Ohloh Blog

Frequent Ohloh users will already notice a big change: bigger, more blatant ads. Implementing more ads has been on our todo list for a while, but I kept putting it of - until now.

Our beta frontend had a lot more ads and we got some feedback that some of them were too subtle - some ads were interspersed within the content too well.

I took that feedback at heart when adding them back now. They are more blatant now. Frankly I'm still trying to get used to the bright leaderboard at the top of most pages!

We'll be running some ad-based experiments over the next few weeks so we'll likely move the ad formats/positions. Meanwhile send any feeback to info@ohloh.net if you have concerns or ideas to help us out on that front.

[Note: This has now shipped]

We've received requests for an Ohloh "badge" for people to host on their site. Something that would let projects show some very basic stats about their project yet small enough to not take up too much space/bandwidth. I've come up with a prototype:

This example contains made-up numbers. It basically cycles through the calculator cost, lines of code and active developers (plus an ohloh plug). Before I make it generally available, I was wondering if anyone had any feedback. Some current concerns:

• Is it too small to read?
• Is the image's size too big (current ~10k).
• Are we missing or showing too many stats?
• Is the animation too slow or too fast?

Either contribute to the thread below or send me mail with any feedback:

• thread
• mail: jason@ohloh.net.

We've thought about the feedback we've received over the last few weeks and have made some changes to our service that will hopefully make it easier for folks to navigate the site, add projects to the site, edit projects on the site and receive notifications about projects. We have also added forums so that we can be more efficient and responsive to your questions, requests and problems. In fact, if you want to discuss the changes to this site, please go to the forum on this announcement.

Many of you have suggested projects that you want to add, so now you can go for it!

Cheers!

--Scott

I was forwarded a link to David Wheeler's blog recently (link). David Wheeler is a prolific writer (software and prose) with a lot of experience in the Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) space. In his blog he gives us a fairly positive review and I was happy to see that he found our site generally useful (thanks David!).

However, in his blog, he alleges that we are likely using his source code analysis tool (sloccount) to determine projects' source lines of code (sloc). As David astutely points out, our focus is on providing a service: how we do it is mostly inconsequential to our users. So using his tool would have been a fine idea - and while I would have liked to, in reality, we didn't: we wrote our own tool from scratch, which we call 'Lingo'.

Why not use sloccount? The simple answer is that it didn't meet our needs enough- which meant either extending sloccount significantly or writing something from scratch. Thinking through the list of required extensions combined with my lack of Perl skills (some call it a Perl phobia), I chose the go from scratch. Lingo is written in Ruby with some native (C) extensions for performance reasons.

At this point, our chief challenge with sloc analysis is scalability. Beyond analyzing the last snapshot of each codebase, we actually go back in time to every checkin in the history of each project and analyze the source lines of code for every file in every checkin/patch. This allows us to know exactly who's responsible for how many lines of code. It also turns out to be quite a workout for our lab. Each fix/feature we add to Lingo normally requires us to re-analyze our entire library of projects from scratch. Our poor servers don't get much rest.

One of the main observations that folks make about open source software is that they are amazed at the transparency users have into open source development. One can go to Ohloh and see a lot of information about development activity on open source projects. The Firefox and Mozilla Core projects have well over 100 active developers. I would love to know how many active developers are working on I.E. 7....

--Scott

Thoughts? You can e-mail me directly at scott@ohloh.net.