Older blog entries for mattr (starting at number 2)

News, of a sort... I'm officially a developer and maintainer of GOVIA. A small thing, perhaps, but makes my day. :)

Shortly, I'll get together some stuff and put a page there dealing with some development-type stuff.

Long life for my hastily created 'Under Construction' Lessonforge logo. It's gone. But check out this, an early mock-up.

Been fooling around today with GOVIA and between loads of laundry, worked up a baby search engine for the GOVIA documents. At the same time, wrote another PHP script to update the master list and get any new document datasheets.

Pretty interesting project, although some image, video, and audio contributions would make it more interesting. :)

Also made a little logo for Lessonforge.com so it looks spiffier than an ascii 'Under construction' message. ;) Sent it to Matt, and I think it was there later.

Until next time...

If anyone wondered, it's a bit overwhelming to jump into the open source world. Just as freedom means responsibility in RL, freedom in software means responsibility. I owe several people money for shareware software I've used since the 80s - that's me being irresponsible. Now, attempting to get a foot in the open (source) door, I find myself swimming in the chaos of finding something for which I can be responsible, both in terms of qualifications and time.

Might wind up just being a cheerleader for open source, but for now I'll keep the mental note to find the newbie's guide to getting involved in open source... At any rate, I know I have something to offer somewhere. Just gotta find it.

Just to make this an extra special woopydoodah first diary entry, let me mention WhoNose, paperlove.org's rear-end.

It began simply as a "Hey, neat" response to a link a friend sent me about PHP and MySQL. What I had/have in mind continues to evolve, but currently it functions somewhat like a webhost-in-a-site. Registered users can create pages with basic HTML in a variety of flavors. When visiting, pages are selected at 'random.' Anyone can react to any page, registered or not.

There is also a group area. Registered users can create special interest groups, with pages of their own, private or public, with the option to invite other users to join. Public groups are, well, public.

In addition, registered users can upload files to include in their pages.

So what?

Well, it's a little different from your standard-issue content management system. As I see it, they aim at doing a whole lot (and succeed!). Yet one's contributed content may or may not get any attention - it's surrounded by other content, boxes of this, lists of that, other contributed content that may or may not be rated or moderated fairly.

The whopping big difference is that contributed content in WhoNose has a shot at getting center stage every time someone comes along. No one much comes along at this point, but that may change someday.

I can't decide whether it's worth being a project at sourceforge or savannah or not. Who cares about WhoNose? But then again, who knows...