News You Can Bruise for 2003 April 18

I don't mention the silly animal-themed codenames I give to NewsBruiser releases in the Freshmeat announcements, both out of my general neurotic distaste for tall poppy self-promotion (notice how the 'get NYCB via email' box is way at the bottom of Crummy's front page, and how NewsBruiser didn't even have a Freshmeat entry for the first four years of its existence) and because I had a vague feeling that the Freshmeat team would just edit out such frivolity. My vague feeling was vaguely justified with the most recent NewsBruiser release, as the Freshmeat team changed "round out the release" at the end of my announcement to the blander "were also added in this release." Perhaps it was merely an attempt to rid Freshmeat announcements of cliches; but then why stop at the announcements? Why not reject entire software packages for being cliched?[0]

All of this is completely irrelevant to the fact that NewsBruiser now has an entry in the prestigious FSF/UNESCO Free Software Directory (UNESCO? They just got involved, apparently.)

[0] Actually, I am kidding. Before my initial NewsBruiser submission was approved, I was interrogated by the Freshmeat admins as to what was so great about NewsBruiser that they should put up another pointer to a weblog program. I think this is a good idea, and I think Freshmeat's reputation for being a repository of pointers to useless, unfinished software is mainly because they don't want to go back and deal with all the packages they added in pre-interrogation days. I check the new packages on Freshmeat every couple weeks for Software Roundup, and even the stuff I'm not interested in is pretty original. Compare SourceForge, which doesn't even care.