Yo ho ho and a haul of reddit treasure!

Posted on August 4, 2008
Filed Under Software |

reddit-booty Yo ho ho and a haul of reddit treasure!

I’ve been visiting reddit for a couple years now, mostly lurking, but never really submitting links or commenting. When I learned that reddit was being released under an open source license, I quite literally checked out the code the same day, and commenced to tinkering!

While chatter and fanfare across the intartubes rolled on, even the lovable reddit alien got in on the announcement with a fun video. (see below) I began getting acclimated to some of the code, the Pylons web framework, SQLAlchemy and so many other technologies which I’d never before encountered. I managed to get a site up and running on one of my servers, and then convinced that reddit truly is “news. evolved.” and “freedom from the press“, I purchased a VPS from RIMU HOSTING1, and set out to make something serious. Thinking globally and acting locally, as it were.


Well, a bit over one month later, and we (a few friends, family and myself) have a really neat and growing site based on reddit called metaboone! Our slogan is “What’s new and popular in Boone, North Carolina and beyond?!“. The site is still very much in development mode and some features are currently switched off to give the brave little VPS some breathing room, but it is quite functional, and very fun!

I must note that the site could not exist as it does without both the numerous resources available in the reddit community already, and the most awesome support of the reddit people themselves! It has been an absolute pleasure to have help from the likes of keysersosa, kn0thing, jedberg, and ketralnis2 in getting certain features going! All the reddit guys are fanstastic geeks whom I’d always admired, and now hold in utmost regard.

Not content to sit on my laurels and only continue to receive excellent encouragement and support from the growing collection of resources, such as the project site, the Google Group, and IRC channel,3 I quickly found myself giving back. Since then I’ve contributed a little bit of documentation4 to the project, and even helped others in IRC and in the reddit-dev Google Group.

Seeing the need for additional reddit translations, and one in particular, I set out to translate the reddit interface to Pirate so that a combined effort might be ready by September 19th. The reddit guys let none of my efforts go unnoticed, and have rewarded me handsomely with a nice collection of reddit items, featuring a killer reddit code t-shirt!

I’m honored to participate in the project, and will certainly be contributing even more going forward. This has become one of my favorite open source projects to-date!

If you’re curious about running your own reddit, do check out the project page, and dive in! I’ll be filling in gaps with documentation, and continuing to help this fine effort to the best of my spare time (all forty-two minutes per day) ability!

Thank ye for the pieces ‘o eight- Ye be a fine bunch on a sturdy vessel, mateys! Me be a wishin’ ye all fairest ‘o winds ‘an followin’ seas! Arrr!

  1. RIMU is AWESOME and highly recommended for doing Xen right- if you need to run a python or even java based web application, check them out! [↩]
  2. I’ve yet to work with spez, but I’m certain that he’s equally awesome. [↩]
  3. #reddit on the Freenode IRC network, irc.freenode.net [↩]
  4. I have plans for much, much more [↩]

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