Asymptomatic

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

I found a list of events that Abby's going to participate in with her Girl Scout's Brownie troop over the next couple of months. Apparently, Berta gets emails from their scout leader every so often with a list of updated events and notices. I think this is an effective way to keep in touch with the troupe, but I think there's room for improvement technologically.

It might be nice to have a published calendar of events, along with a feed that parents could consume in Outlook, Google Calendar, or in my case, Lightning. I've discovered that meetup.com provides iCal feeds that make it easy to subscribe to events. Of course, there are my usual misgivings with meetup.com, particularly that it's a paid service and that they retain control of the data so that you can't move it elsewhere when you decide you can't pay them anymore. So I think there should be a better, open solution.

That's where I think Habari can step in. This isn't meant to sound like an advertisement, because I really think there's something here. First off, having a blog gives you a centralized location to publish event information (and results!), which is the important part. There is apparently already a plugin (yes, the Habari scene is now moving so fast that I can't keep track of everything going on anymore) that will track events as a separate content type within Habari. So it should be easy to segregate a scheduled event from a news posting or a page of contact data. There are still a couple of important pieces missing....

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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I've spent a good bit of time over the past week (probably to Chris' chagrin) working on media functionality for Habari. You can see my quick, obviously unrehearsed screencast describing all of the features visually if you don't want to read my post.

Essentially, media in Habari is about unifying all of your media sources inside your blog software so that you don't have to go running from place to place to assemble a post. In other words, making it easy for the user. I have a pretty common scenario that I use when I start into my diatribe about Habari media.

Paying for hosting is a pain in the butt, especially if you use a lot of photos or audio. Anyone with any sense uses a service like Flickr to house their photos and link to them from their blog. It's simply more cost effective. The trouble is that integrating these services with the interface you're already using to write your blog. Habari is great at this....