I've lately had the inclination to rebuild my blog's relevancy from the last year of once-per-month posting. Maybe you've noticed the last few days. By integrating blogging into my daily schedule, I think I can churn out blog posts with regular enough frequency to get "back in the game." As with most things, it would probably be easier to have someone to do this with rather than doing it alone.

So I was thinking about Inksmith lately. We've seen ideas like this come and go, but I think the idea of a new blogging fraternity is a good one. A membership system would simply relate all of the bloggers to the others, maybe aggregate posts, and provide a topic support system.

I'm not sure how much I'd like to personally invest in building such a fraternity, but it seems like it could be done with very little effort. Write up some simple rules of membership, post them somewhere people can get to, and behave accordingly. What rules would such a group have? Any thoughts? Wanna start one with me?

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.

Since the merge of the Monolith code, there have been 99 commits. That's roughly one commit every three hours for the past two weeks. The Habari committers in timezones around the world are actually committing code 24 hours a day, too.

In that time, we've also seen some terrific advancement besides the implementation of many of Monolith's more interesting features. As I write this, we're merging the source for our 100th commit in the past two weeks, which will enable Postgres database support. This makes for three database engines that Habari will officially support - a true, multi-engine package.

We've also just added s9y imports, which will be a great way for s9y users to try out Habari by importing their data. I'm looking forward to more importers for other popular blogging packages.

There are now 57 plugins in the Habari "extras" repository. The extras repo is a place where Habari plugin developers can collaborate on plugins released under the ASL license. So the 57 count, while amazing, doesn't even include the plugins that don't qualify for inclusion in our repo due to licensing.

Themes are starting to crop up everywhere. Since 0.4's release, we've added two new themes to the core distribution. "Charcoal" is a Habari signature release, demonstrating the craft and style of the Habari platform. "mzingi" is a stripped-down starting point for new themes that includes just the basics. Today on the mailing list was announced the Habari port of the venerable Hemingway theme.

What's been really amazing to me is the participation level of the people in the community. There have been an influx of tickets on found issues, which is really helpful to finding things that need refinement. There have been patches supplied from many folks. Committers really have been working in overdrive to round out the impending 0.5 version, and I think the whole thing is barreling unstoppably toward release.

I always try to make an effort to thank anyone who contributes to the project. It really feels great working together with people towards a larger goal. I think in that respect is where Habari is a winning project. For some reason, they often thank me for applying their patches. I think it's important that they are thanked for taking interest and writing them in the first place.

The idea that people can talk about their experience with Habari on Twitter, and someone from the project will help them with issues, comment on their new site, or just chat about what they thought. And it's not just me doing all the work!

I think people hear me talking so adamantly about Habari and assume that it's some personal obsession in which I - and only me - am completely absorbed. It's not just me. There is a growing, thriving community behind the scenes that makes it all work. It's the coolest part!

I encourage you to get involved. Habari wouldn't be the great app it is right now if not for the people who've come on to help. And it can only get better with more ideas and more hands working.

A few of the folks I "hang with" online are/were involved in the 9rules network. I am not a member, but I had tried to become one at one point. I've been following the recent actions of the network with some interest, and thought I would save my thoughts for later as they may be relevant for other communities in which I am involved and have influence. Some background on the current issue is probably in order.

Essentially, many people had joined the network for the purpose of being affiliated with other bloggers who created great content. Their goal was to enrich the web. These folks chose to participate in the network insofar as they posted new, quality content to their own blogs, which were syndicated specifically to the rest of the members. Although the network powers-that-be had created a site for interaction among members, these folks never saw participation in those forums as a requirement to their membership, simply their continued contribution of quality blog content.

Recently, the terms of membership changed so that you must participate in the forums to remain a member. The people who thought that their blogging contribution was enough realized (with different levels of reaction) that they would no longer qualify for membership and asked to withdraw. This accounts for more than half of the people who I relate with who are/were also 9rules members. What's bothersome to me, especially had I been a member, is the process surrounding the change of the terms of service.

It seems as though the people deciding that forum participation should be a requirement were the people who were already active on the forums. Members who did not see a value in the forums or did not see participation there as a requirement for membership understandably did not visit the forums to participate in the decision. Rather than send email to members asking if the change would be agreeable to the membership, the decision was made and notices of the change sent.

It is interesting that so many people had a different impression of what 9rules was all about and have left. Not only is that interesting, but also the reaction that the 9rules maintainers have had to the poor response to their actions. Take for example Christian's experience.

