Elgg
Elgg 1.5
Elgg 1.5 was released today. There's an official post over at news.elgg.org, but I wanted to make a note of it here too. This is the longest we've taken over a release since 1.0, and there are almost eight hundred significant engine
Latest
Politics
Gender differences on the new frontier
It's a commonly accepted fact that computing is a male-dominated industry, but I was shocked by the scale of the inequality. Okay, this is kind of unscientific, but take a look at these statistics: * Female population of the world: 49.8% * Female population of Facebook: 55% * Female population
Software development
Bug tracking
All software has bugs; the trick is to find them and remove them as quickly as possible while balancing against the other development you have to do. This is where bug trackers come in: they allow developers to project manage these activities while allowing users and other members of their
Elgg
The mechanics of "open"
Since we started Elgg, I've always kept a very open philosophy about how the software should work. From the human perspective, we wanted it to be as inclusive as possible, with an easy-to-use interface and innards that allowed you to do very technical things (like, in Elgg 0.
Linklog
Pathdigger
[..] don't forget that continued funding of any park hinges on public support. Kids who have access to green spaces grow up to appreciate their value [..], and a report funded by the Forestry Commission [..] suggests that kids who do shocking things like climb trees and build dens are more
Web
Atlas is a different way to develop on the web
Atlas is a project that attempts to make developing web applications similar to developing on the Mac. (The actual platform is called Cappuccino.) They've even created a preprocessor for Javascript, Objective-J, that works in a similar way to the Mac's Objective-C. 280 Slides, by the same
Web
Last.fm isn't selling your data to the RIAA, apparently
[..] So do us a favour – if you see people spreading the rumour, refer them to this blog post and mention you heard from a friend that “Techcrunch are full of shit.” Last.fm: "Techcrunch are full of shit". The other day, Techcrunch claimed that the music site Last.
Web
What Facebook users want
What Facebook's Users Want In The Next Terms Of Service. Facebook says it's got a new Terms of Service in the works, with feedback from its user community in mind. Cue the community coming up with its own Bill of Rights containing things it things Facebook
Web
User control on the open web
Data portability and the open data movement ("the open web" for simplicity's sake) revolve around the idea that you should be able to take your data from one service to another without restriction, as well as control who gets to see it and how. Very simply,
Linklog
Implementing open standards is too hard
[..] the plain truth is this: it's empirically way too painful still for first-time OAuth developers to get their code working, and despite the fact that OAuth is a standard, the empirical "it-just-works-rate" is way too low. Joseph Smarr: Implementing OAuth is still too hard... but it
Linklog
Social technology reinforces existing networks
Why do we create and maintain social networks? Most people can immediately think of a few natural reasons -- we get something from the interaction, or the person is nearby and is close to us in proximity, age or gender. But researching such theories on a large scale has never
Web
Buy from marginalized communities with Elevyn
Elevyn is a kind of Etsy for marginalized communities: a way to buy directly from artisans in poorer parts of the world. You get a unique piece of clothing, jewelry or other art; they get to lift themselves out of poverty through their own work. This is something that would