2004.11.28
Open Source
In answer to Jason Clark’s November Challenge which I’m finally getting to, here are a few open source applications I use that I’d like to thank and encourage others to use.
First off, the obvious: Blosxom. Blosxom, created by Rael Dornfest, is a small Perl script that runs this website and several others for myself and friends: OOKEE.com, The People’s Republic of Bookee (home of Odd, AKA gTodd), Mookee’s Main Page, I Am Defiant (home of Jon E.), Vexed: Piss Off (home of NHK), Gracie, and a few others like Arena of the Superpowers and The Unofficial Blosxom Users Site.
Blosxom, however, is pretty rudimentary without the multitude of plugins available (also available here), all free to customize and personalize your site. So a big thank you! to Rael and all of the plugin writers. You guys have done much for the world, each in your own ways.
Blosxom is brilliant for its simplicity and its potential power. Once you understand the basics and start working with it you realize that there’s little you can’t do with it, and if you can’t figure out how to do something really tricky, ask on the Mailing List and almost always get an answer from the very helpful people there.
Tied into that I’d like to thank everyone that’s worked on BSD as that is what Apple’s MacOS X is based on and is what I’m using for desktop and server. I’d also like to thank the makers of Apache, the webserver I’m using to host all of those websites, and then some.
There really aren’t many applications I use on a daily basis that aren’t paid applications, but there are many websites I visit on a nearly daily basis and am grateful for their work. Slashdot for keeping me informed of the geek world, bOING bOING for their insight and interesting links, Robbie Taylor’s Today in Alternate History for its constant interesting reading, Arts and Letters Daily for differing perspectives, and Google because I use their services almost daily. Probably the best set of websites I could provide are in the linkblog on the right side of this homepage.
I could make huge lists but will leave it at that. Who would you like to thank?
Categorized: technology
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