I'm currently at the airport in Las Vegas, awaiting a flight that starts boarding in 45 minutes or so. I figured I would take the time to write this now, because if I don't then I'll just say "forget it" like I always do, and then literally forget everything.
While I was in Las Vegas this weekend, I visited Blog World Expo. I don't even really know what Blog World Expo is. I mean, I know what it's supposed to be, but I'm not really convinced that it is what it purports.
I wouldn't be so bold as to say that social media is an illusion. That's very much not true, but I do think that people are prospecting in this space, not really knowing how to organize the people who are involved. Largely, they're preaching to the choir, or they're so paradoxically self-involved that they can't even see the "social" aspect of the industry that they're trying to form....
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It's hard to make headway against the "leading brand" without showing exactly what sets you apart from them; what you do better. I think that Habari needs and can provide many examples of how we've taking what everyone looks toward - probably most rightly - as the "standard" in blog software, and done something radically better. This is one example that stands out firmly in my mind.
I am not the only person who has noticed that WordPress is released under the GNU General Public License. In the license, it very plainly states:
You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.
The only conclusion is that if your theme executes functions that are provided by WordPress, then your theme is indelibly connected to WordPress, and must itself be made available under the same terms as WordPress. more
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
The people at the Habari Project have recently released version 0.4 of Habari. If you don't usually read my blog, then you might not know that I help write this software and that the software is what runs this site.
Following up on the 0.4 release, I wrote a kind of "manifesto" for what we need to accomplish for Habari 0.5, and then I read the whole thing into the computer so that you could just listen to it. Lucky you, fun for me. Enjoy.
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