Introducing myself
Apr. 5th, 2010 04:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
onliHi Dreamwidth
I'm onli, but you may call me Malte if you don't like nicknames ;)
The Google Summer of Code is why I'm here, I want to participate at the program by working for dreamwidth. If you speak german, have a look at my blog to get the fastest overview of who I am and what I do (even though I normally don't write about too personal things, the blog should give you a picture about my activities). Apart from blogging from time to time, I study Computer Science at the TU-Darmstadt, play Jugger, read books, do things - but enough of that, let's talk about the GSoC.
Well, from Germany ;) But that's not the "where" I meant.
My first contact with the Open Source World was ubuntuusers.de. It's the german support-forum for Ubuntu, at the moment the most popular Linux-distribution, and while searching there for help I stumbled into the team and became a supporter myself. I stayed for two years, for some time even leading the supporter-team.
At the moment, Serendipity is the project I'm most familiar with. S9y is a blogsoftware written in PHP, and while I only commited a few patches to the core itself, I also wrote a few plugins enhancing the software. I stumbled upon this mainly by accident (guess you can see a pattern there :) ), when searching a blogsoftware for my own blog and a friend recommended it, soon started hacking it when I wanted some features for myself.
I'd like to start with the comment-system, making it possible to comment with a name (maybe also mail and url?) but without need to login. This project is called a good project to start with, and as I'm neither familiar with dreamwidth nor perl a "easy" start would be a good thing. But there is more: I regard comments as the most important characteristic of a blog. One can write for a long time without many viewers, but I think the motivation from a comment or a discussion in the comment-area is needed to don't stop after a while. It's no coincidence that my first plugin for Serendipity was a plugin enhancing the comment-system and I afterwards wrote a few articles thinking about the comment-section and how to present it.
If that's really just a starting point, maybe I could work on "porting" one of my more useful plugins like the autotitle-plugin or nl2p. The first inserts the title of a linked site in a link as title-tag, the latter uses p-elements and css to get rid of the br-elements for better accessibility (at least that's the thought), given that this functionality don't already exists?
Because of the big "Doctor Who"-tag at the latest entries, why else? ;)
I took a closer look at dreamwidth because I'm already a little familiar with blogging-software (well, of course not with such a big hosted system). The diversity-statement convinced me to really try it, I think it stands in the tradition of the Ubuntu-philosophy, and that is a coincidence I can't ignore.
That was a lot of "me" and "I". One last: I'm looking forward to get to know you :)
I'm onli, but you may call me Malte if you don't like nicknames ;)
The Google Summer of Code is why I'm here, I want to participate at the program by working for dreamwidth. If you speak german, have a look at my blog to get the fastest overview of who I am and what I do (even though I normally don't write about too personal things, the blog should give you a picture about my activities). Apart from blogging from time to time, I study Computer Science at the TU-Darmstadt, play Jugger, read books, do things - but enough of that, let's talk about the GSoC.
Where am I from?
Well, from Germany ;) But that's not the "where" I meant.
My first contact with the Open Source World was ubuntuusers.de. It's the german support-forum for Ubuntu, at the moment the most popular Linux-distribution, and while searching there for help I stumbled into the team and became a supporter myself. I stayed for two years, for some time even leading the supporter-team.
At the moment, Serendipity is the project I'm most familiar with. S9y is a blogsoftware written in PHP, and while I only commited a few patches to the core itself, I also wrote a few plugins enhancing the software. I stumbled upon this mainly by accident (guess you can see a pattern there :) ), when searching a blogsoftware for my own blog and a friend recommended it, soon started hacking it when I wanted some features for myself.
What do I want to do here?
I'd like to start with the comment-system, making it possible to comment with a name (maybe also mail and url?) but without need to login. This project is called a good project to start with, and as I'm neither familiar with dreamwidth nor perl a "easy" start would be a good thing. But there is more: I regard comments as the most important characteristic of a blog. One can write for a long time without many viewers, but I think the motivation from a comment or a discussion in the comment-area is needed to don't stop after a while. It's no coincidence that my first plugin for Serendipity was a plugin enhancing the comment-system and I afterwards wrote a few articles thinking about the comment-section and how to present it.
If that's really just a starting point, maybe I could work on "porting" one of my more useful plugins like the autotitle-plugin or nl2p. The first inserts the title of a linked site in a link as title-tag, the latter uses p-elements and css to get rid of the br-elements for better accessibility (at least that's the thought), given that this functionality don't already exists?
Why Dreamwidth?
Because of the big "Doctor Who"-tag at the latest entries, why else? ;)
I took a closer look at dreamwidth because I'm already a little familiar with blogging-software (well, of course not with such a big hosted system). The diversity-statement convinced me to really try it, I think it stands in the tradition of the Ubuntu-philosophy, and that is a coincidence I can't ignore.
That was a lot of "me" and "I". One last: I'm looking forward to get to know you :)
(no subject)
Date: 2010-04-06 03:56 am (UTC)(Also it's really refreshing to see somebody who doesn't just want to write a mobile client!)
I'm the accessibility team lead at the moment so I like your idea of fixing our stupid BRs! I believe that's listed in bugzilla under things that need doing, but nobody's got around to it yet. It may be complicated by the presence of the Rich Text Editor, not sure.
The autotitle functionality interests me too actually because most people don't put titles on things here and I read DW through an RSS reader so ... yeah, no skimming possible! But because Dreamwidth is generally used for personal blogging, I'd say more than half of our entries (this is pretty much a guess, but at least a significant number) have no links to external sites! Perhaps we could come up with another technique?
Looking forward to getting to know you.
Cheers,
Ricky
(no subject)
Date: 2010-04-06 04:31 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-04-06 09:48 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-04-06 09:45 am (UTC)(I thought at first about writing the dektop-client - it's one of the few projects in whole gsoc that allow that much freedom. But working with the platform itself sounded more interesting in the end)
Getting rid of the brs really is complicated. The parser-like plugin I wrote for that costed more days of work than any other plugin. And yes, The Rich Text Editor might get in the way, depends on it's handling of newlines... But in the end, I'm convinced it's worth it (even if I can't do it as part of gsoc someone should try ;) )
The autotitle-plugin is maybe a little confusing at first - don't think you understand it the way I planned it - should've explained it more detailled :)
It's not about the title of the entry - it's about the link itself. a-elements may have a title-tag which gets displayed as a tooltip when hovering the link. Inserting their the title of the linked site is regarded as usability-plus.
For autotitle of entrys I sadly don't habe any idea (yet ;) )
(no subject)
Date: 2010-04-06 09:46 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-04-06 09:57 am (UTC)I'd try, from what I've seen so far it's not too hard.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-04-06 11:00 pm (UTC)(We do seem to have a lot of Doctor Who fans are ound here!)
(no subject)
Date: 2010-04-07 12:50 pm (UTC)(Yeah, a good thing ;) )
(no subject)
Date: 2010-04-07 10:34 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-04-07 12:51 pm (UTC)Didn't expect to meet many germans here, especially not from Darmstadt.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-04-07 01:08 pm (UTC)