Hacking for fun and profit

Things have been moving in the Feedjack front. There are new planets using it, like Debian Perú, Planet SCM and Planet Python@TW, but also apps that use use feedjack on the background like Ian Holman’s Economy Chat and VC Chat.

Also in the news: Feedjack just went into the FreeBSD ports, and I hope to see more Django apps get in there soon.

About the new home, Feedjack is now hosted in www.feedjack.org, and there are some new services too (thanks to Google):

• Subversion repository: http://feedjack.googlecode.com/svn/ (instructions)
• Issue tracker: http://code.google.com/p/feedjack/issues/list
• Mailing lists: one for discussion and another one for ticket updates and SVN commits

I’m planning to work again on Feedjack very soon, in the meantime don’t forget to report bugs and send your suggestions to the issue tracker.

Finally, Django 0.95 has been released (digg it here). Some of the new features and changes are:

• Django now uses a more consistent and natural filtering interface for retrieving objects from the database.
• User-defined models, functions and constants now appear in the module namespace they were defined in. (Previously everything was magically transferred to the django.models.* namespace.)
• Some optional applications, such as the FlatPage, Sites and Redirects apps, have been decoupled and moved into django.contrib. If you don’t want to use these applications, you no longer have to install their database tables.
• Django now has support for managing database transactions.
• We’ve added the ability to write custom authentication and authorization backends for authenticating users against alternate systems, such as LDAP.
• We’ve made it easier to add custom table-level functions to models, through a new “Manager” API.
• It’s now possible to use Django without a database.
• It’s now more explicit and natural to override save() and delete() methods on models, rather than needing to hook into the pre_save() and post_save() method hooks.
• Individual pieces of the framework now can be configured without requiring the setting of an environment variable. This permits use of, for example, the Django templating system inside other applications.
• More and more parts of the framework have been internationalized, as we’ve expanded internationalization (i18n) support. The Django codebase, including code and templates, has now been translated, at least in part, into 31 languages. From Arabic to Chinese to Hungarian to Welsh, it is now possible to use Django’s admin site in your native language.

You can also read the full release notes.

Greg Stein announced today a new Google Service in his talk in OSCON: Google Code Project Hosting (they need a shorter name), a hosting service of collaborative development enviroments featuring:

• Project workspaces with simple membership controls
• Version control via Subversion
• Issue tracking
• Mailing lists at groups.google.com

Obviously this is direct competition to Sourceforge.

Now, Sourceforge has has been suffering some problems for years:

• Downtime
• A very cluttered interface
• A search feature that just doesn’t work

Google Code Project Hosting is based on Subversion on Bigtable (instead of filesystem or BerkeleyDB) and features a trac-like issue tracker (written in Python!).

The interface is google-like of course: very simple and without creeping featuritis. There aren’t many projects yet in the system to test the search feature, but since searching is Google’s main strength I bet it will be better than Sourceforge’s.

Google already provides a great mailing list service in Google Groups and Code Hosting can send issue-tracker and SVN commits to the list of your choice.

Is it a Sourceforge killer?

No. It aims, at least at the moment, at different audiences. Google doesn’t offer shell accounts, tarball hosting or compile farms like Sourceforge does. The thing is most projects don’t make use of these features, so I guess lots of small-to-medium sized projects will flock from SF to Google once the dust settles down. For the larger projects, Google’s solution just doesn’t fit (yet).

I have a personal blog in Blogger, but I never liked any of the templates available, both official and unofficial. So I just ported one of my favorite Wordpress templates to Blogger: Hemingway.

Go to the Hemingway template for Blogger page for downloads, sample sites and instructions.

Share and enjoy.