Remember Google Wave? Yes, quite a handy collaboration tool that mostly failed due to a silly invitations-only policy stretched over way too longer than it should. Well, apparently, even after Google gave up the idea and most of its code as Open Source, there are still people who work on making it succeed.
Save Google Wave is the website that keeps track of several alternatives and provides a simple functional overview of each.
GitHub, being a massive data store, is constantly looking for new and improved ways of extracting knowledge from its data.
In April we announced the second annual GitHub data challenge.
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After receiving some amazing entries in the previous challenge, we were excited to see what people would discover with another year of data. The results blew us away: we saw many more entrants and novel applications of our data. GitHubbers ranked their favorite entries, and after tallying the votes, we’re happy to announce the top 3 entries for the 2013 GitHub data challenge.
The second place (Popular Convention by Outsider) and third place (open source contributions by location by David Fischer) winners are very nice. But the first place winner is truly amazing (The Open Source Report Card, by Dan Foreman-Mackey). It’s an excellent combination of data crunching with beautiful presentation. Of course, you’ll need some publicly visible repositories and contributions to see anything interesting, but once you do, it’s quite impressive. Have a look at mine, for example.
Today is the WordPress Day. Thousands and thousands of people gather in hundreds of cities and towns all over the world to celebrate WordPress’s 10th birthday. In 10 years, WordPress went from just another PHP application for bloggers to a feature-rich platform that runs a huge chunk of the Web. WordPress came a long way, grew and matured. As did the community (of which I am a proud member) that developed, designed, translated, documented, optimized, argued, sponsored, tested, troubleshooted, and generally improved the system in so many different ways.
A big thank you goes to each and everyone involved in WordPress.org, Auttomatic and all those gadzillion projects. But, I also want to specially thank Matt Mullenweg, without who, I think WordPress wouldn’t be the same, if it would be at all. Thanks man, you are an inspiration to many. Keep it up and happy birthday.
P.S.: As I was writing this post, I realized that there was no meetup organized in Limassol, so, albeit with a very short notice, let’s get together and have a pint at Alio Olio after work. I’ll be there from around 5:30 until whatever. Here is a quick link to Meetup event.
WHAT IS GITTIP?
Gittip is a way to give small weekly cash gifts to people you love and are inspired by.
Gifts are weekly. The intention is for people to depend on money received through Gittip in order to pay their bills, and bills are recurring.
Gifts come with no strings attached. You don’t know exactly where your gifts come from, and the maximum gift from one person to another is $24.
Gifts are public. The total amount you give and the total amount you receive is public. Participants on both sides of the equation are rewarded publicly for their participation. (You can opt out of publicly displaying your total giving.)
Mashable reports that Steve Wilhite, the inventor of GIF (Graphics Interchange Format), during the lifetime achievement ceremony insisted that it’s pronounced “JIF”, not “GIF”.
[rant mode on]What?! “GIF” is not “GIF, but “JIF”? Non-sense! It’s give, not jive. Girls, not jirls. Gift, not jift. And even if he believes that that’s the correct way to pronounce it, how irresponsible is that to attract attention to this issue now? It’s just like throwing a barrel of petrol into the pronunciation holy war flames of GNU, Gnome, Gimp, and other pillars of Open Source Software.[rant mode off]