status update

February 2011 Tech Update

Nathan Yergler, February 4th, 2011

Highlights from January, 2011:

• We published CC REL by Example, a guide to using CC REL and marking your work online.
• Support for Public Domain Mark was added to the CC API.
• We rolled out improvements to the “machine readable” layer of CC licenses: identifiers on the deeds and equivalence between our old and new namespace.
• 404 pages for the license engine are now more helpful
• We closed 22 bugs, including respecting the “retired” flag in more places, a bug with license selection in 1.0 jurisdictions, refusing to issue 1.0 SA licenses (they do not contain the upward compatibility clause, making them an incompatible silo with the rest of the world), using our license RDF to drive one more part of the publication process (sanity, sanity!), and improvements to CC Network.

January 2011 Tech Update

Nathan Yergler, January 3rd, 2011

Highlights from December, 2010:

• We concluded our annual campaign. Thanks to everyone who helped us raise over $500,000; your support is greatly appreciated. (And it’s not too late to contribute!)
• We verified that our OpenOffice.org plugin is compatible with LibreOffice, so obviously it needs a better name than CCOOo. Suggestions? Leave a comment.
• John Bishop shipped updated CC + XMP support for Adobe CS 4 and CS 5
• We began transcoding our videos into WebM, a free codec for HTML5 video
• Metadata interoperability and harmonization continues to be an area we’re paying attention to, particularly with respect to OER, where there’s no clear winner [yet].
• And while technically from November, it bears highlighting that Technical Case Studies are now in the CC wiki.

October 2010 Tech Update

Nathan Yergler, October 1st, 2010

Inspired by the Wikimedia Foundation, I wanted to give a brief update on the past month’s technology work at Creative Commons.

Notable highlights from September:

• Continuous Integration: We technically rolled this out at the end of August, but CC is now using Hudson as a continuous integration tool for all our software projects (and as I write this, things are green!). You can also get an at-a-glance view of our “core” tools on the build monitor.
• Named graphs (provenance) landed in DiscoverEd
  As we’ve continued to work on this, we’ve also had the opportunity to push some patches upstream to NG4J which addressed SQL quoting issues.
• OER search and discovery paper (describing our DiscoverEd work) submitted for OpenEd
  I’ll be presenting at OpenEd in November, and will update the wiki page with slides when they’re available.
• i.creativecommons.org is now racked at ISC: we’re continuing to make improvements to our infrastructure for both performance and redundancy. i.creativecommons.org (which serves the license badges) has the highest sustained traffic of CC properties, so this is a nice improvement for us.
• Annual Campaign: Our annual fund-raising campaign begins Monday. As usual, we’re rolling out some backend improvements for that. On Monday we’ll move to a new version of CC Network that’s integrated with CiviCRM.
• Public Domain Mark: Our new public domain tool, Public Domain Mark, launches in October. We’ve been working this month on adding support to our technical backend for that. At launch we’ll have a chooser (similar to CC0′s), the deeds and RDF (of course). We’ll also have API support, thanks to the work completed earlier this year to normalize the way our tools work (aka, “sanity”).