I had an idea several days ago where the members of the blog could work on a group programming project and then publish it to the open public. The scripts would not be massive in nature like a forum or cms but little scripts that people are looking for.
Do you think something like that would work?
In today’s web 2.0 world I really do think it could work. Also I think it would be great as a community to work on one project.
I see it working that we agree on a project and then break that project into several smaller bits and work on those bits individually. How do you see something like this working?
For the first project I was thinking we could build a php site scrapper that goes through all the pages on your site and stripes them into an RSS feed. The script would be set as a cron and would then update as pages changed to let people know what is new. What do you think of this project?
Nick
May 12, 2007 7:41 pm
I think that is a great idea , but who will be able to use this script?
Also the other thing is that i don’t know how many people who have this kind of skill are willing to put there time into this. I don’t really have much skill in this type of programming.
blogadmin
May 12, 2007 7:45 pm
I can think of a few people that could use this script.
1. It could be used to determine if there has been a defacement to your site. If you subscribe to your own sites RSS if it changes you would know by your RSS reader.
2. I also know that there are a lot of sites that could use RSS but don’t know how to add it. A script that runs on it’s own would be a great solution for them.
If you have a different idea for a script we could do that as a project instead.
I’m not sure if there are that many people with time on there hands to do this kind of stuff. It’s why I am throwing it out there.
Matt
May 14, 2007 6:06 pm
Did my other comment get through for this post? It was a good one. :D
blogadmin
May 14, 2007 8:12 pm
I don’t see it. Maybe it got removed by the spam filter.
blogadmin
May 15, 2007 6:35 am
I can’t find it. What was it?
Business Network
May 15, 2007 10:22 am
I like the idea, I would see it as a very valuable tool, Feedburner made a slight modification to that idea where they send an email with any changes, which I find more useful because I don’t have my RSS reader on all the time.
Matt
May 16, 2007 6:41 pm
Rewritten, and hopefully better than the original. But, this time I saved it, just-in-case. :P
I think to make this work, a Subversion (SVN) Repository should be setup. So that we’ll actually be able to work as a group and collaborate.
I think we should choose “group leaders” who are experienced in PHP, MySQL, (X)HTML, CSS and SVN. Then, the group leader will have commit access to the SVN. Everybody else will just use anonymous reading to access the SVN and download the latest code to add to. Then, the contributions will be sent to a group leader (probably as .diff’s), to then be committed into the SVN. This will prevent people who have no idea how to use SVN from accidentally messing something up.
I suggest using SourceForge or Google Code (I prefer Google Code, cleaner interface and more up to date technologies) for our SVN. We would also have a mailing list (or Google Group, in the case of going with Google Code) for development. We would have separate projects for each of our projects. We should also release our projects under GPL.
We would also write up some coding standards/guidelines; so we don’t end up with messy, unreadable code.
People would need to learn a bit on how to use TortoiseSVN, but it’s fairly easy to use, so that’s not really a problem.
If we do go this route, I would like to nominate myself for a group leader.
As for the project, it seems like a good idea. Although, it seems like this is something BlueFur wants for it’s own Site RSS Feed. :P Nothing wrong with that, though.
Nick
May 18, 2007 3:53 pm
I would help , but i mostly only have experience with html and a very little php (only able to edit). So i don’t think i could really help. It is a good idea though.
Matt
May 19, 2007 9:29 pm
So, what do you think of these ideas?
blogadmin
May 19, 2007 10:22 pm
I have been looking into both Google Code and SourceForge. I have never really played with these before or subversion. Is subversion not something we can just install ourselves? I would prefer not to be limited to the 100 MB of space that Google Code provides.
Matt
May 19, 2007 10:46 pm
Yes, you can install Subversion on your servers yourself. I’ve actually asked for Subversion on Shared Hosting before, but I was told you didn’t have any plans to offer it with Shared Hosting so far. Check the Install Guide out.
100MB per project wouldn’t exactly be limiting. When was the last time you saw a program that was even over 10MB. WordPress is only a couple of MB, and it’s got quite a lot of code to it.
With something like Google Code, we get the advantages of having a Wiki, Mailing List, Bug Tracker, etc all there and ready to go. Allowing us to do the most important part, the coding, without having to worry about the rest of that.
blogadmin
May 19, 2007 11:01 pm
We would be installing subversion on it’s own server if it was something we would use for these projects.
I understand what you are saying about Google Code but my vision is that we should have those ourselves.
I would love to see a BlueFur Code section that has subversion, wiki, mailing list and bug tracker available for coders.
I know for us we can get subversion installed on a server with a wiki and mailing list. What would you suggest for a bug tracker?
Matt
May 19, 2007 11:16 pm
For the record, I would still like to see Subversion for Shared Hosting. :P
I see your point. BlueFurCode.Com is available. :P
If you want more of a “integrated” solution, check out Trac. It has an okay Wiki, Bug Tracker, Repository browser and keep track of all the changes to the Repository. If we do use Trac and SVN, it’s own server will be necessary. These things can take quite a bit of resources.
We could then have projects have a subdomain. So if we called our first project RSS Scrape, we could have like rssscrape.bluefurcode.com. Which would have it’s own Trac, attached to it’s own SVN Repository.
If you want to see a “real life” setup of Trac, WordPress uses it.
We could then have 1 mailing list for all of BlueFur Code, or 1 per project.
We could also have some Forums (forums.bluefurcode.com) which would have subforums for each project.
I would like to volunteer to help organizing all of this and helping out where I can.
Matt
May 20, 2007 1:44 am
Or, furrycode.com. :P
christian
May 22, 2007 9:45 pm
You may want to CAREFULLY read the terms of service for google code.
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