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Software is only as useful as its users' ability to understand and use it. Questions arise, problems are faced, and feedback needs to get through. Unfortunately, traditional methods of enabling the conversation between users and developers have been slow and impersonal. Today, we hope to bring speed, ease, and a human element to the interaction. [Comments are disabled]
Despite begging, cajoling, writing FAQs, and renaming our "report problem" link to "broken links", we've never been able to convince everyone that http://freshmeat.net/contact/ is for writing us with problems with freshmeat itself. We still get a few messages each day from people asking why BloggyBlog 3.17 won't post their parakeet photos or telling us about misspellings in the Swedish translation of our firewall script. Until now, we've had to express our regret that we only list information about the 40,000 projects on our site, and can't provide tech support for them all. Today, we're happy to announce that's all changing. [Comments are disabled]
The past year has seen the rise of a controversial but unavoidable medium, The Blog. While blogs are not new, and many trace their spirit and much of their content back to the much-lamented baby-photo-infested personal homepages of the early Web, this has been the year in which they've gained wide audiences rivaling those of traditional news sources. I'm not too proud to say that this has left us at freshmeat feeling a little inadequate. [Comments are disabled]
These are divisive times, and the once-lauded principle of respect between peoples seems to break down more every day with us-against-them boundaries on political, religious, and geographic lines. The connective powers of the Internet offer one means of countering this trend, and at freshmeat, we'd like to do our small part for celebrating diversity. [Comments are disabled]
freshmeat.net is primarily a Web-accessible database. However, apart from requesting interface improvements for the Web part, a lot of people requested scriptable access to our database. As of this writing, we have the first version of our XML-RPC API available for you to use (that's not abuse there!). Click below for details and API specs. [Comments are disabled]
Today I'd like to talk about the additional freshmeat.net features that have been implemented over the course of the last months. Starting off I'd like to thank all of you making regular suggestions for improvement. We welcome each and every feedback we get from our users and it's a pleasure for us to implement features you request. This doesn't always happen in a timely manner, but eventually we'll get around to it. Thanks again. [Comments are disabled]
Handheld computing has progressed, and Palm is no longer the near-monopolist of the market. We've decided to rename our Palm section and welcome a greater variety of mobile computing software. [Comments are disabled]
During the boom years, broadband Internet access was a fact of many freshmeat users' lives. In the new millennium, many have found that their return to the basement of the parental home has coincided with a reintroduction to an old friend, the 56k modem. Others in developing countries like Nigeria and Idaho wish they had access to even that much bandwidth. Today, we're happy to announce that we will soon be providing a service which many of you have requested. [Comments are disabled]
The expansions of the past year have left us in need of some extra help. If you or someone you know would be interested in working at freshmeat, please read this article. [Comments are disabled]
We've had trove nodes for the Mac OS X operating system and the Mac OS X Carbon and Cocoa frameworks for ages. We've had an OS X package download link for ages. Now we officially have a whole freshmeat section devoted to the next generation of Apple's operating system. Click the link to read the full story. Links: freshmeat section [Comments are disabled]
After a slightly failed move the day it was originally intended (Wednesday) we were finally able to shift the site over to the new cluster at Exodus West today. Looks like we've been fooled once again by the VM in kernels newer than 2.4.9. After downgrading the database servers to that magic revision everything suddenly sprang back to speed. Click below for the rest of the deal. [Comments are disabled]
As many of you might have followed along, all OSDN websites are being moved from a co-location center from the east coast to a different co-location center on the west coast. freshmeat's next (or last) to move starting today, so if you see any service disruption, bear with us as we move all machine duties from here to there. OSDN netop have already duplicated the freshmeat cluster in the new center so moving should actually not be very noticable for users. But as usual, one's not always aware of all things that can possibly break. Thanks for your attention and have a nice day. [Comments are disabled]
On September 11, 2002 OSDN and all of its affiliated Web sites will host an entire day free of advertising. We will do this in remembrance of September 11, 2001 as a tribute to all of the heroes and victims of that tragic day. We will resume all advertising at 12:01 US EDT on September 12. OSDN would like to thank our customers for supporting us in this action. Most Sincerely, Richard French
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This article is a lost cause. Five minutes after it appears on freshmeat, one of you will come up with another clever feature, scoop will implement it, and this will be out-of-date. (In fact, it's happened as I was writing it, and required a revision.) More importantly, the people who most need to read it... won't. Still, like many lost causes, it's a noble one, so let's give it a try. [Comments are disabled]
Themes.org has become part of freshmeat today. I'd like to share a short history of the site and explain the reasons behind the decision to do this. [Comments are disabled]
It's been a little over a year since the major code revision that led to freshmeat ][. The Web waits for no man, and the time has come to make sure we're in step with recent developments. Today, we're happy to announce our new name and our plans to incorporate important new technologies into the site. [Comments are disabled]
As you may or may not have noticed, freshmeat has suffered from some major downtime from 11am EST to 5pm EST. Both database servers crashed hard and refused to boot with various kernel revisions and mylex driver modules. OSDN's netop staff worked hard to get a replacement machine up and running which neither cooperated nicely at first. The site is up in semi-stable state right now and searches are still disabled while we're working on getting the search database server back up and running. Please bear with us and sorry for the inconvenience. [Comments are disabled]
We've been carrying our old 2-level categorization scheme with us since the date we switched to the freshmeat II codebase on Jan 30th 2001. Over the course of the past year, people have been able to move their projects from the old category scheme to the new scheme. We have also repeatedly contacted developers, encouraging them to update their project's categorization. Effective today, all categories left over from freshmeat I have been eliminated. [Comments are disabled]
One of the problems with a software index like freshmeat's projects database is that people who wander into a category for the first time have difficulty determining which of the listed projects best suit their needs, which are ready for use, and which are in the early stages of development. They resort to downloading deadends and waste a lot of time before they find what they need, or they just give up. Today, we're starting a new series of articles that hopes to counter this problem with insights from people who are knowledgeable about specific types of software. [Comments are disabled]
By now, you've all had time to wander through freshmeat ][ and get the lay of the land. You've found your way around the Trove category system we've adopted, and many of you have recategorized your projects to fit into the Trove map, so people browsing through it will find your work. (Those of you who haven't are heartily encouraged to use the "recategorize" function on the project menu on your project's page. :) You may have noticed that there are categories available for software that runs on several operating systems, and that one of them is for PalmOS projects. [Comments are disabled]
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