af68fe5d4d9d8e06046b30b996739a00
Making the News Easier to Digest
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
In a matter of months if not weeks our IRC network (or channel at the time) turns 15. It started in early 2008 (this is the oldest log on record). This was the year we also started posting Daily Links (the oldest entry in "News Roundup" is dated January 31 2008). We've done that almost every day since then.
"A lot has changed in 15 years and it helps to be able to go back in time to MeeGo, OpenMoko, and all sorts of other things that people completely forgot about by now."The IRC network (or Freenode channels at the time) has been running 24/7 since them, fully logged as well. The public logs have historic value as they help show how we grew and how the community evolved over the years. We did shape many things, including the fate of Novell.
The IRC logs are definitely complete. In case of connection issues (like yesterday when we finally moved to fibre-optics at home) I tried to import data from peers, either machines or people. It was more challenging albeit still doable when I was away on holiday.
But arguably the most important contribution of the site is the record of news, with special focus or emphasis on GNU/Linux and Free software. A lot has changed in 15 years and it helps to be able to go back in time to MeeGo, OpenMoko, and all sorts of other things that people completely forgot about by now. We've posted literally millions of links in Daily Links and, to a lesser extent, in IRC.
"The tools will be Free software (AGPLv3, as usual) and available in Git some time soon."Over the past few days we've been working on new tools (still in early development, still not in Git) that will help us manage links or news of interest. This is a strategic area to us as it also helps with research for potential articles, videos and so on.
The tools will be Free software (AGPLv3, as usual) and available in Git some time soon. For now, however, we're gradually departing from Graphical User Interface (GUI) front endd like RSS readers. There are better ways to read, accumulate and organise the news. Tailor-made programs overcome artificial limitations of GUIs. It's about time. Better late than never. There's some more background to all this in the video above. ⬆