It has been a while since I released a new open source project. The last time I dealt with the Python project registry it required a highly manual through-the-web registration process. The Cheese Shop is so much nicer, and the integration with distutils makes it so easy to register a project and release that there is no reason in the world not to do it. There are just a few basic steps to getting started:

My project site is finally online, and I find myself falling into precisely the trap I was hoping to avoid. I originally wanted to find some existing software to host the site, so I could concentrate on the myriad projects cluttering up the back of my brain. Since I opted to build my own, I’ve found myself focusing on building more features into the site management tool instead of those other projects.

While I’m at it, I ought to go ahead and release the code I wrote to host my projects site.

What’s new? I have been using an Automator workflow inspired by an article by Andy Ihnatko to download the latest image from the Astronomy Picture of the Day site and set it as my desktop background. It also adds a copy to my screen saver images folder. Some of the pictures are pretty, and some are inspiring. Check it out, if you are interested.

I spent some time over the weekend building a rough tool with django to host my code projects. It is only at http://www.doughellmann.com, though that domain may not be available in your DNS cache, yet. I’m happy with the schema for the results, but will probably tweak the colors and layout for a while.

Now that I have the site in order, I have posted a copy of my mail archive script in an easier-to-use format.

I have also moved Proctor into the new site.

I’ve moved Proctor development from sourceforge to my own server and released version 1.0. We have been using proctor successfully for several years now at work, and it makes automating our nightly tests very easy. The build is automatic, the software is installed automatically, and then proctor runs the test suite. All 3000+ tests take several hours to run, mostly because they aren’t all strictly “unit” tests.

I am looking for a tool to build out a site to host my code projects. None of these projects are large enough to warrant anything like the features provided by SourceForge. I don’t think my requirements are very strict, but I haven’t been able to find anything to do what I want (sort of a sourceforge-lite): I must be able to host the projects under a domain I control myself.

The idea of a machine that can print a copy of every book ever written makes me think I need to build some more shelves.