Infrastructure

Like announced earlier on the serendipity blog, fellow usability expert Joachim Harloff is currently trying to improve the listing of Serendipity Plugins so that they are more accessible to users.

He needs your help to fulfill them. Initially he planned to personally meet with serendipity users, but this proved more complex than initially hoped. Thus he has created a smaller, text-based version of it.

You can download the file at http://www.softuse.com/serendipity_sorting.zip. It contains detailed instructions. You can also feel free to personally contact Joachim about any questions you have.

Joachim estimates this questionnaire to take you about 1,5 hours of your time. You could greatly help to improve the serendipity usability, so please participate! Joachim wants to evaluate your responses starting on September the 8th.

For the time being, the Netmirror.org servers currently do not update anymore, they seem to be having a problem. We have contacted the maintainers last week and hope to get feedback soon.

Until then, download of some and new plugins via Spartacus through this mirror will not work, and you will need to configure the Spartacus plugin to use the SourceForge.Net mirror servers.

Once the problem is resolved, we will give you a status update here.

UPDATE: Netmirror.org works again, thanks to their technicians :-)

This month's german PHP magazine features an article introducing Serendipity and its capabilities, as well as some looks into thecode- written by yours truly, Garvin Hicking. The article is titled "Blogging mit Biss"

The article was written with newbies to Serendipity in mind, but also targetted at eager developers who might want to contribute to Serendipity. When the next PHP magazine issue comes out, we'll see to publishing the article on s9y.org.

If you've read the article and want to share your opinion, feel free to comment here.:-)

The Spartacus services, which was not updating for some time, should now be working again properly. If you still have no access to updated plugins, please let me know.

UPDATE: Spartacus works again

Yesterday, my private linux development box passed away. My small EPIA ME-6000 Mini-ITX PC served me and the serendipity development several gracious coding hours. Even though its 256MB of RAM and the performance of a P2-400 was sometimes driving me insane, it had one big bonus: It was nearly fanless, and thus silent enough to fit into my combined living/work area.

And now it is no more.

Which temporarily means, as long as I get a new silent PC I cannot boot my linux system, which (apart from fetching my mail and beign my file storage) also took care of updating the Spartacus XML files every 24 hours. This means that until then, the new plugin versions are not available via Spartacus, and you must either wait or fetch them via CVS.

Since a new silent PC cuts a larger hole into the budget that I had planned for my turkey-holidays, I can't tell how long I need to gather up that new PC. If anyone here has a small project (2-3 weekends?) in his backhand, that would require a skilled PHP-developer with solid Serendipity-knowledge like myself - please raise your voice. :-)