Monthly Archive for January, 2009

Test site fixed!

Published on January 27, 2009 in Featured and General Blogginess. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , .

Hey gang, the test site is now working correctly again.  Hooray!  If you’re interested in the details, this was the fix.

Please go ahead and create yourself an account, add plenty of (appropriate) feeds, file issues for anything that is broken or otherwise obviously wrong, and chat us up on the mailing list with ideas for improvement!  Please don’t be shy, we need as many people beating on this thing and providing feedback as we can get!

When you are adding feeds, don’t worry about the checkbox that says “I own this blog/website”.  Add any sites you like, as long as they fit within the ORBlogs purview!  I believe we will eventually be getting rid of that checkbox and the current model of feed ownership, and moving to either a curated model or a community-managed model.  I could be wrong, though.  :)

If you are already on the mailing list, you may have noticed a couple of messages from TeamCity (our continuous integration server).  I set it up to directly notify the list on most build events; I believe it helps us toward our goals of agility and transparency.  If for some unlikely reason it becomes a burden, we can always turn it off or redirect it to a secondary mailing list.  Also, if you create yourself an account on the TeamCity server and want more than just “viewer” access, let me know and I’ll hook you up!

-Bill

Getting Things Done

Published on January 23, 2009 in Featured and General Blogginess. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Hi all!  John gave me rights to post here, so I thought I would abuse the privilege for a moment.

I feel like we have been stalling a bit, so I have done a few things recently to try to make the development process more transparent, as well as easier for anyone who wants to just jump in and do what they can, but may have been stymied by not knowing where to start.

I posted on the mailing list earlier today about what I have been doing, so go ahead over there for the details, and reply on-list (my preference), in the comments here, or via Twitter if you have any questions.

By the way, go ahead and consider this another call for development help.  Anyone have some #afterhours they want to contribute to this?  ;)

Cheers,
-Bill

Help ORBlogs: Hit The Development Server!

Published on January 6, 2009 in About ORBlogs and Featured. 2 Comments Tags: , .

I was supposed to write this blog post a couple weeks ago. Ugh. Holidays!

Well, we’re all back to work now that the holiday madness has ended, and that means that development is heating up again on ORBlogs. This year, Santa dressed up as Bill Jackson and left a development server under our tree. The server is at http://haxx.orblogs.org (which is a redirect currently, but we’re working on that).

Here’s a message from Bill snatched from the ORBlogs development list:

Uh, hello?  I think you have missed some tweets from both John and me; I have had a testing server running at http://haxx.orblogs.org/ for quite a while now!  :)  Apparently I did a poor job disseminating this information, I think even John didn’t realize it was actually working until last week or so.

I wrote a shell script that monitors the Subversion repository, and rebuilds/reloads the app on every checkin.  I just need to test it a bit more and add it to my crontab…

Anyway, everyone please go ahead and start using the site above for testing, and start filing bugs as you find them!

Lastly, anyone not familiar with Pencil (the Firefox plugin) should check it out; it’s awesome for doing UI mockups, web or otherwise.  Bram, I imagine you know about it already.  :)

Cheers,
-Bill

What this means is that anyone with access to the source code (i.e. working from our ORBlogs Google Code page) can hit the development server, see problems, fix them, and commit the changes.

Not a programmer? Not interested in grabbing code? No matter. Check out the development server anyway. If you see issues that need fixing, head over to Google Code Page and file a ticket. (Do us a favor and make sure someone else hasn’t already done so :).

Additionally, Bram Pitoyo has offered to work on the layout and typography. With such a master as that on board, the ORBlogs user interface is certain to be amazing. Maybe we can talk Amber Case into some great data visualizations as well (hint, hint :)

I hope everyone had a safe holiday season. With a server running, more people helping, ORBlogs 2.0 is closer than ever to being re-launched. Thanks Santa!