better than the meat, but the meat was the point of the dinner, so that's what I'll talk about here. I'm all about focus here. Focus.
I showed up right on time for the welcome session on Saturday and checked in. I hadn't been able to show up for the Friday night meetup because of the previously mentioned "side dishes". I checked in and was shown to the "Speaker Lounge", marked off by signs with martini glasses (with olive!). After a brief welcome from another couple of session leaders in the lounge, we all shuffled down to Room A for the introduction.
I'm not going to do a play-by-play of the rest of the day, because that's already feeling tedious. Let me cover briefly a couple of sessions I did attend, and my overall impression of the camp. more
Staring at the walls in the office is not conducive to constructing posts. I'm not sure how I've even managed the last 9-10 years worth of posts. You'd think I'd run out of material.
I was mentioning to someone the other day that I paradoxically - since the walls are plain white and small - have a lot of good ideas while in the shower. I had another one of those days today. I must have come up with three or four solid ideas about things I wanted to blog, but simply lost them upon setting foot outside the bathroom. Less dramatically, we had plans immediately after I showered this morning, so I didn't really have a chance to act on my ideas.
So I was thinking, if I had some kind of device that I could use to record ideas while in the shower, or in the bathroom getting ready in the morning, I could keep these ideas and be able to act on them later in the day. I'd probably do well with something that is somewhat waterproof, but can somehow be erased. ...
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On IRC a few weeks ago this question was posed by an unassuming visitor:
What makes Habari different from any other blog application like WordPress?
I blew a mental gasket sitting at my desk, but managed to scrawl out a few words that managed to be quoted here and there by folks in the community. It may have sounded profound to others, but it was really offered up in haste and without much consideration.
Since then I've been thinking: If I had to give a serious elevator pitch about Habari, what would I say? more
Habari's community is a sight in action. Two weeks ago, I threatened to make a significant change to the appearance of Habari's back-end admin, and the day afterward, I executed on that threat.
The Monolith design for Habari's admin had been on the slate for a long time, even prior to Michael Heilemann's announcement back in February. We've been striving toward user interface excellence. While there's been a lot of contention by those concerned over what constitutes the best design, I think it's impossible to deny that the design is handsome.
The Monolith source code had lingered in a branch of the source repository awaiting the day when it would be mature enough to merge. It became clear to me that although opening branches of our repository for non-PMC (Primary Management Committee) coders to work on special-interest changes to the core code was good for innovation, it wasn't necessarily as inviting in the spirit of our community-contribution nature.
So after a couple of months progress, and with the blessings of several other PMC members, I made good on the threat of merging the Monolith code to the main branch of the code repository, and over the past two weeks the flurry of contributions has been nothing short of amazing. more
