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What’s annoying with Flattr buttons on Planet Debian?

December 8, 2010 by Raphaël Hertzog

Dear Planet Debian readers, a significant number of people have expressed concerns over the presence of Flattr buttons on Planet Debian. The concerns were expressed in a thread on the debian-project mailing list and they were quite diverse.

While the discussion brought some of the issues into light, it’s not really possible to find out whether a specific concern is widely shared or not. That’s why I set up a poll on selectricity.org.

Please take a few minutes and rank the various options: put the most important concern first in the list, and sort the others by decreasing importance. If there are concerns that you do not agree with, put them below the entry named “Special: I don’t share the concerns quoted below”. And to prove that you have read through all the options before voting, put the other special entry last (it’s named “Special: I know how condorcet voting works and thus I put this item last”).

Click here to go to the poll. You need only one minute to vote and no login is required.

PS: The discussion on debian-project is the reason why I changed the footer in my RSS feed to contain only plain text (in a smaller font). I also improved the wording to be more neutral.

Support 5 free software with Flattr

December 1, 2010 by Raphaël Hertzog

Flattr FOSS LogoA new month means new free software projects to support with Flattr FOSS. I’m happy to see that it’s gaining traction outside of the Debian world as well. I saw quite a few new entries for free software projects so that I don’t have to fear running out of suggestions in the next few months. 🙂
Let’s go over the 5 projects that I recommend you for December:

  1. Getting Things GNOME (flattr link) is a GNOME task manager. Its name is a play on David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) but the software doesn’t enforce the GTD methodology. You can implement GTD however since the software is very flexible and lets you organize the tasks with arbitrary tags. It’s a promising software and it can be extended with many plugins.
  2. The W3C validator (flattr link) is used by thousands of web developers to verify that their HTML pages are well formed. But did you know that it was free software? Yes you can contribute code, or you can help them with a flattr.
  3. Bitlbee (flattr link) is a gateway between IRC and many other instant messaging protocols. Geeks are known to be IRC addicted (at least I am using it for Debian development) and with bitlbee it’s one reason less to watch something else than the IRC client. 🙂
  4. Arch Hurd (flattr link) is a port of the ArchLinux distribution to the GNU Hurd kernel.
  5. Paste.debian.net (flattr link) is a simple website where you can share some textual content for a limited amount of time (you usually paste the content from some other applications, hence its name). Very handy when you want to quickly show something to others on IRC. This service is run by Debian developer Alexander Wirt.

That’s it for this month. A quick question to finish this issue: I count at least 15 Debian contributors using Flattr currently, would you be interested by a small directory listing them?

5 free software to support with Flattr

November 1, 2010 by Raphaël Hertzog

Flattr FOSS LogoIt’s already the fourth issue of Flattr FOSS: it means 20 different projects using Flattr that I presented you. Here are the 5 suggestions for November:

  1. Redshift is a small utility that adjusts the color temperature of your screen to make it less aggressive on your eyes, in particular during evening/nights. It uses the time of the day and the geographic location to know whether it’s night or day. I discovered it this summer and I liked it, although I’m not running it permanently.
  2. Noscript is a Firefox plugin to control what sites can execute javascript, flash and other plugins. All those are creating supplementary security risks and you browse safer if you allow only some sites to run them. This is the number one entry on Flattr in the opensource category, it recently took the place of dpkg.
  3. phyMyAdmin is a web interface to manage MySQL databases. If you have such a database on a web-hosting service, you have likely already seen it in action. It’s an award-winning software with a 12 year history, it’s not so common for PHP applications. 🙂
  4. Chromium maintenance in Debian. Chromium is a rapidly-evolving & complex software and Giuseppe Iuculano has been tirelessly working on packaging it. Almost alone within Debian. He deserves kudos for his work even though he reused work made by Fabien Tassin on the Ubuntu package.
  5. Dulwich is a pure-Python implementation of the Git file formats and protocols. It’s an important building block for interoperability between Bazaar and Git: bzr-git (a Bazaar plugin providing Git integration) is notably using it. Given the large usage of bzr in Ubuntu and the popularity of Git world-wide, it’s important to have such gateways.

