[Clipart] Open Clip Art Library 2012

[Jon Phillips]

Hi all, welcome to 2012! Our project continues to grow, now on a big
new server, and with more and more clipart!

At the end of the year we hit a major point of growth which forced us
to consider our hosting solutions for the project. Luckily to the
efforts of nkinkade, Jcubic, and others, and with the support of
Gandi.net, we moved our busy site over to their servers. Well, that
wasn't quite enough oomph so we had to ultimately use also a second
big server we can scale quickly at http://linode.com. Now the site is
up and is performing very well. Thanks to everyone who worked on that
move! Our goal now is to keep growing, steadily and grow our
stability.


Upcoming 2012 Release Cycle

For the upcoming 2012 year, I am proposing that we work at a more
brisk monthly pace for feature and bug fixes. On Aiki, the Aiki
Framework development team is already working towards this, and tying
together these releases is a good step in that direction. We need your
help! If you want to help fix bugs or become a librarian, please do
now by visiting our launchpad page, helping comment on bugs and then
also fixing them:

https://launchpad.net/openclipart


Keeping the servers Running

Also, you will notice on the search results page that we have added
ads for a popular commercial service that provides images. In moving
to Linode, we require funds to pay for hosting and if we have excess
we will use to support our monthly release cycle bugfixes and feature
upgrades. Shutterstock provides a great service for clip art,
hopefully beyond just what we provide, and hopefully that also
provides value to people who use our site for clip art. As always, our
clip art remains free as well as the site, but attempting to use these
ads is a way to help offset the cost of running the site which is
increasing. That's right, it costs to run these big servers and keep
serving free clip art :)


Upcoming 3.1 Release

With the upcoming 3.1 Release, you will see our developers have
already been hard at work with many tasks nearly completed. Already
with the server move, we have ferreted out many slow queries, replaced
the search engine with Sphinx, and fixed many bugs. One of the biggest
updates coming is an upgrade of our server software which will result
in massive fixes, a clear path to translating the site, and many
features available for our use.

https://launchpad.net/openclipart/+milestone/3.1

Here's to 2012 on the project!

Jon



-- 
Jon Phillips 王✳爻气 http://fabricatorz.com ✳ skype: kidproto ✳ irc: rejon
+1.415.830.3884 (global) ✳ +86-187-1003-9974 (beijing)