Andy of Niall

Oh noes it's Ohloh Posted on 16 August 2007 | Tagged ohloh, code, fields of gold, project frozen flame | Comments (9)

I came across an interesting site the other day - Ohloh. It's basically some sort of odd combination of open source software metrics and social networking. While I am generally find most social networking sites fairly annoying, this one intrigues me by introducing something else into the mix. Last.fm is another good example of this - I use it for plenty of music finding goodness.

When I stumbled across the site, I found that I was, in a way, already a part of it. Ohloh had been tracking my commits to SilverStripe (although only the commits made since the subversion repository was opened), and when I signed up I could claim that svn user as me. It also gives some interesting statistics about SilverStripe - for one it is very well commented; one of my tasks a while back was going through and adding phpDocumentor comments to the code, although the enormity of SilverStripe meant that I didn't particularly get that far, so I can't credit for many of those comments. Maybe later on I'll get a chance to do some more.

I also added Fields of Gold and Project Frozen Flame to Ohloh, and after waiting a day or so for the projects code to be crawled we now have statistics on both the projects.

A few other SilverStripers also signed up and we gave each other kudos - Ohloh's way of letting you show gratitude to another open source developer. Ohloh also calculates a 'kudo rank' based on the commits you have done and the kudos you have received. I logged on the next day to see not one, but all five of the 'highest kudo gainers' on the front page were SilverStripers (although Elijah is put down as CMSMadeSimple, he is one of our Google Summer of Codestudents, and is working in a private branch that Ohloh can't see). Woohoo!

Ohloh is a site I plan to keep an eye on, it's still in it's early days, but it shows promise.