It has been a busy week!

We started the week with the ongoing push towards Elgg 1.1, including a number of bug fixes and some translations. The biggest change this week was to move sessions over to a database store – this provides more scalability options as well as making things more secure on shared hosts.

This week also saw the development of the first version of our commercial SMS server that provides both outbound and inbound SMS channels for Elgg installs to hook into. This included a sophisticated client side library which provides simple yet powerful tools for hooking into this feed – the proof of concept was to add SMS functionality to The Wire (so you can now post your Elgg community thoughts on the road!)

More on this to come…

On Thursday, me and Ben were helping out at the OFE stand at the London Linux Expo. We got to meet some very cool people and talk about open standards (such as OpenDD), introduce Elgg, and generally big up FOSS.

I had a good look around the show. The contrast with the Linux side and the Mac side in terms of style was striking.

It depressed me somewhat that the Open Source Village (with a few exceptions like Open Street Map) was pretty much a lesson in what not to do.

It was good to see the projects there, and its great they were given this space. But most people there seemed to be more interested in staring intently at their laptops rather than talking to people or interacting with the other projects.

Contrast this with projects like Ubuntu which had people giving keynotes and wandering around chatting to people.

No prizes to see who is more likely to still be around in a years time…

But, on a positive note, while I was there I discovered that GoDaddy (one of the largest hosts and domain name resellers in the world) are now offering Elgg hosting and support!

And finally, after spending the day working on a commercial build, I spent 15 minutes building a small plugin which enables The Wire to push messages to Twitter. It is now possible to send an SMS to your wire and then out to your twitter – all through some loosely coupled drop-in plugins.

Cool eh?