Serendipity's own Garvin has some helpful hints. While only those using the blogging application Serendipity will likely only have interest in this post, I thought I would post it up front anyway. There have not been a huge amount of real news from the various blogging applications except for a couple exceptions. Regardless, I like to promote blogging applications as much as I can.
As some of you may have noticed, I returned a few days ago from my low-tech week. It's taking me awhile to adjust being stuck at the computer so you'll have to bear with me. It's been tough enough to spend the PC time at work, so spending my "free time" on the PC is challenging. It's kind of like not eating fast food for a week and then suddenly having to ingest it for every meal. Drupal addict and Yoga for Geeks guru, Sarah Pullman, mentioned a similar experience in one of her posts. To add insult to injury, I blew up three sites on my VPS and had to put the pieces back together.
A new version of SMF has been released to the public, SMF 1.1 RC3. For users of the forum software, this has been an unusually long period of time for waiting to see a new release candidate of the software.
Some of the new features and improvements as listed in the official announcement:
I am going to spend this next week away from the computer. Between my "day job", this site, and working on some sites for others...I have been looking at the computer screen way too much. Meanwhile, the wife and kid have been looking at the back of my head for too long. It is time to enjoy the backyard and play some ball with the "boy".
As the title says, phpBB 3.0 (code name Olympus) is now out as a second beta. I see a lot of encouraging things about phpBB 3.0 and it will likely be seen as a big improvement over 2.x. The features and improvements to phpBB from version 2.x to 3.x are numerous and I'll probably chat about them as 3.0 near its actual actual release date.
The only comment I'll really make here is...I'm sure glad I didn't build a near production site on phpBB 3.0 Beta1. If you read the few lines below you'll see that no update path is offered between the first and second beta. Ouch!
From phpBB:
The past couple days has been a busy time for those involved in the Rails open source project. Just as busy as the Rails core developers were the users running Ruby on Rails applications (such the Radiant content management system). On Wednesday, the project's developers released Rails 1.1.5. In the announcement of the Rails release, David August called upgrading the new version "mandatory" since the security vulnerability was so severe.
I'm working on an ecommerce site using osCommerce to enable the shopping cart functionality for my client's online store. This is the first time I've used osCommerce so I'm still working on improving my comfort level with the application. osCommerce is open source and released under the GNU General Public License. According to the osCommerce site:
"The label 2.0 has become so overused that it is now a tic, a reflex action, a device that gets trotted out because someone thinks it sounds both hip and techie. And it did — for a while. Now it’s tired."
-Steve Fox, "Too Tired of 2.0", InfoWorld, June 26, 2006