This is a repost of an email I sent to the development mailing list.

It’s really good to see some activity in the development community – conversation about developments and different people with different ideas contributing code is, for me, what open source is all about. When we created Elgg, we always wanted it to be open and receptive to the needs of people running the software.

We’re going to release 0.4 in mid-January, which contains some remixing of the RSS feed system exhibited on Elgg.net, as well as a restructured (and simplified) templating engine, some improvements to internationalisation, friendship and community membership moderation, and a number of bug fixes / feature improvements. This will not contain any of the improvements that Martin and his team in New Zealand are proposing; we will look at those for 0.5, as they are serious structural changes and will require more time than we have to think over and test. However, if anyone has any modifications to the existing SVN code they would like added, now is the time to submit a patch or bug to the project space on Eduforge.

We’ve agreed that from now on source code will be formatted to 80
columns and 4-space tabs. Jim, if you’re still willing to do this, would it be possible to send through a code patch? We’ll worry about the global variables for 0.5, as while I think renaming them is a good idea, the five or so data structures that we’ve talked about in another thread are really for the next version. It would be unwise to make more major changes than we’ve planned for this release – I don’t want to send something that doesn’t work out into the world. (I do, however, want to progress quickly on that topic in the thread here.)

This has been an amazing year – to start with a small system in January, which was open sourced in March, and ending here with numerous installations has been a very exciting ride. Thank you very much for sticking with us, and for contributing to Elgg’s development. With your help, next year we should reach version 1.0, and a system that I believe will genuinely be useful to a lot of people.

AP: U.S. Teen Runs Off to Iraq by Himself – Yahoo! News

A crazy, irresponsible stunt – but I have to confess, I’d love him to stick his interviews up on the web.

It’s nice to get away for a while; a difference of perspective does a world of good for your clarity of thought, and often even your basic happiness. You don’t get a much bigger difference of perspective as between Oxford and the San Joaquin Valley (pictured right), or between sitting in front of a screen all day and spending time in the outside world.

The danger with creating a community online is that people will spend too much time in that community. It seems like a funny thing to be worried about when we’re largely involved with promoting engagement and creating systems that people will want to use. But it seems to me that if someone is too involved in a learning environment, they’re liable to not spend enough time actually learning.

Of course, this is true of all educational facilities – the danger of creating a really cool student bar is that students will spend all their time in it drinking beer. It’s important to promote a balanced learner lifestyle containing all kinds of helpful elements, rather than the use of one tool or other. I don’t buy the idea that we should just let people get on with it, and students don’t want any kind of involvement from the institutions in their lives – they come to an institution, and often pay tens of thousands of dollars, so that they will come out at the other side with a good degree and a great deal more knowledge and skills than they came in with. Sure, these things perhaps shouldn’t be mandatory, but this kind of lifestyle help should be out there and very visible. I would hate to think that someone might be spending twelve hours a day on Elgg when they could be out there taking advantage of everything on offer to them.

You might scoff – nobody would spend hours in front of a website! – but this is, I’m afraid, naïve. Hang around community sites like Myspace if you don’t believe me, or check out the frequency of posts in some LiveJournal communities. A growing number of people are beginning to recognise the seriousness of Internet addiction. Of course, as the programmer and vendor of an online learning system, I’m not about to say that learners should avoid such systems – the bottom line is that an institution’s role includes both gentle guidance towards the knowedge and skills that a learner seeks, as well as how to use them in a rich and balanced way.

Best wishes to everyone this holiday season. We’re going to have a great new year – we hope you do too.

Spam is, unfortunately, an issue. As a site becomes popular, it starts to attract more and more unwanted attention from unscrupulous people who want to add their unwanted advertising, usually through weblog comments and discussion board postings.

What’s the point? Basically, the more links to a site there are, the higher its Google pagerank, and the higher up the search results it comes. Nobody thinks anyone’s dumb enough to click a link in a comment; it’s an attempt to exploit loopholes in search engines to make sites more popular.

So how do we fight it?

Elgg now has two prongs to its attack. The first is a master blacklist of terms people cannot include in their comments; for Elgg.net we’ve set this to include things like “-casino” and “v1agra”. People trying to post those to the site will receive an error message. The terms on this list are actually regular expressions, so we can match more complicated terms if necessary.

Secondly, we’ve restricted commenting to logged-in users by default. You can change this – it’s in ‘account settings’ – but be aware that doing so makes you more susceptible to spam.

Developers: if you want to include this feature in your plugins, you just need to check if run(“users:flags:get”,array(“publiccomments”,[resource owner ID])) is true or false.

If you do receive spam on your Elgg blogs, please let us know. Hopefully, though, these features will be enough protection to fend spammers off.

Last night I was in Mariposa, in the Yosemite foothills, and stopped into a burger joint. It was a typical family-run place, with $5 meals and the kind of welcoming, friendly atmosphere mixed with slight distrust that you only get in small-town America. There was a big TV in one corner showing the game, and overweight people in trucker hats drank cheap beer as they tucked into their fries.

And then I noticed it: they had laptops and were checking their email at the same time. The burger joint had wifi and they were all online.

This gets me every time – I remember clearly when the Internet was the pastime of nerds and academics. In fact, I could swear that was last week, but now it seems a lot like everyone’s online.

But they aren’t. In fact, 50% of the population is still largely offline (and that first 50% are probably not au fait with the technology they have). There’s a long way to go, and in determining any technology-related solution, we have to think about the have-nots – the people who don’t, and likely never will, own a computer or have connectivity.

I think a lot about this, and will post more later this week …

Apologies to anyone trying to get hold of me for the next couple of days. I’ll be on the road – or rather, in the air – travelling to California. My connectivity there should be pretty good, so I’ll be back online by Monday.

An odd one this afternoon. Can anyone recommend any good free or open source exam grade management software aimed at a university level that will record as much of the following as possible:

Initial, resit and final test scores
Any changes to those
Weighted averages

Additionally we’d preferably like it to transform scores into grades and provide transcripts for the students and overall summary reports.

I realise things like WebCT / Blackboard have score management built in, but I’m after something we can pick up and use. (Not in conjunction with Elgg, just on its own.) Thank you for any help!

Yahoo will be offering Movable Type services. Together with the recent del.icio.us purchase and existing properties like Upcoming and Flickr, plus Six Apart’s upcoming, consumer-orientated Project Comet, I predict a Six Apart acquisition in five .. four .. three .. two ..

The origins of hypertext, from 1945:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/194507/bush

Worth a read if you haven’t already.