“Ooh, sexy title,” is what you’re thinking, I know. Anyway, with my compulsive habit these days of installing WordPress plugins, I downloaded Social Bookmarks Reloaded. A great start, mind you, but lacking in a couple of areas. The great thing about open source is you don’t have to sit around griping about software not doing what you want. You can go in and fix it to make it do what you want! In this case, my complaints were really nit picks. I didn’t like the fact that the mouse over text (i.e., the alt text) for each bookmark was hard-coded and basically said the same thing for each site (e.g., “Add this to Digg” “Add this to D…e.l.i.c..i..o.u….s…”). I wanted the Digg bookmark to say, “Digg this,” for example. So I added an extra parameter to the xml file that described the bookmarking sites which allows you to put in your own alt text if you wish. Then I invoked the mighty Vi and made code changes to the plugin to incorporate the new parameter and dynamically create the new alt text for each image. Voila! I’ve got lots more changes I want to make to the plugin, such as adding this description interface to the plugin options interface, and a way to edit the bookmarking sites dynamically, among other things. Once I’m done I’ll re-release the plugin so others can take it and add even more functionality. Vive la Open Source!

Bookmarks

This is sort of a follow up to my article on Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo. I encourage you to read (or re-read) that article; the premise is that Google continues to innovate and has fully embraced the open source model of application development and become active in promoting and contributing to the open source community. This is what I believe Microsoft should do if it doesn’t want to go the way of the IBM Selectric. Unfortunately, Microsoft’s proprietary software dogma has reached pathological proportions and it will take a major changing of the guard (that means you, Ballmer) to knock any sense into the executive suite. If Microsoft doesn’t start getting with the open source program (in principle and action), I predict it will be a vestigial semblance of itself in twenty years time. This blog entry demonstrates what Google is doing and why they will continue to rule as long as the innovation continues.

Bookmarks