Episode: 1592
Title: HPR1592: An Open Source News Break from Opensource.com
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1592/hpr1592.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 05:34:17

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Hello Hacker Public Radio.
This is Semiotic Robotic here with Special Guest, Ginny Skalski, with your weekly open
source news break from OpenSource.com.
Recently at OpenSource.com, we featured an in-depth comparative analysis of three prominent
open source content management systems, Drupal, Jumla, and WordPress.
Writer Niteesh Tawari pits these heavy-hitting CMSs against one another, explaining how
they stack up in four key respects.
Installation time and complexity, plug-in and theme availability, ease of use, and customization
and upgrades.
Spoiler alert, Tawari never settles on a single winner.
Instead, he tells readers which CMS to select depending on their priorities.
Wanted an application with plenty of configuration options during installation, Tawari recommends
Jumla.
Want something that's easily upgradable?
In that case, Tawari would tell you to install WordPress.
If you're thinking of managing a website, blog, or other online resource, the open source
way, then you simply can't miss this extensive analysis.
That was a great article.
I actually tweeted that out to my followers because I know there's a lot of people who want
to start blogging, but just don't know where to start, and I thought that article did
a good job of breaking down some open source CMS options.
Was there any CMS option in there that you're using?
I know Drupal certainly for open source.
Absolutely.
I would have to say Drupal.
That's what we used to power open source.com.
We just transitioned actually from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7.
We did that upgrade at the end of May.
It was a tough upgrade because anytime you upgrade your key infrastructure for your primary
project, it's a little harrowing and a little scary, but it was awesome.
Our community manager had it down to his science.
We had like, oh my gosh, the downtime we had on the site was like a minute or something
like that.
It's a bit crazy.
Yeah, and in my opinion, it was actually kind of a fun team building exercise or just
a good team building experience to go through the upgrade together.
All of us troubleshooting bugs and all up early in the morning, getting ready to watch
the upgrade happen and be online on IRC checking things.
It was fun.
I really enjoyed it, but I would have to go with Drupal because it's what powers open
source.com.
I wonder how many people would look at upgrading their platform as a good team building experience.
I like your optimism there.
That's really good.
Well, here's another camp miss piece.
This one's by community moderator Joshua Holm, who introduces us to a set of open source
tools designed to take some of the stress out of designing and giving presentations.
Holm stresses that the presentation tool chain he details on open source.com is relatively
platform agnostic.
It's built around HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript, so presenters can transmit fly decks seamlessly
across the web without feeling locked into any particular presentation software platformer
environment.
Because these presentation frameworks are open source, Holm writes, they can be extended
and enhanced in any way you wish, though to be fair, writing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
is a little more complicated than just using PowerPoint, keynote, or impress, Holm says.
I think that's a fair analysis.
Home walks readers through three tools, impress.js, hovercraft, and strut, applications that
allow presenters to create slide decks and planaled read structure, text, or markdown, then
output them in any number of cross-platform compatible formats.
So you've either used this, have you tried impress.js?
I haven't tried it yet.
I've seen presentations on it, and I think it's really slick.
It's definitely something I'd like to try sometime.
I've not yet tried hovercraft or strut.
Yeah, I haven't either, but I have to say, as a huge markdown fan who basically lives
in markdown, I would love to be able to make slide decks in markdown.
That's just like a holy grail for me.
So I posted a comment to Joshua at the end of his article and just said he's open to
the whole new world for me, because I'm interested in trying this out.
But you said you saw it, right?
It looks like Prezi, like the output looks like Prezi, or what?
Yeah, the two impress.js presentations I saw definitely had a sort of a Prezi feel
to them.
They're very interactive, and the text and type was moving, and it was definitely a step
above your standard PowerPoint or other typical presentation.
What's cool to me about this is the way that, because presentation software, like, because
slide decks play such an important part in presentations anymore, because people are
increasingly doing presentations remotely, so getting a team together for even something
as simple as a little lug meeting that has people in multiple locations or something
like that.
You would have to send a slide deck to everybody, post it somewhere, have them download
the slide deck, or email it out, or whatever.
Here you just create a whole slide deck in HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript, put it on the web,
and people load it up.
You know, they just, they find it on the web.
They're probably URL.
They can go to it.
And it's amazing.
If you're shipping around slide decks, you can make changes at the last minute.
You know, you ship your slide decks to everybody, and then you're like, oh, jeez, you know,
slide 46 has a mistake.
I got to fix it and send it back out to everybody else, or whatever, oh, we just got that quarterly
port in the day before I sent my slide.
Right.
It was day after I sent my slides.
So now I've got to redo it, so this is just such a better, such a, oh, it just seems
like, again, holy grail of presentation software, so I'm anxious to try it out.
