Slashdot Mirror
Slashcode v1.0 Released
Patrick and Chris have been working their kung fu overtime for some
time now to clean up Slashcode and release a version one point oh.
Its available on Slashcode: if you're interested in setting up your own slashdotesque weblog and are up on mod_perl and apache, you'll enjoy it. With 1.0 out, its time to once again start hammering on new features including wireless device support. I hacked in quickie WAP device support, so if your phone handles it, give it a whirl. Avantgo will be coming soon as well, along with many design improvements that will drastically improve performance (thank god!) and simplify administration, and allow usage on a variety of SQL servers.
Considering I coded that on purpose, I doubt we'll remove it from a future release. This is quite intentional behavior.
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
I might also mention that Squishdot is available. It is a lot easier to set up than Slashdot and its code is a lot cleaner. It runs under Zope, using a modified Confera engine.
Back when I joined slashdot over 2 years ago (is there any way to find out exactly when?), it was an inovative site with an interface that was hardly used anywhere on the web- back then, the hot things in webdesign were frames and portals. Now, I can hardly pass 10 websites without seeing atleast one that has a similar "web-logesque" interface. It looks like slashdot was one of the first sites of this trend. Now, we have reached version 1.0 of Slashcode, and we can truely say that both slashdot and it's community have gone a long way. Even though we have to face trolls on a permanent basis, we can now easily face them with our army of well-selected moderators. We have even grown some "hidden" forums, created by using comments.pl with a sid that doesn't point to an article. Back when I joined, I got ID #4213. The comunity has grown so much, that the poll often goes into the tens of thousends of votes, and that's just the people who vote! Slashdot has grown from an anonymous site that only a few select geeks knew about to a gaigentic news agency of sorts for nerds worldwide!
Way to go Slashdot!!
I certainly hope you are not trolling, as this is something that comes up time and time again.
It's really not enough just to upload the code to a public site and release it under one of the free (as in speech) licenses to call yourself "Open Source." While technically your source is open, there is much much more to that than just having publically accesible/modifiable code.
At the heart of the Open Source concept is the notion that software developers should "release early and release often." Note that this is entirely contrary to what you have suggested. It's ok. You're still learning.
The reason you release early is to catch major problems early, when they are minor ones. That way they don't develop into huge problems later which require an entire redesign. Note that Open Source isn't an instant cure for design problems; rather, by its very nature, more eyes see the code, more brains work on the concepts, and thus better solutions tend to arise.
The reason you release often is to keep things moving. Hoarding the code leads to a slow development process wrought with bugs. Releasing often encourages people to try the software and submit feedback, since they know that a new release which will address their concerns/bugs/RFEs is just around the corner. Without the release often, you are losing much of the benefit of open source.
You would do well to read ESR's The Cathedral and the Bazaar. It does an excellent job of documenting a particular example where the Open Source development process resulted in a high-quality application. Along the way it explains much of what I have hinted at, with documented evidence as proof.
May the source be with you.
I like this Slashdot thing. Cool stuff since I was led to it a couple years ago. Perhaps this is beyond what slashdot hopes to accomplish, but there is SUCH a great wealth of knowledge here, its a shame it can only be accessed via designated topics. Even Ask Slashdot questions are picked for us.
So how about setting up a part of this venerable website as a general forum? Where folks can post questions which the Powers That Be may not consider worthy enough to post on the front page?
I'm trying to learn Linux, and often have questions directly related to the OS, or others about what type of programs are the best, the options- how exactly a recompile works and such.
It would be fantastic if I could post these questions in a general forum in case anyone is willing to help.
Or perhaps such a place exists already! But usually I have to remember 10 different newsgroups/webboards and which I posted questions to...
Kinda like an Open Ask Q/A section. Embrace and Extend?
Perhaps the moderation of such an area would be overwhelming. Then again, the same user-moderation scheme could be used there. Or perhaps just ask for volunteers from among those with the higher karma points.
Regardless, love the site and would really dig if it expanded in such a way.
Kinda like Moe, but just a little more Kool
I when I read this, I fired up the web browser on my phone. Works nicely but the text formatting is a little wierd. You, of course, don't get to see the comments.
--GnrcMan--
I refer of course to the trolls who are waging a DDoS attack on moderator points. Just like any other DoS attack, they seek to consume all of a resource to prevent legitimate users from accessing it. Instead of consuming sockets, bandwidth, CPU, or disk space, these guys are consuming moderator points.
I've even noticed that the last several times I've moderated, I end up losing about 3-4 points of Karma. Now, perhaps I'm being "a bad moderator", but I don't think so: I take great care to moderate well and in the spirit of the Moderator guidelines. I wonder if the Trolls haven't managed to get several accounts they use for bogus MetaModeration.
So I wonder what if any attempts to correct this have been added to Slash1.0
www.eFax.com are spammers
The URL is the same (http://slashdot.org/). Rob simply added a mime redirect to httpd.conf that redirects text/vnd.wap.wml requests to /slashdot.wml. WML has some issues with HTML tags so the WML is basically a stripped-down lowercase HTML version of index page. Viewing comments via WAP is going to take some work becuase viewing 100K of text on a cell phone LCD screen is obviously not feasible so it will most likely be view-one-comment-at-a-time type of scenerio.
If you think the Slash code sucks, you have not looked at recently, and don't know what you are talking about. It could stand for a lot of improvements, which we are busy making. But it is far from sucktitude.
If you think Perl is slow, you are a stupid troll. Go away.
If you think SquishZopePHPYourMamaSlash is better than Slash, then by all means, use it and shut up about it.
If you have patches or want to otherwise participate in developing Slash, make sure you post it on the Slashcode site (or better yet, please read the FAQ about how to help, because if you don't, we might not see your contributions or patches or suggestions.
This has been a public service announcement. You can go back to your hot grits now.
"Hah! Taste my Third Heaven's Gate Parsing Strike!"
"Useless against Golden Willow Parts the Nested Documents!"
And lots of programmers wearing jeans and t-shirts flying around on cables through bamboo forests.
***JUMP PAD ACTIVATION INITIATION START***
***TRANSPORT WHEN READY***
***JUMP PAD ACTIVATION INITIATION START***
***TRANSPORT WHEN READY***
Not yet -- Slashdot has a lot of tweaks that have to be massaged out but during the next few weeks it will be upgraded to 1.0, then once Slashdot is on 1.0 code base it will stay in synch with the latest-greatest Slash release. I think Slashcode is running on 1.0.
This is a shameless plug, but can I suggest you guys take a look at DBIx::AnyDBD. It's a module I wrote to greatly simplify making cross db perl DBI applications.
The basics are that you put all your db access methods in a Default.pm file (in the class hierarchy of your choosing). Then when you want to port to a new platform, anything that's different to your original development platform goes in [Driver].pm, where [Driver] is one of Sybase or Oracle or Pg, etc.
This has really simplified things for me on a cross platform development system, and I think it will for slashdot (and other systems) too.
Mail me direct if you have any questions.
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
Am I the only one who has visions of two programmers talking out of sync with their mouth movements?
"Huh. So you wish. To review my code. You must be eager. To die. Huh."
When I loaded slashdot this morning, did
I load a page generated by slash 1.0? That is
the question.
Amazing magic tricks