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2009 Top 10 Software Cooperative News

MJ Ray — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 17:08:01 +0000

Amazon Kindle Un-selling Books was the most-viewed news item on my blog this year. Once again, a lock-out/bad-business story takes the top spot. I don’t think that one got as much coverage in the mainstream media as they usually do, which probably contributed to the relatively high reader numbers. I feel like I get criticised often for commenting about business ethics, but it does seem to attract a fairly big audience.

The repost of Tribute to Richard Rothwell came a fairly close second. Again, not something that the mainstream tech news covered. “the world is a sadder and lonelier place without him, and the rest of the world has lost one of its brightest stars.”

Top-placed technical item was HOWTO Apache httpd 2.2 PAM Authentication Modules which was a distant third. It was posted in late 2008, but I suspect that will keep getting viewers until everyone’s upgraded. It’s currently the top recipient of search engine traffic for the site.

Other technical stories in the top ten were Windows 7: Released with known critical bug in fifth, ssh security in sixth and Top 8 J2ME MIDP Applications in tenth place.

The only completely non-technical topic was the Cooperatives-SW Board and Housing Enquiry in ninth place.

Cross-over topics complete the ten with 2009 Software in the Public Interest Board Election in fourth place, New #ukgovOSS Action Plan in seventh and Meeting about forming a Koha Foundation in eighth.

Finally, I think the strangest three search phrases ending at my site this year are “spi bike week”, “request free t-shirt” and “will britannia building society demutualise“.

Happy New Year! Found any easter eggs in your web stats?

WordCamp UK, 17-18 July 2010 in Manchester

MJ Ray — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 07:26:08 +0000

Advance notice of WordCamp UK 2010 on 17-18 July 2010 in Manchester. Ticket sales expected in early April 2010.

I voted for the Portsmouth bid, so of course Manchester won(!)

I’ve passed the event details to our co-op for consideration. Do you think we should go and if so why? If not, why not?

#ukgovoss and Poor gov.uk Websites

MJ Ray — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 07:30:32 +0000

Using gov.uk websites is an ordeal at the best of time. Even the most polished websites tend to reflect the structure of the government body, which I find counter-intuitive – and I’m a councillor who pays attention to these things.

Few websites are polished though. Most don’t even seem to reach “competent”. After reports of 60% of UK government websites containing HTML errors and local government sites containing porn-links, there’s recently been reports about Birmingham City Council’s website costing nearly £3m and still not capable of basic features like apostophes. Have you got a horror story to top that?

Why does this keep happening? Good cooperatively-developed web applications and tech worker co-ops are available. I’ll be musing on this and other council-related topics over at Parish Councillor for FOSS for the next little while if you’d like to join me.

Consumers, Boycotts and Cooperatives

MJ Ray — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 07:27:30 +0000

A couple of days ago, daniel stone: boycott insanity compared Boycott Novell to “people on the street shouting at the sky about the government.”

Previously, I’ve explained here why I think Boycotts are consumers doing judo on corporations and it’s still on the Boycott Novell About page. I people who boycott companies to those who just complain about them while so-called-engage with them.

Hopefully, daniel stone is just unhappy with the IRC spew (which I’ve also criticised in the past) but that’s not clear to me. That IRC spew doesn’t seem much worse than stuff I’ve seen in other projects’ channels – the main difference with BoycottNovell is that they seem to publish all of it to a blog, which really doesn’t seem smart.

On a related boycotts/consumers note, Ed Mayo, previously of New Economics Foundation and Consumer Focus, has been named as the new Chief Executive of Co-operatives UK. TTLLP is a CUK member and even though I’m sceptical after Digital Britain, at least Ed Mayo’s blog is running on free and open source software. Let’s see what happens.

identi.ca and twitter OLPC – One Line Per Contact

MJ Ray — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 07:46:41 +0000

I’ve been having fun with identi.ca and twitter recently, but some of my contacts, friends, followees, subscriptions (or whatever you want to call them) send many more messages than others. One contact gave a running commentary on his progress up the floors of a building yesterday. Fine, but a bit of a torrent of data.

