[Openfontlibrary] OFL site

[Dave Crossland]

2008/7/4 Ben Weiner <ben at readingtype.org.uk>:
> Nicolas Spalinger wrote:
>> Dave Crossland wrote:
>>> I await ccHost 5 :-)
>> Me too.
>
> So is the OFL site's relevance to the rest of the world - the things it
> provides, the views it promotes - going to stand or fall depending on
> somebody else's software launch schedule?

Too gloomy, my friend :-)

Other font repositories - such as CTAN, Debian, Fedora, etc - are
directly relevant for the users of those systems. If you contribute to
those repositories, OFLB will benefit from your efforts in the future
- so if you want to feel a tangible sense of progress in the near
future, I suggest joining the Debian or Fedora fonts team (the Fedora
fonts team seems especially vigorous and is requesting contributions
right now :-)

> I'm trying to see whether the site's going anywhere,

You can take it somewhere. Mail me your SSH public key and I'll get
you admin access to the server. On the wiki there is a task list you
can work on.

As you know, the most important task is adding font previewing, and
ccHost v5 beta versions are complete enough that you can make useful
progress with implementing a font preview plug-in for it.

As I've said before, I can perhaps even fund your efforts if you're
short on work.

> because I wonder
> whether anybody apart from some of the list participants is interested
> in it.

There is demonstrably some interest from non-list-subscribers - fonts
are uploaded, despite the low quality of the site.

> What do the access logs tell us?

...
lrwxrwxrwx  1 rejon  openclipart   59 Aug 22  2007
openfontlibrary.freedesktop.org-access.log
...
$ tail openfontlibrary.freedesktop.org-access.log
tail: cannot open `openfontlibrary.freedesktop.org-access.log' for
reading: No such file or directory
$

:-(

> [Don't worry, I'm not going to keep on needling - but I'm curious about
> the future of the OFL site and unless I am mistaken the only way it will
> have a future is if a significant proportion of the people on this list
> have a keen interest in it.]

It has a future because the only way is up :-)

-- 
Regards,
Dave