Oops, I Did It Again
Released some software, that is. Haven’t done it for a couple of decades, and this time I used the GPL rather than my old “Baen Convention” tag. (Yes, that’s not a typo for “Berne Convention.” I christened it in honor of the grand fellow I stole it from, Jim Baen, the SF editor. While editor at Galaxy he released a nifty hack with the copyright statement “All users are hereby granted all rights to this software, on a nonexclusive basis. In fact, the only reason this is copyrighted at all is to prevent someone else from copyrighting it and thereby restricting its distribution!” The words tickled me enough to borrow them for the HyperCard XCMDs I was at that time releasing.)
This time it’s a mambot for the CMS Joomla (recently forked from Mambo, the bot will so far work with both). The CMS refused to allow me to place the output of a module where I wanted to, namely as a sidebar to my main story. It insisted upon maintaining an empty column beneath the inserted module until the content item itself ended. Very ugly. So I wrote something to fix that. I offered it to the dev team, thinking naively they might want to bundle it, but that never happened. (Offer’s still open, team.)
That seemed like a good enough excuse to learn to use SourceForge (or the Joomla implementation of it, anyway) and so was born Module Insert as an Open Source project. Along the way I added something I wished I’d added to it in the first place, so I guess it still qualifies as a new release, despite the fact I’ve been using it in Mambo sites for a year or so.