Ohloh Blog

I was shamed into writing a new feature today. Someone asked me why we didn't have reports available for sendmail and eMule.

The underlying reason is that these projects don't appear to offer public access to their source code repositories. However, instead of disclosing this fact intelligently, Ohloh simply showed a blank report.

I've now checked in a new feature that enables people to specify if there's a public repository available and whether Ohloh fails to support their specific SCM.

I've decided to make the "no public repository available" fact have a yellow warning symbol next to it - since it tends to indicate that the project doesn't offer full transparency into its development process. I'd be curious to get your opinion on this.

I'm a little sheepish to admit that we had a really dumb bug in Ohloh. We had omitted to set the character-set in our html. The mechanics are mostly boring , but it simply meant that most non-english users had to suffer with strange characters in their names or posts.

So why am I publicly admitting this? Because I wanted to highlight the fact that an Ohloh user stepped up and provided a lot of help in fixing up this mess. He wrote a crawler to find the problems and sent us a useful summarized report. It was hugely helpful.

So on behalf of the entire Ohloh team, we'd like to give a very big thank you to Lars Wesselius!

We added 'suggest a feature' last week . It's an anonymous web form to suggest features to Ohloh. The response has been great - many to thank to all who've contributed ideas.

I noticed some of the suggestions are requests for features Ohloh already supports. While it's slightly frustrating to read, I very much appreciate these suggestions. - it means we need to simplify these features.

In the category of suggestions of features we don't yet support, I've been surprised how much I found myself agreeing wholeheartedly with the features mentioned. One recent idea, however, gave me pause. The feature was: "code search capabilities". I've seen how a bunch of sites already do this: google code search, koders, codase, etc... This makes adding the feature less interesting for me - it's already done. However the real reason for this post is that I don't understand the value of code search. I code for a living so I figure I have some knowledge here. I grep my own source tree many times a day. However I fail to see the value of searching keywords in random source code.

With so many sites offering this functionality (and with the recent suggestion), I'm wondering: what is it, exactly, that I'm failing to "get" about code search?

I just checked in the new Experience feature tonight (Ohloh now enables people to fill out their software development profile in a much richer way than before).

To make sure the deployment went smoothly I snooped the database to watch for the first users to use the new functionality. The dubious honour of being the first went to rafaelmizrahi. He's apparently contributed to Mono (sweet!) and to...wait, what's this? GuitarHeroNoid?

I was intrigued by that project's title - so I followed the project link. Behold! A robot who's only purpose is to play - no, let me rephrase - shred at Guitar Hero. Wow! I am humbled - what an awesome project.

As a reformed guitar hero junkie I was really impressed. It made me recall Terrence Parr's quote (the ANTLR dude): "Why write something in five days that you can spend five years automating?".

This project has very little practical purpose - yet I can't help admire just how cool it is. I didn't know much about the team behind the project - GarageGeeks. I will definitely be checking them out in the future.

So here's a well-earned Kudo to you, Rafael Mizrahi!

We announced a partnership with CollabNet this morning. We're making our metrics available to visitors to the various forges CollabNet hosts. So now when you visit OpenCollabNet or Tigris you can see Ohloh metrics on those forges, like this entry for Subversion. Over the coming weeks you'll see Ohloh metrics on other forges hosted by CollabNet.

We'd like to provide this service for other forges, so if you're interested send me a mail at scott@ohloh.net.

Thanks,

--Scott