BeeSeek Blog

If you are curious about where your colleagues-bees come from, visit the BeeSeekers map.

Do you recognize the map? :P

The service is open to all that feel an bee in the heart, so all those that use BeeSeek as serch engine too, also if they aren't subscriber to any team of the BeeSeek Community. Instead, if you are subscribed to a team, is appreciated that you write it in your profile.

Let's cover all the world!

Translated by Claudio Azzarello

A new decision has been recently made on Developers Team's Mailing List: the browser extension for Beeseek will be no more! Andrea Corbellini, on 5th october, after a virtual meeting with SABDFL Simone Brunozzi, proposed to trash firefox extension to avoid a futile proliferation of browser plugins, choosing instead a web application.

In the last few days Andrea Corbellini, developers Team Leader, opened a thread about which characteristics to consider when a "bee" browse the web. At the moment, search is not focused on creating a ranking, but we use it to harvest data and create the real ranking system. Everyone is invited to join us on this effort, commenting this post or using the wiki page dedicated to the search algorythm.

The following proposals have been posted:

Translated by Ubuntista

Some days ago we started our BeeSeek store, the online shop hosted on www.cafepress.com (it was a Council meeting decision).

BSMascotte

There are many clothes for every age and of course for men and women, each one is marked with BeeSeek logo or the mascotte. We also offer some everyday objects like mousepads, coffee mugs, wall clocks, planner books, calendars, pins, baseball caps. Now you have the chance to show BeeSeek to your fellow mates and friends, wearing or using our items!
Come and buy some!

Translated by Ubuntista

Official tool for meetings

IRC has been chosen as the official tool for meetings, because it
allows to transcript decisions and discussions in 3 ways, to improve
transparency between council and community:

Hive in apt

Hive&co will enter apt with pycentral.

Temporary license for BeeSeek

GPL v3 has been chosen momentarily, but we're waiting a final decision.

Shop in Cafepress.com

We've opened a virtual shop at this address:
profits are zero, to increase chances that our gadgets are bought.

Using Dreamhost hosting

The website will remain on Dreamhost until Beeseek will be too big for
it. Hive&Co will be hosted on a VPS by vpslink.com, sharing the host
name between the two.

Official beeseek language

As you can see, dear english reader, english is the official language
for beeseek documentation, while the italian language is only optional
at this moment.

How to vote in the council

Everything needs a half plus one votes to be approved. The vote is valid only if at least half of the council and Simone are present. In case of parity, Simone's vote will count double, irrespective of the number of council members.
Simone has also a SABDFL role (Self Addicted Benevolent Dictator For Life), meaning that he can force any votation if he likes so.

nota bene: this point is still under discussion.

Database cleaning

beeseek's database needed to be reorganized, so:

Changing in platforms for wiki and forum

Mediawiki has been substituted with MoinMoin, because:

The forum platform has not been chosen yet, because forum will transform into a support place for users.

Changes in sites domains

Domains become

Economic issues

Using Rosetta

Despite the official language is english, Rosetta is the right tool expecially for translations. Since beeseek is still in development, the most useful parts to translate are wiki and blog. To integrate Rosetta in our project we need PO files that contains an ID for each text string (Rosetta asks that it corresponds to the english sentence) and the translated string (initially in english too). This task will be accomplished by a dedicated script. Once POs are created, we have to load them in the Launchpad server in the appropriate section and wait that it is approved by a Launchpad administrator.

Creating a project FAQ

To help newbies that are joining beeseek for the first time, we are creating a FAQ section.

The BeeSeek Council meets usually once a week on the dedicated IRC channel, #beeseek-council on server irc.freenode.net. During those meetings, the Council takes strategical decisions and talks about BeeSeek general development, as it is needed in any project, and so in FOSS project like BeeSeek.
To be transparent, in this page we'll add the transcriptions of every Council meeting.

Today BeeSeek opens to the public its official repository, at repo.beeseek.org. Andrea Corbellini, from the Developers Team, the guy which cured the setup of this repository on BeeSeek server, announced it today.

The "repository" concept is surely familiar to people already into the Unix world. It's a system that allows download, installation and auto-magic configuration of softwares that the user needs. Dedicated softwares, like apt-get for Debian-based distributions, among which we find Ubuntu, manage everything, using an easy graphical interface or the faster command line.

Repositories bring uncountable advantages, from the easy setup, to the added security of not leaving files and libraries around, and the easyness and flexibility with which you can update the software to the newest release.

From today, therefore, anyone willing to use the BeeSeek software, can download hive with the simple command:

sudo apt-get install hive

At the moment this repository supports only Ubuntu. To add our repository you can just open sources.list with this command:

sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

and at at the end of the file those two lines:

deb http://repo.beeseek.org/ubuntu/ DISTRO main
deb-src http://repo.beeseek.org/ubuntu/ DISTRO main

(you need to substitute DISTRO with your preferred distribution, like: edgy, feisty o gutsy)