In my 2010 year-in-review post I made a passing mention to my decision not to buy any more Apple products. Most people who know me can probably guess the reasons behind the decision, but recently I’ve had some discussions that made me think that it’s worth a blog post to spell them out. First is [...]
It’s finally here! After many, many months of bug squashing, refactoring, and general bloodsweatntears, BuddyPress 1.5 has been released! This long development cycle has been frustrating in some ways and extremely rewarding in others. On balance, I’m quite proud of the work that’s been done, and quite pleased to have worked so closely and so [...]
For two reasons, Blackboard is the key to why I develop free software. The first reason is historical. I first got into free software development because of my work with the CUNY Academic Commons project. As spearheaded by Matt Gold, George Otte and others, the Commons is intended to create a space, using free software [...]
This morning I whipped up a little BuddyPress ditty for the CUNY Academic Commons that allows your members to select how many posts they’d like to see at a time when viewing a single forum topic. It’s not particularly beautiful (for one thing, it requires Javascript to work correctly, though it degrades gracefully by not [...]
The General Public License (aka the GPL) is for users. This observation seems so obvious that it needn’t be stated. But for those who develop software licensed under the GPL (like WordPress and most related projects), it’s a fact that should be revisited every now and again, because it has all sorts of ramifications for [...]
Also filed in digital humanities, edtech, philo
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Tagged bsd, ethics, free software, gpl, intellectual property, licenses, open source, philosophy, Richard Stallman, Wordpress
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About a year and a half ago, I started moving all my personal and professional software development to Git and Github. Here are a few thoughts on what it’s meant for me as a developer. Originally, the primary impetus for the change was that, as version control software, Git is so much better than Subversion. [...]
After a few hours of Googling and headdesking, I finally got PHPUnit up and running in my local environment. In the end, I had to make reference to a bunch of different resources. It was a convoluted enough process that I don’t think I can replicate step-by-step instructions, but I can at least list some [...]
We came back from a mini-vacation in Wisconsin yesterday to find a package on our table addressed to Wally. Inside was this beautiful quilt: The very cute card was inscribed, in part: “Commissioned by Paul Gibbs. Made by Andrea Rennick”. Paul and the Rennicks are a few of my friends from the WordPress and BuddyPress [...]
I just tagged version 0.6-alpha of Anthologize in the wordpress.org plugin repo. This new version has a bunch of bug fixes, improvements to stability and consistency of output, and a few new feature goodies. Read more about the release here. On a related note, Anthologize development has recently moved 100% over to our Github repo. [...]
A few months ago, I was contacted by Kathryn Weinstein, a local graphic designer and member of the graphic design faculty at Queens College, about co-teaching a WordPress course, for credit toward the Graphic Design degree, in the fall of 2011. Immediately, I felt drawn to the prospect of revisiting my old haunting grounds. But [...]