imag just got a website, a mailinglist, a git repository setup and an IRC channel.

So I wanted to set up a website for imag for months already, but I finally got to it. I actually developed the website offline and it was almost done, and now it is online.

I wrote the website using nanoc, a static site generator. I used nanoc before and I also contributed some code to nanoc, so I already knew what to do and how to do it. I wrote a minimal theme for the website, I wanted to have it plain-text-ish, as imag itself is a plain text tool.

I managed to register an IRC channel on the freenode irc network, which is awesome. travis was set up to post to this IRC channel if a build succeeds or fails which is really convenient as well.

Of course we also have a mailinglist now. One can register there to contribute patches via mail and to ask questions. Of course there's not that much on the mailinglist yet, as we do not have a community around imag, yet. Anyways, there's the possibility to build one now, which is awesome, I guess!

Background

So what's running in the background here?

I registered a space at uberspace where also this very website is hosted, set up a gitolite and a cgit webfrontend for the git repositories.

The mailinglist is run by ezmlm, which was written by djb and is very well documented how to setup on an uberspace.

The domain was registered on united-domains.de.

Costs

Well, I pay these things from my own money (I can make some money this summer working at my university, so that's not a big problem).

Currently, I pay 19 Euro per Year for the domain and 2,50 Euro per Month for the Uberspace, but I will increase this as soon as there are more contributors on the git hosting or on the mailinglist (as soon as my setup causes actual workload on their servers) or as soon as I have a job, whatever comes first.

So that makes it 49 Euro per year with the current setup, which is affordable for me. As soon as I increase the monthly fee for uberspace (I will go to 5 Euro if I make my own money and no contributors and more if there are contributors), this will cost me 100 Euro per year if I give uberspace 6.75 Euro per month. Still not much, I guess.

As soon as I have to pay more than 100 Euro per year I guess I will add a “support this project” button on the website ... or something like this. Well, we'll see...

tags: #linux #open source #programming #rust #software #tools #imag #git #mailinglists #network #social

Some people always tell me that “mailinglists are so 1990” or something. And yes, of course, email is an old protocol and everything. But that does not mean that it is bad.

Here is why I love mailinglists

I get a lot mail. About 1k mails per day, whereas most of them are mailinglists. Actually, the most of them are from the linux kernel mailinglist and I automatically drop them into a folder where I do not look at that often. But when I need to, I can.

But that's not the point of this post, actually. This post is about why I love mailinglists and think mailinglists are a better way of communication compared to, for example, the IRC chat.

When writing in IRC, you have to type quickly, depending on how many people are in the room and talking at this moment. You can hold discussions with several other people, but as soon as several people talk at the same moment but about different topics, things get nasty. That's not the case on a mailing list.

A discussion often starts with a question, a suggestion or maybe an announcement. Then, people comment on it, the discussion beginns. Because mails are persistent in a way chats will never be, one can talk his time to formulate a response. Discussions are seperated in subthreads, which is way more convenient than talking in IRC, getting from one point to another but never beeing focused on the discussion as one discussion but a chain of.

Also, on mailing lists one can focus on single points others make in their statements by quoting them in a really convenient manner. One can remove parts of the statements of others when replying, which forces everyone to focus on the actual points and not the stuff around it, which may be relevant, but often is not. When people talk over a mailinglist, you can read that afterwards to get a clue what is going on. I often search mailinglists for solutions of my problems rather than wikis or something, where problems are generalized and often do not match with my actual problems.

And, of course, if a mailinglist is open, one can post to it without beeing subscribed, which is really a good thing if you want to solve a problem which occours once but never again. Example: I try to configure my mail client at the moment, my offlineimap configuration, actually. I had several issues (related to eachother, of course), so I posted on the mailinglist for offlineimap, where people help me. After the problem is solved (it is not by now...) I will forget this mailinglist again, as I'm not subscribed to it. I don't care afterwards about offlineimap, because it should just work for me and that's it.

So, these are my points why mailinglists are a great tool for getting problems solved, doing discussions and the like. Please note that I do not think the IRC should be abandoned in favour of mailinglists. I love writing with people in IRC, too. But for solving problems, mailinglists are way better for me.

tags: #mail #mailinglists #social #irc #chat