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.

After my debacle with the monitor this week, I decided that I needed a new screensaver. Primarily I was thinking of disabling the login display when returning to the OS from the screensaver, but I have been thinking I wanted something more for a while now. And since my new monitor does not recover from power-save mode, I need something good to prevent the burn-in that I saw on the monitor at Best Buy.

I've been using the basic My Pictures slideshow screensaver that comes with Windows XP for a while. I have a lot of pictures, and the kids like to see my computer showing them photos of us on all of our vacations. Abby actually asked me why I had changed my screensaver once, which prompted me to restore the photo one.

The thing is, the one that comes with Windows is pretty lame. It'll only show photos on one monitor at a time, unless you turn on the "animation" feature, which simply drags the single photo across all three screens very slowly. I'm looking for something that does a little bit more.

One of the more cool multi-monitor screensavers I tried displays an old-school BOB (you might call it "particle") animation. It's neat because it centers on the center monitor, and spreads over all three like its supposed to.

Most screensavers will only work on the primary monitor. If they work on multiple monitors they often only work on the monitors attached to the primary graphics card. Rarely do they show different content on all three monitors.

Today I downloaded Google's screensaver application. It does some animation/crossfading, but I guess my second card isn't quite up to snuff, at least not for non-DirectX animation. Still, it does a nifty Polaroid-style photo pile on all three monitors, which is much better than what the Microsoft screensaver does.

What I'd really like is some slow-zooming/panning crossfades. Simple transitions. It would be neat if larger pictures could be displayed as faded or black and white across the entire 3-monitor background, and several smaller versions of different photos could face in and pan across them simultaneously. And it would be ultimately cool if I could get a little animated information on there, too.

I've liked the screensaver one of the guys I've met through work uses on his Mac. It displays a list of unread email subjects. It would be swell if I could get an RSS feed or email subjects somewhere on the vast expanse of monitors on my desk along with the photos.

My new computer is supposed to arrive on Tuesday. It should be able to push DirectX pixels to all three (four, if I get another one) monitors without any issue. So a working screensaver that did what I want would be nice. I hope I don't have to write my own.

And hey - Why is it so hard to create a simple software catalog? There are a bazillion software listing sites on the net, and they all suck so much. Just looking at some will make your eyes bleed, they're that poorly designed. Maybe that's the problem, people see how poor the existing sits are, and then insist on making their own poor site. Well, I'll try not to fall into that trap.

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.

Have you heard about Habari? If you're a regular reader here, then of course you have. What you might not know is that Habari development is not dead.

It's weird how a summer can bring a natural stall to the activities usually relegated to the development spawned by countless hours of hibernating indoors. To outside appearances, it might not look like a lot is going on with Habari. Even though commits continue to trickle in, but it's not the full-blown force that it was six months ago. I'll assure you now that the project is still quite alive, and that we've even got release news to back that up.

Today we released version 0.2 for developers. This is another release that is meant to be a review for people that want to be ready to develop for Habari when the 1.0 version is released, or want to start shaping the software early on. You can run it on a live site if you're daring (I do here), but I wouldn't go as far as to recommend it. So, what all have we been doing in Habari, then? I'll tell you.

Of course, you can learn a bit about the new release at the main web site, and Skippy writes a lot about what new things we've added since our last distribution. But there's so much new stuff. We've also added cascading templates, so that you can build a theme for displaying your content that can be as simple as a single template for everything to specific as a separate template for each post. We added hooks to augment our Atom feeds via plugin. The plugin page itself has been improved so that every plugin has a dedicated page to house its own form controls. Rewrite rules have been much overhauled to vast improvement in flexibility. The interactive manual, although small for now, is included in the download.

The list of new stuff goes so far beyond what we've all listed that I'm even shocked to see all of the work we've done since the last release. Why didn't we release something earlier?

We've had a lot of great help getting this release out over the past few months, but recently Chris and Skippy drew the 0.2 release finish line and started hauling toward it. Michael has put a good bit of work transferring wiki entries into the TiddlyWiki format that Khaled originally presented to use for our manual. Sean has been posting weekly summaries of our mailing list, and wrote our announcement post on the Habari Project site. And I need to thank all of the coders who spent the last few months cranking out the software both in supplying code and submitting bugs and ideas.

But the question I really want to ask now is, What's next?

What I've been working on personally for the past few weeks is a new design for the Habari Project site itself. I hope to get the design online this weekend sometime, but these goals have been slipping for a while with work occupying time. It's not just the graphical design of the site, but a new thematic purpose for a community site based around the software. I'll probably have to elaborate on that idea when it's done.

As for the code, plans are already in the works for the new access control system. We've discussed the ideas of communication between sites, and are hyped to build Pingback support on top of our brand new ASL-licensed XMLRPC layer. The admin design should continue aggressively for version 0.3, building on the great start we already have.

Personally, I'd like to grab the media API, wrestle it to the ground, and tie it off. I've got big plans for that, and I'm anxious to make it all work with our friends from Viddler. (Chris and I have already decided to use Viddler for screencasts on the HP.o site blog when it relaunches.)

It's exciting times for our project, as we roll around to our one year anniversary. Many of us are gathering in Columbus for Ohio LinuxFest at the end of September, which should be a great event in itself. Meeting with the Habari folks again will be a great bonus.

I hope you are looking forward to participating in the future of Habari like we are!

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.