If someone posts and leaves it for a while, it’s sometimes an explanation of where they’ve gone, so I’d like to check people’s last tweets. I’ve seen some clients do that and it seems there’s a method in the API to do it. The API returns XML, so I’m using XSL to transform it to xhtml (I’ve still not taken the time to learn the XML CSS ways) with the following commands:-

	wget --no-check-certificate -O - https://username:PASSWORD@identi.ca/api/statuses/friends.xml | \\
	sed -e '1a\\
\\

' > identica.xml

And here’s twitters.xsl which converts the downloaded xml to xhtml:-



twitter.com



<xsl:value-of select="$site" /> Friends








 () -

Have fun! (And what have I done wrong?)

journals.aol.com closure botched

MJ Ray — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 07:40:59 +0000

America OnLine (AOL) killed their blogging service – actually, all their Hometown sites – last September and I only just noticed.

AOL didn’t kill it cleanly. They could have offered 301 Moved Permanently redirects to users’ new hosting (good – maybe no interruption to users), returning a 404 Not Found with an explanation (OK – software like RSS readers would detect the serious problem) or even simply taking the hostname offline (bad, but better than what they did). Instead, AOL 301-redirected everyone to a page on their own journal (which hasn’t closed down) to “sincerely apologize for any inconvenience”. It wouldn’t have been so much inconvenience if it had been closed down cleanly.

I was only reading one journal there (Pripensulo) which I can’t find anywhere else, but I’m surprised by the incompetent webmastering. AOL’s webmasters run managing massive (if bland) websites, after all, and if they’re smart enough to do a 301 redirect to their apology, then they’re smart enough to do a useful redirect or a 404 Not Found. Why didn’t they? Don’t they care about their users? Are they trying to take SEO points from all their users and give them to People Connection?

Looking Back: 2008 Part 3

MJ Ray — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 07:43:59 +0000

This is the final part of my review of popular articles on my news websites during 2008. It follows part 1 and part 2, but it can be enjoyed on its own, like an nice ripe cheese. Unlike one friend, I do not like cheese for breakfast.

September

Are Your Free Software T-Shirts Ethical? This question got a lot of views, but no answers yet. Again, those statistics surprised me.
Away From Keyboard was a listing of events I attended in early September, with some links to summaries in the article and the comments. (I can’t find my Bristol Knowledge Unconference report just now. Did I post it to another site?)

October

The Trouble With Big Webmail built on my past comments about Yahoo and broadens them to Hotmail/Live and GoogleMail. I’m still convinced those sites remain popular because they are good at marketing, rather than being good at email. In fact, they’re so bad at email, almost no-one should use them.
Pulling One File From a Plesk Backup – It seems I wasn’t the only person not to know about that.
Nestle Boycott 20th Anniversary seems to be the only time I wrote about boycotts this year, surprisingly (I know I’m pretty militant and direct-action-y), but what more deserving target?

November

Which Social Bookmarking? was by far the most popular article in November and it also got lots of helpful comments. I posted my review and choices (such as they are) a few days ago.

December

Bristol Alternative Christmas Quiz. Everyone loves a good seasonal quiz, it seems. I didn’t get to it (arrrrrrrrrgh busy!) but I hope it went well for BWCC.
Smart Tricks with ssh was only the second meme-like post to make the “most popular” list this year.
and it’s still a bit early to evaluate articles from late December! I may add a few to this list later.

Happy New Year 2009, in case I don’t see you before then!

Looking Back: 2008 Part 2

MJ Ray — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 07:49:29 +0000

This is a continuation from part 1 but can be enjoyed on its own too, like a good red wine. It’s a bit early for me for red wine, though.

May

BBC TV: Click: Free=beer and facebook-flaming – my letter was never broadcast, as far as I know
Fuel Price Bleating and Biking – one of the last non-work articles to appear before I split them off into their own page last summer.
Told You So: Exhibitions and Spammer Registrars and Quick Question: opticaljungle.com = publicdomainregistry.com? – these were about similar topics and I may have new developments to report early in 2009.

June

BBC website, TV and Technology – some background comments on the BBC as they try to figure out what to do with new media. Auntie is a bit clueless about new things.
7 Reasons Why Firefox 3 Download Day Sucks – the big news for web development was a new major version of the almost-free-software web browser. It’s a big improvement on version 2, but still had some “brown paper bag” mistakes and the “download day” marketing idea put clueless news media (see previous item) before users. Continued in FF3 day 3: first impressions, FF3 day 6: security flaw and banks and FF3 day 10: security flaw 2, more banks, looking for a new browser.

