Tell us your gnizr success stories

Recently, FishEye shows the total number of line-count of gnizr open source has passed 100,000. Since we have open-sourced gnizr, the traffic to our Google Code project and blog sites continue to increase in a healthy pace. We are very happy about this.

While we can use automated tools to track visitor traffics, but we didn't have a good way to receive and monitor feedbacks from our users. Today a new Wiki page has been created on the Google Code project site to report and receive community feedbacks. This new page called "Success Stories" will publish short descriptions of how users from diverse industries and organizations are using gnizr to facilitate information sharing and improve people's productivity. On the same page, you can find the email address to which you can send your suggestions and feedbacks.

I wrote the first story about my experience in using gnizr to teach the Social Web Technologies course at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Gnizr Dev Server Down for Maintenance

Couple developers wrote us about not being able to access gnizr public Maven repository and the Javadoc page on dev.gnizr.com. Our server dev.gnzir.com is down due to a network upgrade. The site will be back online in the next couple days.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

UPDATE (March 4, 2008): the server is now back online.

Monitor gnizr Devleopment and Say Hello World

Since the public release of gnizr 2.2.0 on Dec. 7th, 2007, within 2 weeks, we received ~4000 downloads. Thank you for everyone's interest in gnizr. Some users voiced their questions in our user group, and some others commented on our Wiki pages and submitted Issue reports.

New Mailing List

Today we created a separate mailing list for tracking issue changes and SVN commits. Subscribe to this list to receive immediate notifications when users submit new issue reports and we commit changes to SVN.

http://groups.google.com/group/gnizr-dev-tracking

New Developer Documenations

As reported in our Twitter stream, we are in the process rolling out gnizr developer documentations. Our goal is to provide information to help developers to extend gnizr by either adding new functions or altering its existing behavior.

We begin with an overview of the gnizr design and its database model. We then describe instructions on how to set up a build environment for rapid prototyping and testing -- fyi. we use the same settings in our development. Getting things started, we created a Hello World tutorial to showcase how you can take this building environment into action.

All documentations are in the editing process. We will complete the Hello World tutorial when we release gnizr 2.3.0-M3.

We are very excited about what gnizr can do for the open source community. Not only we want to make it the best open source social bookmarking and mashup application, but also we want to provide a free and open source educational tool for people to experiment with social web technologies and innovate new applications to exploit the power of Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web.

Gnizr 2.2.0 Status

We just migrated our open source gnizr development to Google Code. It will take couple more weeks before we complete the whole process. During the following weeks, we will be busy working on the following (and more):

• Roll out gnizr 2.2.0 beta for download
• Setup a Maven repository to serve uncommon dependency libraries (maybe)
• Test the steps described in HowToInstall and HowToBuild wiki pages
• Complete the GetStarted wiki page for a 10-minutes overview of gnizr functions

I drafted HowToBuild tonight. The described instructions haven't been fully tested (i.e., don't waste your time trying it).