on Tue, Jan 14, 2003 at 08:19:32AM -0500%, Doug Loss said:
<aside>
Mike> the freshmeat guys focus on things like does it work.
Hmmmm... I hate to disillusion you, but we have no idea whether any
of the software listed works or not. :) There are currently 26,579
projects listed on the site; there's no way we could test them all.
We only care about whether the software is available. Luckily, user
ratings and comments help to sort the wheat from the chaff.
</aside>
Doug> We talked about that early on (and in fact tried it), but
Doug> decided not do so for this reason. Freshmeat's definition
Doug> of the "education" category is something like "primarily or
Doug> solely intended for educational use," where our definition
Doug> is more like, "of use in an educational environment."
Yes, that's correct (we did this three years ago this month -- how
time flies!), and I'm afraid there's no way around it; it's in the
nature of the two sites. We're a generic software index, and SEUL's
pages form an education-specific software index. You can include a
word processor and a Web server in your index because they're both
useful to schools, but if we put them in our Education category, the
categorization becomes so broad that it's meaningless.
It doesn't work for you to submit all your software to our Education
category, then just link to that. It will never hold all the software
you want to reference. However, that doesn't mean that you can't use
freshmeat's data; you just have to come at it from a different
direction (discussed below).
Doug> we include apps that never get listed on Freshmeat, since
Doug> they wait for people to register their apps while we search
Doug> out apps to add to our index.
There's a misconception here. Anyone can submit listings to
freshmeat; you don't have to be the software's author. Look at all
the projects listed on http://freshmeat.net/~jeffcovey/. I didn't
write LaTeX. ;) I just added those listings as part of work I did.
I contacted the authors and told them they could claim ownership of
their projects, but they haven't.
You're free to submit as much as you like.
Doug> if you're talking about some agreement with Freshmeat where
Doug> we (SEUL/edu) move all our app listings there and rely on
Doug> them to maintain the accuracy of the listing while we get to
Doug> maintain a categorized index (so that all the apps are
Doug> properly listed as educational), I'd certainly entertain
Doug> something like that
That's easily done. Each of our listings has an XML representation;
here's an example:
http://freshmeat.net/projects-xml/gcompris/gcompris.xml
All you have to do is maintain a list of the projects you want in your
index, and you can build your listings from our XML files. If you
refresh your listings from our files regularly (once a day?), you'll
have updated descriptions, URLs, etc. We have a robot that crawls our
database checking for broken links, so they don't stay broken long.
You could use our popularity ranking information, and we even have
screenshots with thumbnails you could use. You could use the
date_updated fields or the files in http://freshmeat.net/backend/ to
build a news page (though this is a bit trickier, as I don't see a
file which includes the texts of the release announcements).
If you do this, of course, it would be nice to give the appropriate
credits, etc.
I might even enlist whoever does it to record the process in a
tutorial on "Maintaining A Special-Interest Software Index With
freshmeat's Data". :) That would provide publicity for your project,
and I think encouraging people to do this sort of thing is good all
around. From our perspective, it brings people to freshmeat (if the
other site links to us through "Project data provided by..." and links
to our project page for each project it lists), publicizes our site,
and gives us the satisfaction of knowing our work is being put to use.
For the person using our data, it cuts down on duplication of effort
and provides up-to-date information and consistent, well-written
project descriptions and release announcements with no more effort
than initial setup and a cron job.
Well, I was awake when I started this. I want to send it before I go
to bed. I hope the end is nearly as coherent as the beginning. :)
Sincerely,
Jeff
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