The responses in the comments there from Tyme and Scrivs, two 9rules maintainers, seem openly hostile. You can find examples of similar reactions from them on many of the sites who have decided to leave the network. It's natural that they would be upset that people would leave, but to react in such a way is very strange when trying to foster a community.

Moreover, wishing that the communication had happened privately when you operate a blog network is an outright pipe dream. Listen to yourself speak the words: "Private" and "Blog". Nuh-uh.

What might have been a better reaction to the growth of their community? A better effort to shape the direction of the community than alienating their long-standing members. The solution is simple.

When communities get large, they naturally segregate. By separating the forum participants from the non-participants, but allowing the groups to continue, both groups could thrive within the community. Instead, the two groups were created, and one of them was told to shove off. If one of the main purposes of the network is to help each other and be a community, this is a very strange way to accomplish that.

I suppose it's easy to stand somewhere outside all of this and preach, not having built my own blog network or managed their large membership. I am interested in all of these going on because practically all of the bloggers I know in real life were members of 9rules, and it's all I hear these days. Plus, being a leader in a (non-blogging) community of my own, I am interested in the metamorphosis of this network that was once well-respected by the people on the web that I myself respect.

Were I to create my own blog network (and I have no delusions that I have time for such a thing), it wouldn't be about creating content for the network site. It would be about connecting users better.

The web is too diverse to drop every blog into a single, strict category. It's also difficult to find the "key site" that pulls together the blogs dealing with a single topic.

For example, I hang around with a lot of Philly bloggers in real life. I write about hanging out with them. I write about my own experiences in Philly. While my site does have content about Philadelphia, you'll note that it's not primarily a blog about Philadelphia. Pigeonholing my site into a single "Philadelphia" category seems narrow-minded.

If I was looking for a list of bloggers from Philadelphia to see if they had similar experiences to mine, or simply to read about what's going on in my area, where would I go? There are a few sites I know of as starting places for sure, but there isn't a place that connects all of them together well. Even the ones I know of that connect them to some degree are all content-generating, meaning that sure, you have a blog of your own, but membership is based on your contribution to the aggregating site.

A better blog network would unite people with common interests. It would pool sites together like Technorati does under specific but varied tags, and give bloggers more control over which channels their own blog (and blogs they read) belonged to. You would be allowed to categorize content from your own site or others', create events and topics for discussion among the blogs that fit your reading criteria, and participate solely from your own blog: Content is for your site, indexing, relation, and membership is provided by the network as its sole features.

One of the things I really think would be neat is a way to forward discussion topics to people who have expertise or interest in what you want to read about. You could forward food topics to groups of foodie blogs, or tech questions to techie blogs via the network, and then watch the network for blogs that respond to your topic. Blogs that write about a chosen topic could see what other blogs in the network have also said about that topic, and contribute to the conversation on those blogs. The network site could map that interaction as output that outsiders could follow. It could be very cooperative, yet wouldn't require participation in a forum.

Well, it's something to think about for later when building up the Habari community, to make sure that if we refocus what the community is all about (which I hardly expect us to do, but you never know) then we need to make sure that we don't let go many of our long-standing respected members for lack of informing them of the changes and asking for their involvement.

Plus, if someone cooks up a network such as I've described, be sure to invite me.

There has been a good deal of tumult over a recent TechCrunch post that Mullenweg characterizes as a "hatchet job". There are some crazy folks trolling the comments over there, and although there are many points there I find on either side of the validity line both in the comments and the post itself, I do have my own perspective.

Changing Way brings up an interesting point about anyone being able to improve WordPress' spam prevention. After all, WordPress is GPL-licensed, and so anyone can take the source and improve it and re-release it. Skippy has offered a good argument for why a fork of WordPress would have difficulty materializing. But people seem convinced that anyone can submit code changes to the core software to have them included. While this may be generally possible, I think it's more difficult for the common person than you would imagine, and I think it is an unrealistic belief for this specific feature.

Consider that Automattic runs Akismet, a hosted spam prevention service. Packaged with WordPress is a plugin that uses Akismet, which also requires a WordPress.com API key. If you are a pro blogger (which is one reason why most people don't lend some credence to this) then the service that prevents spam is a commercial service, from which Automattic profits. You can also choose not to use the plugin if you aren't worried about spam or have chosen some other route or protection. Where's the bad here?

