NY Times hand-codes its web site

Wow, just wow. I am so glad I read this today! Students, take note. This is why I teach you to hand-code, and why you love it when you learn this way. Students think they won't like it, but time and time again, I teach them hand-coding, then a wysiwyg editor, and 9 times out of 10, they prefer to hand-code even after using the fancy editor.

Khoi Vinh, Design Director for the New York Times online talks about the design and implementation of the NY Times site:

It's our preference to use a text editor, like HomeSite, TextPad or TextMate, to "hand code" everything, rather than to use a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) HTML and CSS authoring program, like Dreamweaver. We just find it yields better and faster results.

But really the browser-to-browser consistency that you see (and I have to admit, it’s far from perfect) is the result of a vigilant collaboration between many different groups — the visual designers and technologists in the design team that I lead, their counterparts in our technology staff, and the many, many detail-oriented people who come together to make the site a reality every hour of every day.

Third Workshop on Public Data about Open Source Systems

I am pleased to announce that the 3rd Workshop on Public Data about Open Source Systems (WoPDaSD) will be held concurrently with the 4th International Conference on Open Source System and the IFIP World Congress on computing in Milan.

I am a co-chair of the WoPDaSD, and have been for the previous two years, so this should be very exciting for our little community of data collectors.

IJOSSP Call For Papers

I got named to the editorial board of a new international journal last week. The other board members and the editors for this journal are top-notch people who I respect a lot. This should be fun.

Here's the blurb from e-net about it:

===
Megan Squire Conklin, associate professor in the Department of Computing Sciences, has been named to the Editorial Review Board of the new International Journal of Open Source Software & Processes (IJOSSP).

The journal was created to publish high-quality original research articles on the large, interdisciplinary field of open source software and processes. It will primarily serve the related fields of software engineering, management, sociology, and economics, and will publish work describing new research in free, libre, and open source software development.

The 46-member international editorial and review board includes open source researchers from 14 countries.
===