Litany Against Fear

The sixth edition of my column is live: http://github.com/blog/246-github-rebase-6

I’m slowly improving the parsing process. For the last edition I broke out all of the work the app does into rake tasks, and then the Rails site is just for viewing the data. Basically there’s a few steps:

Download ATOM feeds (This week, 1400. Last week, 1200).

Check that all of the downloads went ok. (Bad gateway errors happen to good people)

Parse the files, making sure that events are unique and users forkers are logged.

Surprisingly I’m relying less and less on my app to get the column together, which is good. Huge kudos to the GitHubbers for creating the Recently Created page for each language. This helps me diversify the column while avoiding a lot of data crunching on my end.

Next week I definitely want to parse the entire month’s worth of events to really see the trends come out. Luckily their atom feed goes back 4000-5000 pages (of 30 events each) or this wouldn’t be able to happen. What this will mean is that I’ll actually have to optimize the download and parsing as much as possible. Stay tuned!

This is the start of a new weekly column that going to recap some of the action that’s been happening on GitHub during the past week. My goals with this column include:

1. Prove that Git is a great choice for version control!
2. See how active the community at GitHub really is and what they’re working on.
3. Show how Open Source development is truly open.

Using the magic of feed-normalizer, hpricot, and gchartrb, I’ve created a little Rails app (dubbed Rebase, of course) that I can use to rip all of the events that are going on at GitHub. I’m going to try to keep the format of the column consistent, but I definitely need your feedback to make it better.

Stats Breakdown

And, just for fun:

Notably New Projects

Each week I’m going to look over some interesting new projects that have just showed up on GitHub and explain what they’re about. If you have a project you think I should showcase, let me know and I’ll see about featuring it!

Wysihat

A minimalist’s approach to WYSIWYG/Rich Text Editor. Right now it’s very, very beta, but it has the support of 37Signals so I definitely hope it’s destined for greatness. Once some decent themes are created for it, I’d definitely consider integrating it in some of my sites. This project definitely is growing and needs help, so fork away.

Android

Google announced that their Android framework was going open source and was hosted on Git, so it was clearly only a matter of time before their code landed on GitHub too. They have a ton of projects in their codebase, but it doesn’t seem like all of them have pushed yet. Definitely looks promising though, and I really would like to see how their system works.

acts_as_passive_aggressive

Just in case you ever needed a way to vent on your users, this plugin provides the perfect opportunity. I love the project’s readme.

VoteReport

This is a new Rails site to track the election next week through Twitter. They’ve got quite a lot of documentation on their PBWiki, and I really hope that this site turns out to be a little more useful and fun than watching tweets fly by on Twitter’s election page. If you want to help them get the project up and running before the 4th, go for it!

javascript-xhtml-purifier

A new, robust JS script to sanitize HTML. I can guarantee that at some point most web developers will need to do this, so bookmark or clone away.

Next week I’d love to break down the stats a little more and figure out what commits were the most commented on, and maybe which projects had the most activity. Let me know what you’d like to see in the future!