So here it is the Purplepixie.org official blog.

The intent of this blog is two-fold:

1. Provide a centralised point of information for various Purplepixie products and services
2. Act as a spleen-venting point for my ramblings on various tech and non-tech things

Since 2001 Purplepixie has built up a small selection of freeware software and free-to-use services. Naturally given the longevity of the developments this has led to a quite fragmented estate which becomes harder to maintain over time.

Projects and services on Purplepixie consist of some which are a small player in large domains (for example FreeNATS which has a few thousand users of the hundreds of thousands or even millions of network monitor users) or a larger player but in small domains (such as VSO Journals, the only VSO-specific blog aggregation service). Some of course are hardly used at all or are simply redundant today (being based upon very old versions of Linux or solving a problem which no longer exists such as ISDN).

To try and make the estate more manageable and accessible the following is therefore planned.

Source Code Management (SCM) for Everything

The intention is currently to eventually make everything currently still being developed or maintained available through github.com. This isn’t as straightforward as it sounds because most of the projects have their own convoluted build and test scripts which may contain sensitive information or be host-specific. They need to be cleansed of any sensitive information and also updated to be suitable for general source release.

The first project (and only as I write) to make full use of github was FreeDESK with the full development environment code, including unit tests, build scripts, and release packages included within the SCM.

Centralised Source of Information

This very here blog will act as a central source of information, covering updates and new releases.

Some projects, by nature of their complexity, have their own news feeds and release advertisements (FreeNATS and FreeDESK). The plan is to bring the smaller projects into this blog with the larger ones perhaps to follow at a later date.

Standard Mini-Site/Project Web Framework

All of the projects have their own little mini-websites. Most of these are built using PHP and standard templates but are individualised, which makes it hard to maintain and update.

Consideration will be given to replacing all projects with a standardised CMS-style system or, at the very least, a standard information linking mechanism (using this blog as the central point).