Seek Nuance

Over the years, I’ve used many website forums and bulletin boards. They’ve been based on a variety of packages, such as phpBB, LiveCloud, or vBulletin. PhpBB is, I think, the reigning king of forum software.

To add a forum to a site, you can use an off-the-shelf system, or roll your own. Casual sleuthing will reveal an assortment of at least 50 some-odd off-the-shelf bulletin board systems, from which you can choose one to run your forum. If you want a bespoke forum, most frameworks provide bits of the necessary functionality, if not entire customizable forum modules. For example, see the Django forum applications or Drupal’s Forum module.

Web forums are OK, but I’ve yet to encounter one that wasn’t clumsy in some way — sometimes, in multiple ways. And you know what? I’ve yet to find one that beats august Usenet, when accessed with a decent reader such as Agent or Unison.

I’ve used identi.ca micro-blogging for the past five months. I’m switching to twitter.

Why identi.ca?

I was involved with a number of projects at Fisher Communications until last month. Including building a Plone system to be its news sites’ in-house CMS. Our development environment and technology stack were open-source, with only a couple exceptions.

When I worked on our technology roadmap, an early consideration was how to distribute quick (lightweight) intra-team updates. Virtually the entire development team would be within the same building; of those, virtually all would be within one office. The CMS project would eventually reach 10 heads in dev, QA, and operations; plus content creation and advertising traffic control. Other dev or page layout individuals would be on other activities. For all of this, we needed a way to inform each other about daily activities. Daily stand-ups are used for this in a typical XP or Scrum team. (To be fair, stand-ups are used in many different development methodologies, but XP and Scrum have greatly popularized them in the mainstream technical media.)
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If you’re looking for mind-mapping software, I recommend FreeMind. I learned about it from a Macworld review.

It’s open source (GNU GPL), feature-rich, and works great. The review dinged it for frequent hangs, but it hasn’t hung on me yet. I’m using it to brainstorm my job search.

Its UI isn’t very Mac-like, but it is tolerable. And you can navigate a map quite easily after learning the keyboard shortcuts.

I’m looking for information on Trac vs. Mantis for issue and bug tracking, and MoinMoin vs. Sycamore for wikis.  By “information,” I mean comparisons and trade-offs thereof…

The issue tracker would be used by about 20 people, all within one company.  The wiki would be used by up to 100 people, ditto.

Any experiences, anecdotes, informed opinions, or even uninformed opinions, out there?

I’m launching a new Django-based project at work.  I’ll initially be the sole developer, but I expect it to grow to 10 heads (developers, QA, web designers, operations, and project management) over time.  I hope to start the ball rolling this week, and one of my first decisions is the Source Code Management (SCM) tool.

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I’m puzzled by LinkedIn profile photographs.

I’m certain mine is a minority opinion. LinkedIn added them because, they said, it was their most-requested feature. And the blogosphere’s reaction was generally (uniformly?) positive. The CW was that LinkedIn was responding to Facebook market pressure.

I may identify myself as antediluvian by writing this, but I think this feature is rather odd as it’s been implemented. Read more…