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 [...]
Filed in digital humanities, edtech, philo, wordpress
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Also tagged bsd, ethics, free software, gpl, intellectual property, licenses, open source, philosophy, Richard Stallman
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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. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
My wife and I just had our first baby, which is the occassion for much nachas and, by extension, picture sharing. Facebook is, for better or for worse (emphasis on the latter), the de facto place for such sharing to happen. For a number of reasons – a desire to be somewhat selective about who [...]
I’ve just tagged version 1.2 of Unconfirmed, my WordPress plugin that allows for easy management of unactivated registrations on your WP site. Unconfirmed 1.2 has two new, handy features: WordPress non-Network support Previous version of Unconfirmed supported only WP Multisite (Network mode). That made sense, because WP “single” does not have native support for user [...]
A few weeks ago, I wrote about reclaiming short URLs using YOURLS. That post raised some interest among the CUNY Academic Commons team in having a URL shortener just for the Commons, with full integration into BuddyPress. So I emailed Ozh Richard, author of YOURLS, about the possibility of adding BuddyPress support to his official [...]
After seeing that Andrew Spittle is working on a WordPress theme for a mobile photoblog (as discussed here), I thought I’d do the same. I happen to like Autofocus pretty well, so I’ve just made a child theme, with a few Twitter-specific modifications. Follow it on Github: https://github.com/boonebgorges/boones-photoblog. (Keep in mind, you’ll need the parent [...]
In my last Project Reclaim post, I talked about using WordPress as a Twitpic-like personal mobile photo service. When the ultimate goal of the photoblog is to send a tweet, it’s almost always necessary to use a URL shortener. But trusting your URL shortening to a free service is a dangerous move. If that service [...]
Twitpic and its ilk are pretty convenient, especially when they’re integrated into mobile Twitter apps. But as recent articles have shown, the terms of service of such services can be downright icky. Twitpic may have changed its tune a few days after the outcry, but honestly, if it takes an outcry to make a company [...]