Since OpenSource Release Feed was launched some time ago, it has gone through a whole bunch of changes. It started of as a simple site built on Rails meant to make staying up to date with open source releases easier for the community. To a certain extent it succeeded but, getting the community out there involved was always difficult. The site eventually grew to be more then just release announcements and ended up containing various articles, competitions as well as some very popular interviews. In the end, due to personal circumstances the site was closed and I open sourced all the code and made it available on GitHub for anyone that might find some, or all of the code useful.

A short while back I started up the site again, again with the community in mind and hoped to build a network of sites around open source that would inform people and build a strong sense off community. Through my previous attempt at this as well as the current iteration I finally realized what I believe to be the reason why the community was not joining in and adding their own release announcements. I was expecting way to much. My release announcements in general was around four paragraphs along with some links to the full release notice as well as where one can download the new release.

Thinking about this however I realized, except for release announcements that are a bunch of pages long and could benefit from someone going in and highlighting the main topics of interest, these release announcements are in general short and to the point and all of the info I was posting and links I was adding all existed right inside the release announcement. So why not make the process of sharing these release announcements simpler? Well, it just became much, much simpler.

OpenSource Release Feed has been relaunched based on the StatusNET open source platform. StatusNET is a micro-blogging platform in the same vein as Twitter and allows for users to post messages, share links and hash tag their notices. To my mind this is the perfect way to share release announcements that are quick and easy for everyone to join in on. In a 140 characters or less you can spread the word of a new open source release to a whole community of people. And with OpenSource Release Feed you can even set your account up so that your announcements on OpenSource Release Feed are automatically posted through to your Twitter account, more about this a little later. There is also no reason for a new username or password as the platform fully supports OpenID.

I would love to see everyone join in and start sharing their release announcements and creating a really active stream that the rest of the community wants to follow and join in with. Everything is ready and you can jump in right now and start adding release announcements, but before you do, please take a second to read the instructions below to see how to set-up your account to automatically update Twitter.

Automatically Cross Post To Twitter

Once you have registered, or logged in with your OpenID, click on the ‘Connect’ link at the top right of the page. You will here find two tabs, one for SMS and another for Twitter. Click on the Twitter tab and then simply click on the ‘Connect my…’ link which will direct you to the Twitter OAuth page. Once the page has loaded, allow OpenSource Release Feed access and once redirected, your Twitter account and OpenSource Release Feed account will be connected. From here on out, happy posting! Oh yes, the new URL for OpenSource Release Feed is here.