Well, what do you think the likelihood is that Automattic - who controls what code is added to WordPress - would bundle any other service's anti-spam plugin with WordPress? Although it's not released yet, I wonder about the likelihood of having another commercial spam prevention plugin included with WordPress.

Wait. Weren't any of these 71 others good enough to include? No, the only one good enough is the one that Automattic wrote and is (depending on your comment volume) making money from.

I hesitate to bring up comparisons of how this sounds suspiciously like when Microsoft bundled their browser for free with their operating system and put Netscape out of the browser sales business, because there are just enough differences to draw attention away from the argument I've made above. But doesn't this smack of something that you'd otherwise see an enormous Slashdot thread about? If WordPress wasn't the darling of the blog world, but perhaps an evil corporate machine?

I wrote that last line somewhat off the cuff, but this perception is interesting to me. The more intriguing evil characters in literature don't always think that they are doing wrong. They often believe that they are acting in everyone's best interests. I get that impression a lot from what comes down from Automattic. They'll bundle their commercial product with this open source software because people really want it. But they don't seem to see the danger on that path. Advocates of open source who have obvious success from packaging access to their closed-source service for free with the product of many others' work. It's like those annoying little icons that off-the-shelf PCs have for AOL and MSN and 50 other paid services on their desktops. I digress...

Mark goes into great depth about the wonders of Akismet and comparisons between it and other solutions. I agree on many points, specifically about how there would need to be many solutions to the spam problem if there was no centralized solution. I don't think anyone has said that Akismet works poorly or that it's not needed. Nonetheless, that there's something off about having a commercial product tied to a supposedly community-driven project. I think Mark's comments on having an alternative "blog-level" solution hint that he might agree. But his success at committing such a solution itself (however improbable it is to materialize) holds little hope if history is to be believed.

I've said in other places that I only really see one solution that would satisfy me, and it's certainly not palatable to Automattic. That would be if Automattic released the keys to the open source project to the community and let them decide what's best. If the community decided that Akismet was kosher, so be it. At least then you'd know that the decision wasn't a commercial one inflicted (whether with good intent) on unsuspecting open source.

Now I've filled a good sized post only scratching the surface of the issues arising from the TechCrunch article. Oddly enough, this is something I didn't even really want to talk about. Seriously, don't we all have better things to do? Still, it has been interesting to see the whole thing play out, and I wonder what other repercussions there might be besides the change to the default blogroll, especially as people become more aware of these cracks in WordPress' otherwise apparently flawless porcelain façade.

There is so much stuff going on, I'm not even sure where to begin.

If you missed it, yesterday's April Fools Day activities went off quite well. Thanks a bunch to skippy, moeffju, and chrisjdavis for helping out and playing along.

Also, I'd like to apologize to all the WordPress users who found the ForkPress link on their Dashboards yesterday. I was really tired when I entered the post, and I hadn't intended to tag it "WordPress" when I was scanning through the text. I hope it was entertaining just the same.

Obviously, part of the plan is to use ForkPress as a jumping point to announce the Habari DR release. We've gotten the code wrapped up to a point where we'd like to have some other developers see what we've done so far. We want people to start playing with Habari, see what it can do and what it lacks, and continue to make the software better. All of the sites in yesterday's joke were running Habari, and we did production and setup of all three entirely on Saturday. Most of the work was getting the logos and photos together - Habari installation was a snap, as expected.

This release isn't for production use (although you are reading a Habari install in production currently), but it is the first release available to users outside of source control. That is, you can download it as a zip or tgz file.

Oh, and there's more on my plate after this weekend's shuffling the software out the door and getting the AFD stuff online...

I'm going to Los Angeles tomorrow for work. I'll be in town all week. I don't know what my free time is like, and I don't have a car. I don't know what that means. Are there people in L.A. who want to chat about Habari? I hope I can escape the $work$ for a few hours here and there, though I expect they'll be locking me in a closet with my notebook the whole time I'm there.

So I'll be away from home until Saturday. Easter is Sunday - there's much family planning there. And then on Monday, Berta leaves for Atlanta and her $work$ for a few days, leaving me alone at home with the kids.

I shouldn't report being alone with the kids on this blog because then people might get wise and send over social services. Popcorn for lunch! Pizza for every other meal! Bed time at 3am!

Berta's birthday is Wednesday. I have no idea what to do about that.

And I guess that's all I can talk about for now. Hopefully have more stories for you from LA. I hope the hotel has wifi, or it's dialup via bluetooth via cell for me.