And that's a good point, too, because one of the two impressed at JS presentations I saw
was I was going through an old conference website and looking at who the speakers were,
and I saw that one of the speakers had used it.
So I clicked on it, and I went through his entire conference presentation, like several
months later, which normally I would have never downloaded the slides even among my laptop
and scrolled through them.
So it was a really cool way to quickly have access to it, and see it even months later
when it could be stale at that point, which it wasn't.
All right.
One final story here in our health channel, we're featuring a piece from Open Hatches,
Shawna Gordon-McKean, who also volunteers on the Open Science Collaborative.
Gordon-McKean explains Wiki Project Med, a non-profit corporation that brings together
doctors wishing to contribute and promote high quality health content on Wikipedia.
Jake Orluet's Outreach Coordinator at Wiki Project Med, or WPM, explains that quote,
people are, for better or worse, learning about life and death issues through Wikipedia.
So we need to make sure that content is accurate, up-to-date, well-sourced, comprehensive,
and accessible.
For readers with no Native Medical Literature, Wikipedia may well be the only option they
have to learn about health and disease, end quote.
To this end, WPM organizes volunteer writers and translators to help enhance the quality
of the medical information available on Wikipedia.
Gordon-McKean explains how the team avoids those inevitable edit wars and works to decrease
the stigma associated with seeking guidance from an online encyclopedia.
You know, I'm not really surprised that a lot of people do get their medical information
from Wikipedia because, you know, in this Google culture, people go online, they know what
their ailments are and often Wikipedia is the first thing that comes up.
So that's not surprising to me, but it's interesting to read that they're trying to decrease the
stigma associated with seeking guidance from an online encyclopedia.
Do you think that stigma will ever go away and that will become, you know, a common
place accepted?
Go to your online encyclopedia first?
Gordon-McKean-McKay I think so to be honest.
Because I mean, I think this is what, like, WebMD and places like that were, this was
the problem, they were supposed to solve, right?
It's really a problem of, I think it's sort of a problem of branding and a kind
of a problem of a sort of cultural expectation, right?
So I think there still is a stigma associated with online encyclopedias, like Wikipedia,
for anything as, you know, so quote unquote, serious as, you know, health and disease.
But for pop culture topics, it's like an authoritative resource, right?
So there's something, there's some weird stigma attached to certain topics and not others.
And this is not to say that, you know, people should use Wikipedia as, you know, the single
source for self-diagnosis, but it seems to me that that stigma is still very strong.
And I always, I think that people maybe don't use it as the single source because you
look something up online with something strong with you.
And if it doesn't say what you wanted to say, you try to go to, like, for other sources
in the Bible, so maybe it's a starting point depending on your ailment and then you keep
going further.
That's right.
Yeah, and I think that, you know, Wikipedia is a good sort of point of contact, first point
of contact for folks who are looking about anything, whether it be, you know, a summary
of last night's Big Bang Theory episode or, you know, some kind of explanation of symptoms
that they're experiencing.
It's a point of contact for people, but, you know, the thing that Wikipedia does really
well and that they've been up in their game lately is consensus-based relevance, consensus-based
authority, and sourcing, right?
So they've been really, really aggressive with sourcing of stories.
And so, Wikipedia, if anything, provides a really nice user-curated set of links that
you can use to trace a Wikipedia entry to see where it went.
But I think this project here, Wikipedia Project Med, is taking the right approach and saying,
look, we've already got this platform here.
We've already got, and people are already using it.
Let's meet people where they are and try to give them, like, make this resource better
for them because it's what they're using, right?
It's not like, well, we know better than you and we're going to make this resource
that's going to be better than Wikipedia.
That's a really tall, that's a really tall order nowadays, and so this is a sort of approach
where, you know, doctors and health professionals want to meet people where they are and make
the resources that they're already using better for them, and I like that effort.
I just had an idea.
Tell me what you think about this.
Okay.
You know, it's removing two electronic health records.
How cool would it be if I'm a physician?
I have my electronic health record pulled up, you know, it's the end of my day, I'm typing
out my notes from the day, and all of a sudden I get a push notification about a question
on Wikipedia.
Is this true or false?
Can you explain?
And so I take a moment and answer that question with the proliferation of electronic health
records, if every doctor answered one question that was pushed to them per day, I think
you could gather pretty robust catalog of the answers.
Yeah, so it's kind of like a cross between caption and crowdsourcing.
You know what I mean?
You know what I mean?
Like to log out, answer this question, and then like, yes, yes, we need to make that
Ryan.
Okay.
There's our million.
Well on that note, that's all for this news break from opensource.com.
For more on these stories, be sure to check out the show notes for this episode, and as always
you'll find a daily dose of open source news at opensource.com.
Until next time, dear listeners, this is Semionic Robotik.
And this is Ginny Skalsky, wishing you peace, love, and open source.
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