Through the magic of social networking site LinkedIn, a friend of a friend introduced me to a friend. This friend is looking for a technical writer for a website with a geek audience interested in open source, Linux, web technologies, and software development. It’s not as big as Slashdot in readership, but it is sizable and has good credibility.
It’s not a permanent job, it’s more like “we’ll pay you decent money if we publish your article.” Print magazines pay a pittance for a two-thousand word article. This website pays pittance x 3, making it a lot more worth the trouble. If I can get on the stick and write an article per month, it could make a decent source of part-time income.
I know I’m being vague about the site. Once I get my first article published, believe me, I’ll post all the details. 
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I have finished setting up Trac for hosting my open source projects. As if installing Subversion last week wasn’t enough, Trac configuration took a lot more trial and error. My web hosting provider uses Plesk for setting up web domains. Even though I know my way fairly well around Apache, I had used the Plesk configuration app to set up this web site and my friends’ websites on this server. I practically painted myself into a corner, as Plesk doesn’t like geeks messing around the Apache config files, which you have to do to set up Trac and Subversion. ** sigh **
I am still fighting with the configuration of the Subversion code repository. I want to have check-ins through ssh+svn, and anonymous checkouts through HTTP via Apache mod_dav_svn. I hope to have that all set up tonight so that I can check in the first files of my open source project’s code.
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I like and use Google Calendar, but as a bona fide code geek, I am more interested in getting my calendar data out and integrating Google Calendar into desktop and web applications.
My first open source project for pjtrix is a Mac OS X application to integrate together iCal and Google Calendar. In the last few weeks, I’ve been researching the Google Calendar API, writing some test applications to insert calendar events into Google Calendar, pull calendar events out, change calendar event data and put it back in, etc. It’s all done in Ruby, which has made it all really nice.
Right now the integration between iCal and Google Calendar is only one-way. You can import your iCal calendars into Google Calendar. Or you can import your Google Calendar calendars into iCal. But you can’t have changes flow from one application to the other without creating a mess of duplicates every time you change the date or time of an event.
You can read more information about my project at the project’s Trac home page.
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