This article is part of the Flattr FOSS project.

Update: mentioned the work of Fabien Tassin on the chromium package within Ubuntu.

Secret figures of a Debian/Ubuntu blogger: what you liked most on raphaelhertzog.com

October 25, 2010 by Raphaël Hertzog

Chart goes up on screenI launched raphaelhertzog.com this summer (taking over the English content of my former multi-lingual blog), when I decided that I would be more serious about blogging on Debian/Ubuntu related topics. On September, I decided to write 2 articles per week and up to now I managed to keep the schedule.

Two of my articles were published by Linux Weekly News, those are much more researched than the average blog article (they are tagged with [LWN] in the list below).

The most popular articles

Most people read my blog through the RSS feed which happens to be syndicated on Planet Debian and Planet Ubuntu. According to the feedburner’s statistics, the top-5 articles are:

  1. 5 reasons why I still contribute to Debian after 12 years (32700 views)
  2. [LWN] Understanding Membership Structures in Debian and Ubuntu (31700 views)
  3. Social Micropayment Can Foster Free Software, Discover Flattr (30100 views)
  4. Everything you need to know about conffiles: configuration files managed by dpkg (29900 views)
  5. How to make 110.28 EUR in one month with free software and Flattr (29400 views)

But I also have occasional readers visiting my blog because my articles are announced on Identi.ca, Twitter and Facebook (and they circulate on social networks, thanks to those who are sharing them!). The top-5 articles according to the statistics of my website are:

  1. 5 reasons why I still contribute to Debian after 12 years (6000 views)
  2. [LWN] Can Debian offer a Constantly Usable Testing distribution? (5000 views)
  3. Understanding Debian’s release process (1500 views)
  4. Flattr FOSS (1400 views, not an article but I regularly blog about this project)
  5. Can Debian achieve world domination without being on Facebook? (1100 views)

The most flattered

Since I am using Flattr on my blog, it can be interesting to see the articles which generated lots of flattr micro-donations. The top-3 articles are my articles about Flattr (1, 2, 3). Excluding articles related to Flattr, the top-5 is:

  1. 5 reasons why I still contribute to Debian after 12 years (12 flattr)
  2. The secret plan behind the “3.0 (quilt)” Debian source package format (10 flattr)
  3. How to use multiple upstream tarballs in Debian source packages? (5 flattr)
  4. [LWN] Understanding Membership Structures in Debian and Ubuntu (4 flattr)
  5. Do You Want a Free Debian Book? Read on. (4 flattr)

Most articles get 2 to 3 flattr clicks.

The most commented

I usually get 4-5 comments on most articles but some generate much more feedback:

  1. [LWN] Can Debian offer a Constantly Usable Testing distribution? (40 comments)
  2. 5 reasons why I still contribute to Debian after 12 years (22 comments)
  3. Can Debian achieve world domination without being on Facebook? (15 comments)
  4. How to generate different dependencies on Debian and Ubuntu with a common source package (14 comments)
  5. [LWN] Understanding Membership Structures in Debian and Ubuntu (12 comments)

Factoids

Here are my conclusions based on the above figures:

  • Writing about your Debian/Ubuntu work and your long term involvement makes for highly popular content that spreads well.
  • In-depth and well researched articles (like those written for LWN) do not generate more flattr revenues than the average article even if they take 4 to 8 times as long to write.
  • People are more likely to flattr you for your free software contribution than for the value they get out of your article.
  • People care a lot about the Debian release process, and like to discuss the topic.

If you also appreciate the above-linked articles, you should click here to subscribe to my email newsletter.

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I write software, books and documentation. I'm a Debian developer since 1998 and run my own company. I want to share my passion and knowledge of the Debian ecosystem. Read More…

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