onli

Hi Dreamwidth
I'm onli, but you may call me Malte if you don't like nicknames ;)
The Google Summer of Code is why I'm here, I want to participate at the program by working for dreamwidth. If you speak german, have a look at my blog to get the fastest overview of who I am and what I do (even though I normally don't write about too personal things, the blog should give you a picture about my activities). Apart from blogging from time to time, I study Computer Science at the TU-Darmstadt, play Jugger, read books, do things - but enough of that, let's talk about the GSoC.

Where am I from?

Well, from Germany ;) But that's not the "where" I meant.
My first contact with the Open Source World was ubuntuusers.de. It's the german support-forum for Ubuntu, at the moment the most popular Linux-distribution, and while searching there for help I stumbled into the team and became a supporter myself. I stayed for two years, for some time even leading the supporter-team.

At the moment, Serendipity is the project I'm most familiar with. S9y is a blogsoftware written in PHP, and while I only commited a few patches to the core itself, I also wrote a few plugins enhancing the software. I stumbled upon this mainly by accident (guess you can see a pattern there :) ), when searching a blogsoftware for my own blog and a friend recommended it, soon started hacking it when I wanted some features for myself.

What do I want to do here?

I'd like to start with the comment-system, making it possible to comment with a name (maybe also mail and url?) but without need to login. This project is called a good project to start with, and as I'm neither familiar with dreamwidth nor perl a "easy" start would be a good thing. But there is more: I regard comments as the most important characteristic of a blog. One can write for a long time without many viewers, but I think the motivation from a comment or a discussion in the comment-area is needed to don't stop after a while. It's no coincidence that my first plugin for Serendipity was a plugin enhancing the comment-system and I afterwards wrote a few articles thinking about the comment-section and how to present it.

If that's really just a starting point, maybe I could work on "porting" one of my more useful plugins like the autotitle-plugin or nl2p. The first inserts the title of a linked site in a link as title-tag, the latter uses p-elements and css to get rid of the br-elements for better accessibility (at least that's the thought), given that this functionality don't already exists?

Why Dreamwidth?

Because of the big "Doctor Who"-tag at the latest entries, why else? ;)
I took a closer look at dreamwidth because I'm already a little familiar with blogging-software (well, of course not with such a big hosted system). The diversity-statement convinced me to really try it, I think it stands in the tradition of the Ubuntu-philosophy, and that is a coincidence I can't ignore.

That was a lot of "me" and "I". One last: I'm looking forward to get to know you :)