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25 posts, 30 days

No, not 25 posts in 30 days here. That would be something.

Over on FOSSwire (where I write about all sorts of Linux and open source stuff for those who don’t know) we’ve hit a goal of bringing monthly posting frequency back up to 25 or more.

You can see the frequency of posting over every month of FOSSwire’s history on its archives page. As you can see, we’re back up to an impressive level compared to recent months, which have been difficult.

The major reason why we’ve managed to hit this goal has been my fellow writer and editor at FOSSwire, Jacob Peddicord. His increase in posting frequency (plus an extra two posts compared to last month from me) have allowed us to get back on top of things.

Also his articles always get the big traffic. 😉

I’m looking forward to hopefully being able to keep a solid posting frequency up on FOSSwire to make sure we’re always delivering fresh content.

When you have several thousand RSS subscribers and more than a thousand uniques a day, you have to stay fresh. Not that I’m boasting about numbers or anything… 😛

My PC-BSD review

OK, so cross-linking is bad and stuff, but it’s been a long time since I last did it, so it’s OK, right? 😛

Just finished a review of PC-BSD, a BSD distribution based on FreeBSD for desktop system.

I was really impressed at how easy it was when compared to the big bad FreeBSD install, which I seem to always mess up right at the last moment thanks to the far from intuitive menu system.

But I digress. PC-BSD is as slick as any desktop Linux, and I think it makes a fine general purpose desktop OS, as you can read more about in the full review.

And yes, I’m trying to post a bit more regularly here too. It’s working, so far. 😉

FOSSwire 2.0

Thanks to the extremely hard work of Jacob (coding and architecture) and Chris (design), and not really me (I did keep posting though), FOSSwire has just relaunched!

Well, FOSSwire, we’ve had some ups and downs, but overall it’s been a good year. We now have quite a reader base compared to when we started.

But now isn’t the time for reminiscing. (really, never is the time.)

You may have noticed some changes around here. Did FOSSwire get a haircut? You’ll have to figure that out for yourself. But we did add several new features:

  • Tabs: Now, instead of a bajillion categories, we now only have five, and they are shown as tabs at the top of the page. Who doesn’t like tabs?
  • Tags: This is where the mass amounts of categories were thrown. We didn’t really know what to do with this new feature in WordPress 2.3, so we’re just using it as our new category home.
  • The Metabar: Chris calls this the Ãœberbar. To each their own. The important thing is this is home to many more features, including:
    • GNOME vs KDE vs XFCE wars
    • FOSSwire Video: Yep, we finally support video. Expect many more posts to have this feature.
    • PkgBase Automatic Installers: This is what we were suggesting with this post. You can now enjoy a one-click style install feature for systems that support it. And for those that don’t, instructions are given.
    • Expertise Level: Know before you read a post how difficult it will be to do. Most commonly used in the Tips & Tutorials section.
  • Post Ratings: For anything that can be reviewed, such as a software or game release, we can now assign a rating out of 10 to it.
  • Caching: You won’t notice anything (other than comments being delayed) except for the site running a lot faster. We’re using a custom-built caching system that is by far faster than WP-Cache.

Those are most of the features, but we’ve made some cosmetic changes here and there. We think you’ll like it.

This relaunch marks one year of FOSSwire, and I’ve been extremely happy to be a founding contributor and hope we continue to enjoy as much success as we’ve had (and hopefully more)!

One year.

Wow.

It’s gone pretty quickly, and in the past year I’ve managed to push out 210 posts. It isn’t quite one a day, sadly, but still, I’m pretty happy with how much I’ve put into FOSSwire personally.

Of course, I must again point out that the overwhelming majority of the work for this new release was not done by me! I’m not taking credit at all – not until content I’ve produced arrives 😉 .

So, here’s to the next year!