a little progress report

[mouser]

thought i'd give a little progress report on f+r 2:

i've been going back and forth in my mind about how substantially to reorganizing the settings of F+R v2.

we discussed a lot the desire to have modifiers that let you select different folders to search etc.
i originally advocated a kind of kludgey solution but someone (forget who) said concisely that it would be nice to be able to easily configure these modifiers by putting the settings for the modifier in one place, which would not be supported with my hack.

so i'm just getting up the guts to do rewrite the options handling of F+R to revolve around the idea of having directories and scoring associated with a modifier/category.  it's a pretty big change to the underlying code.  old config files may no longer be compatible (not sure yet whether i will make an upgrade tool).

anyway, i'm still working on it - it's not so much work that it won't get done, but it's enough that it's going to take me another month.

[rbeeger]

As for me, I could live with having to reconfigure F&RR.
We'll be here to welcome the next version once it's finished.

[nontroppo]

Well mouser, good luck and if you need to bounce ideas around then we're happy to help in any way we can. Have a great Christmas by the way ;-)

[cybersnoop]

Have you considered making f+r2 open source?

[mouser]

i'm not sure how useful it would be to people to open source F+R since it is written with borland c++ builder, a commercial compiler (doesn't mean that it can't be open sourced, just that it's not nearly as attractive to open source community as a program that can be compiled with free toils). 

my other concern of course is with regard to donations.  there are a couple of apps here of mine that are open source, including a very popular irc encryption addon, which really doesn't get donations.  i'm not sure if people would be less inclined to donate to the site of F+R was open source, and if other versions were written an distributed by others.. maybe we can think about a new kind of open source license that says it's open source but derived versions should somehow redirect people to still visit this site? i'm not sute..

[gottadoit]

Mouser,
One thing to consider is that open sourcing something and putting an entry for it on freshmeat and sourceforge does give you some links back to your site. At least this is a very simple and useful app to do it with, it has the appeal factor of being useful and a certain amount of simplicity in what is being done

Increasing eyeballs is the way to more donations if you pay any attention to the standard marketing messages. It doesn't matter what it is you do, the conversion rate is always fairly low so you need more people to visit to keep up your donations. In relation to this topic you just need to consider if having this application open source and therefore in those 2 extra places (and maybe a few more) would assist driving some traffic to the site....

Something that is free and might be worth 10 seconds read is hxxp://www. butterflymarketing.com/blog/ there is currently a pdf teaser chapter there that presented some information that might be worth a read

nb: its not a live link because live links *out* of your site decrease your google page rank and you won't be wanting that after all