A little while ago, while talking in the #drupal mailing list, I showed my latest creation to one of the core developers there. His reaction was “Wow, I am always surprised what people use Drupal for”. His surprise is somehow justified: I did create a site for a bunch of strippers in Perth. Yes, I would classify the link quite work-safe.

After talking about it for a while, I decided that it would be a good idea to write a short case study about how I created the site. So, here we go.

The constraints

The site needed to be hosted in Perth.

Since the very beginning, directories (of any kind) have had a very central role in the internet. Even Slashdot can be considered a directory: a collection of great news and invaluable user-generated comments. As far as software is concerned, doing a quick search on Google about software directories will return the free (as in freedom) software directories like Savannah, SourceForge, Freshmeat and so on, followed by shareware and freeware sites such as FileBuzz, Super Shareware, PCWin Download Center and Software Archive (great if you’re looking for shareware and freeware, but definitely less comprehensive than their free-as-in-freedom counterparts).

I read David Jonathon’s article Anybody Up To Writing Good Directory Software? the other day, which got me thinking about software directories in general. As David mentioned, many of the software directories one finds when doing a quick google search are free as in beer, not as in freedom. But what interests me is the software directories that already exist, providing a combination of both free as in beer software, and open source software. Sites such as Freeware Downloads and Shareware Download don’t advertise themselves as providing free as in liberty software, but each of them have a good selection of open source software available… if you know where to look.

You get the best free software news at FSDaily… because YOU decide what’s important. Here are the top 10 FSDaily stories from the last week as voted by the members. Don’t like ‘em? Think something’s missing? Want to know more? Head to FSDaily and get voting!

I was happily hanging out in the sysadmin room of a major ISP around here in Western Australia (no, I wasn’t meant to be there, if you really want to know!). Steve, the senior sysadmin in charge of the place, showed me a computer screen (running Vista, but I won’t comment on that) and said “Oh yeah, I’m sure you know about this…”. “Yeah, I know Google maps” I answered. He looked at me embarrassed. “Err… actually, we use Zenoss server monitoring here… look close. That’s our VPN!” It was a map of their server in Australia. There were green lines between them.