Posts tagged: PROJECT HOSTING

In July I deployed a major update to dpaste.com. Nothing exploded. Good things resulted.

Despite their adoption of Big Green Download Button technology, SourceForge still has an absurdly cumbersome download process. I know it’s annoying to just gripe (I try to see the positive side too); I’m just surprised that it’s still this crufty. According to the OSTG site, “SourceForge.net hosts more Open Source development products than any other site or network worldwide.” But if the pace of modernization doesn’t pick up, I’m afraid that won’t be true for much longer.

A few days ago, Sourceforge got a makeover:

The SourceForge.net Engineering team has completed the implementation of a new look-and-feel for the SourceForge.net site. This is the first major change to the appearance of the SourceForge.net site in more than three years. This work is part of a planned incremental revamp to the SourceForge.net site. Initial focus has been placed on revamp of page header, footer, layout; and specific improvements to the SourceForge.net front page, project summary page, login page, file release page, and download page. Launched 2005-11-14.

Last fall I got all fired up about a fork of the GPL’ed Smultron editor for OS X which we called Saskatoon. The project died on the vine, so I zipped up the source code, posted it on Sourceforge, and sent an e-mail to the few dozen people subscribed to our announcement list.

In the aftermath, I noticed an interesting thing – with 30 downloads in one week, our “Activity Percentile” rose to 99.33%. Unless I’m misreading something, that means that only about 700 of the 100,000+ projects on Sourceforge were downloaded more than 30 times that week.