Ohloh Blog

The good folks who bring us Git have announced the Git User's Survey 2008. If you are a Git user, I encourage you to take a moment to give them your input. The survey is open until September 10.

The results of the 2006 and 2007 surveys are also available online.

2008 Git User's Survey

We've been seeing more Ohloh widgets in the wild lately. Here's a few examples:

1. Rock Your Hackers Facebook App
   Rock Your Hackers allows you to praise, promote, and in no uncertain terms shout for joy about your favorite free and open source software projects (FOSS) and then share your "Hack List" with your friends (and perhaps fellow hackers)! Wave the banners of your favorite FOSS projects for all your "faceworld" to see.

2. Drupal Plugin
   This module allows users, with the right permissions, to display their Ohloh profiles in their Drupal account page. It will also facilitate any future integrations with Ohloh.

3. ikiwiki Shortcut
   Ikiwiki is a wiki compiler. It converts wiki pages into HTML pages suitable for publishing on a website. Ikiwiki stores pages and history in a revision control system such as Subversion or Git. It also features a handy ohloh shortcut.

4. QuickSilver Websearch Plugin
   If you use quicksilver on the mac, you can quickly search projects ohloh using the websearch plugin.

Got an idea for a new widget? Check out our REST API docs. It's free and easy to use. If you'd like to discuss it, come also join us on IRC - irc.freenode.net at #ohloh.

Someone joined our spanking new IRC channel last night (#ohloh on irc.freenode.net) and alerted me to jabber chat groups. They offer similar functionality to IRC: you can reserve a 'well-known group name' (for example: ohloh@conference.jabber.org) and offers basic moderator controls.

The benefit, to me at least, is that this integrates much better with IM clients. Not that I mind IRC that much, but I've got to admit that I don't enjoy the esoteric commands and bots very much.

In any case, we'll officially stick with IRC for now - it's way more popular. Secretly, I'll keep rooting for jabber chat groups to take off.

By popular demand, we've created an IRC channel. Come join us on irc.freenode.net in #ohloh. Feel free to discuss ohcount-related stuff (including GSOC 2008 proposals), ohloh website problems or ideas, or just drop by to heckle us for the fun of it.

See y'all there!

We're proud to announce that we've been selected as a mentoring organization for Google's 2008 Summer of Code program. Are you interested in parsers, source code analysis and/or software development metrics? Then apply now!.

We hope you'll be as excited as we are to shed light on open source software development. Successful contributions will be run against the billions of lines of code Ohloh processes. If that's not enough - just think of the massive kudos you'll earn ;-).

We've outlined some project ideas on our Ohcount Project Ideas page. Give us a shout if you have any questions about the info there. We're also curious to hear alternative ideas about how you'd like to contribute to Ohcount. In the end, any interesting metric you'd want to derive from analyzing raw source code is interesting to us - bring it up. A general code complexity metric would be pretty cool, for example. Note that we strongly favor metrics that can apply to most programming languages. A Dylan code beauty metric, for example, wouldn't fly.

You can reach us by emailing info@ohloh.net, or, if you prefer a more informal chat, ping me on IM using jabber contact 'jasonallen@gmail.com'. Good luck to all applicants, we look forward to working with you.