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!
Bill and I want to reiterate that our main goal here is to have people check things out and then submit tickets (i.e. bugs) and issues using the issue tracker (http://code.google.com/p/orblogs/issues/list).
Now that the base code is running, things will run much faster if there are small, easily digestible tasks in a list. This is what the issue tracking system is good for. Make sure an issue hasn't already been listed though, because if I try to fix an issue that Bill has already fixed, he's going to lay the smackdown on me!
Glad to help with Data Visualization. Simply let me know the terms/ideas/data you'd like to track. I'm also into doing surveys and making inforgraphics out of the statistical data.