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One of the problems with a software index like freshmeat's projects database is that people who wander into a category for the first time have difficulty determining which of the listed projects best suit their needs, which are ready for use, and which are in the early stages of development. They resort to downloading deadends and waste a lot of time before they find what they need, or they just give up. Today, we're starting a new series of articles that hopes to counter this problem with insights from people who are knowledgeable about specific types of software. These will be reviews not of individual applications, but of types of applications. We want to offer information on the history of the given type of software, which apps are the old favorites, which are under the most active development, how all the pieces fit together, etc., so that people know how to get started with the topic at hand. Imagine that you're looking at "Internet :: Log Analysis" for the first time, and everything looks equally good (or bad) to you, or that a friend stopped you in the hallway and said "I just started using Linux and know nothing about Unix word processors. What do I need to know?" These are the sorts of problems we hope to alleviate with a little helpful advice from experts. Our first review is on the topic of financial software, and is by Christopher Browne, the man whose name pops up when you type "Linux finance" into Google's search box. After today, anyone who finds her way to one of our financial categories will find a link to his review and your comments on it. I hope you'll find this helpful. There are 298 categories to go, so I'll welcome your help in finding qualified people to review them. Start at http://freshmeat.net/browse/, see if anyone leaps to mind as the obvious person to do a review, and let me know. Thanks, and enjoy. [Comments are disabled]
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Reviewer criteria? Other than someone who 'leaps to mind', what other criteria are you looking
for in a reviewer?
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Re: Reviewer criteria?
I'd prefer someone who doesn't have ties to one of the projects in the review, but wouldn't turn down a good review from someone if he made his association clear and was fair to the other projects.
Where possible, I'd like to find the person who is "obviously" the one
to review a given topic. For example, I've asked Grant Taylor of linuxprinting.org to write a
review of printing software and Dave Phillips to write sound and music
reviews because his site is the
de facto authority on Unix audio applications.
That sounds good. :)
I don't think we want to get into voicing our personal opinions, but
thanks for checking. :) It's better to let the readers do the voting.
Glad you like them; thanks, scoop! :) --
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Multiple catagory trees might help One small suggestion: maby in the next revision of the Freshmeat engine it might be a good idea to have multiple catagory trees, and have a project fit into one (or more) place in each tree. That way, users could quickly sort through for what the user interface is (console : ncurses, X : gtk, etc) seperate from what it does (say, internet : web : user apps : browsers for netscape-like things vs internet : web : user apps : fetchers for things like wget, and either have internet : web : servers for things like apache or maby have servers as a seperate branch of the UI tree), and other such criteria that aren't inherrantly related (possibly OS, though that would affect the UI). That could make finding things a lot easier, especially if you have several criteria that you're selecting for. Also, breaking the catagories up a bit more might help. Sure, it may take a few more pages of browsing to find exactly what you are looking for, but you'd have a much shorter and likely more pertinent list.
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Re: Multiple catagory trees might help Your comment is very confusing to me because it seems to describe what's already there -- you can filter your searches to remove the X applications, etc. Could you explain what new feature you're suggesting? --
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Re: Multiple catagory trees might help How? The closest I can find to do that for a given search is either to browse through the trove for a particular catagory and then run a search from there (admittedly quite usefull, but not what I was thinking of, and sometimes you loose thigs that are missing a given keyword in their descriptions), or otherwise modify your my Freshmeat settings each time you are trying to search to filter for a specific search (and even then the filters in my are somewhat course; good for filtering the new items page, not so great for a specific search) I may be missing something, but I had a fairly thourough search of the trove browing pages. It's not obvious how to do this w/o entering a lot of things into the search box. (What I was thinking of would be used to filter results, which would hopefully make using the search box unnecessary in many cases)
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Re: Multiple catagory trees might help I may not understand what you're trying to do. Here's what I'm picturing: You want an email client, so you search for "mail client" in the projects database and get 168 matches. You want one that licensed under the GPL, so you click "[filter]" next to "License :: OSI Approved :: GNU General Public License (GPL)" on one of the matches. That brings the matches down to 24. (A sign people haven't properly categorized their apps; grrrr.) You want one for the console, so you add a filter for "Environment :: Console (Text Based) :: Curses", which gives you two matches. Yay! You found mutt. :) Of course, this is dependent on people having their projects properly categorized. We can't do anything about that except encourage them to do it, which we will be doing shortly. Is that not what you were looking for? How is your idea different?
Thanks, --
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Another solution The problem you describe is one off the problems
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Re: Another solution You can already subscribe to projects you want to know about and filter out those you don't want to know about. You're just not paying attention. :) --
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Re: Another solution
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Re: Another solution Thank, Now that I were looking for it finaly found it. There is a problem that the is no subscription link on the project page. If your enter the project via the right bar or dircet hit via search you can't subscripe. Knud
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Re: Another solution
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Re: Another solution This is a marvelous idea. I don't want to filter out categories necessarily - one of the great things about freshmeat is it lets me get a feel for what people are working on - world-wide brainstorming if you will. I often don't know I'm looking for a piece of software. The 'people who watch this project also watch...' links would be especially valuable. Audio Galaxy has a similar idea in that they suggest related artists. It's a nice way to explore the database. Reviews are nice too. Can you add a section to the reviews shoing what version of the software package was reviewed, and what version is current (and a link to the changelog?) Freshmeat is great, but the original author is correct - it takes too much time to keep up with it.
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Re: Another solution
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