July

Standing for Election to SPI Board Again – my most popular page ever, by number of page views anyway. It was spammed to hell so often that comments are now switched off. I suspect the US Election had more to do the popularity of this article than my unsuccessful candidature for the Software in the Public Interest board.
Batting Against Three Strikes through the Back Door – I’m a member and ambassador for ThePhoneCoop and TTLLP are agents/resellers for them, so this misguided EU law-making was worth some of my time. Writing about it here got me a response from Neil Parish MEP that I don’t think I would have got otherwise. It’s a terrible shame he never sent a reply from Malcolm Harbour.
LugRadio Live Event Review – a review of one of the most populist UK free software events by one of their most vociferous critics (back before they went all Creative Commons warm and fuzzy) was always going to be popular, which is partly why I wrote it, but not the whole reason: I’m delighted that the event should return in the future. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty damn fantastic. “A tech conference crossed with a rocking gig by the strangest boyband ever, with a cheerleading racoon and some very cool people.”
Good News on the Koha 3.0.0-final Approach – another surprisingly popular marginal comment. I’ve currently broken/desynched/something my local git tree. I’m going to repair it by New Year and then start writing up more Koha explorations and sending patches upstream.

August

SPI Meeting Announcement and Why People Don’t Join SPI – I think this summary is still relevant today and I hope that I can help improve things in 2009.
Is Yahoo Now Even Worse On Spam? All of the big unpaid webmails have problems, but Yahoo (and so BT Internet) are worse than most.

More to follow in a couple of days…

Looking Back: 2008 Part 1

MJ Ray — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 07:15:07 +0000

Over the next few days, I’m looking at the most popular articles from this site and my previous news website during 2008. I’ll be doing it in three parts.

Popularity is measured by page views from local access logs, but some articles were actually more popular in the months after they were first posted, so it’s not completely accurate, but let’s be forgiving over the holidays, OK?

January

I must have been writing rubbish because nothing got that popular at the start of the year, but some of my older pages continued to be popular throughout 2008:-

Online Banking with GNU/Linux, Firefox-based browsers or Free Software (started in 2007) – I really should move that list to another address because I think it’s going to be around for a while.
alt.satellite.tv.europe Frequently Asked Questions (first posted in 2006) – again, could do with a better home.
Annoying blog comment misfeatures: letter images – until people recognise the limitations of “CAPTCHA”, this is probably going to be a popular page.

February

SPI Meeting Wed 27 Feb 1900Z irc.oftc.net/#spi – I think this started my regular meeting announcements, which has been a surprisingly popular series and has expanded into a whole category of SPI articles here.
The Myth Of Deregulation – this was meant to be a marginal rant. Its popularity (and the subsequent comments – some of which were unpublishable or their authors requested removal) surprised me and so I started writing more about social enterprise, cooperatives-sw member businesses and how they interact with GNU/Linux software and web development.

March

Annoying Judge Resurrects Software Patents in the UK – notable only for pointing out that Symbian is not a UK company. It was probably news to some software developers, which is probably why it made my popular articles list.
Debian Project Leader IRC Debate or it might have been Random recent threads from planet debian – for the first part of the year, I’m looking at what page spiked on which day, but I posted twice a few days apart, so I can’t tell which article on the page was popular.

April

UK mobile micropublishing choices? – for the trip that motivated that article, I used twitter, but I’m actually updating identi.ca over XMPP from my mobile now.
Better Free Software Organisations? – I’ve read the Yunus book mentioned in the comments on the Advogato repost of this article and I’ve a review which will appear on this site later. It includes a bit of a flaming of the simplistic and IMO factually-incorrect dismissal of cooperative businesses, so I wonder if it will get a few responses from Yunus-fans.
Explaining web site improvements: what’s important to you? It seems that April was a good time for asking questions: this is a third popular question-based article. The website discussed has now been approved and ordered from TTLLP, but the work is not yet scheduled.

That’s the first few months of 2008 done. I’ll post the next few months in a couple of days. Hope you’re enjoying the holidays if you’re having them. I’m sure I am

Supporting World AIDS Day

MJ Ray — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 07:33:42 +0000

“HIV/AIDS has been a global epidemic for more than 27 years. Most of today’s youth have never known a world without it. … The time is now. Together, we can prevent the spread of this pandemic – through awareness, care, prevention, education and research.”

Today is World AIDS Day and I’m happy to support it as part of the Bloggers Unite effort.