I recently added mailing list analytics to Grokbase in response to Gabor Szabo‘s post on estimating the size of the Perl community. This provides some useful insight into community participation; however, both Gabor and I noticed there are a significant number of automated posts from computer programs and it would be useful to segregate these
Community Analytics via Mailing Lists
Recently Gabor Szabo wrote an article to answer a question he’s often asked, “How many people are in the Perl community?” In his response, he mentions and analyzes a number of proxies including conference participation, commits, open source contributions, mailing list posts, etc. John Napiorkowski agreed with the importance of analyzing this data, “Understanding this
Base58: Fast Hashing with GMP
Base58 is an alternative to Base64 that is growing in popularity for case-sensitive encodings due to several characteristics including multi-protocol-safety and human-readability. It is used by Flickr, Bitcoin, and now Grokbase. The general characteristics of Base58 are that it uses the protocol-safe alpha-numeric alphabet (Base62) and excludes easy to confuse digits. Both Flickr and Grokbase
Filtering Popular Mailing List Discussions with DateTime
Discovering Information via Better Browsing A great way to get into the thick of a new software project you want to learn or need to use is to check out popular mailing list discussions. Typically these will have detailed answers and multiple points of view. Recognizing this, Grokbase was designed to sort many things by
