Open Source CatholicBecause sharing is good for everyone.
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A new chapter for Open Source Catholic: announcing the Catholic Digital Commons Foundation
After years of conversations, drafts, and quiet collaboration behind the scenes, I’m glad to be able to share some news with this community: the Catholic Digital Commons Foundation has been formally incorporated, and Open Source Catholic is entering a new chapter alongside it. What follows is the story of how we got here — where we started, the people who made it possible, what the new foundation is (and isn’t), and an invitation for those of you who have been reading along to take the next step with us.
Where...
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The Tale of the Episode Numbers Bug
One of the ways I put my talents as a software developer to use for the church is I maintain the Catholic Stuff You Should Know website. I love reading stories about interesting bugs other developers have encountered, so I thought I’d share my own story about a bug I recently fixed on catholicstuffpodcast.com.
To understand the bug, it will be helpful to have a little bit of the backstory. The Catholic Stuff You Should Know website was originally built with WordPress. In 2016, I migrated the website...
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Semina Verbi: an online encylopedia of the influence of the Gospel on human culture
Open knowledge
Reading up on some of the past posts in this community, I see there have been a number of posts about open access to information, in particular (in this context) as regards the Catholic faith. Access to the biblical texts, access to the Catechism and magisterial documents… When a project is open source, it has a good possibility of surviving over time if it is able to create a community, because it remains accessible to the community even when the original people behind the project might not be...
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Bringing the Word of God to the desktop and to websites
There are a number of projects out there that publish Bible texts online. You can look up Bible verses, and even compare between versions.
That’s great for just consulting a Bible verse. But what if you want to quote a Bible verse in a document, or on a website?
Most people would go to one of the websites where you can find an online version of the Bible, copy the verses they are interested in, and paste them into their document (or webpage). But then you probably have to reformat...
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Migration to Jekyll and GitHub Pages from Drupal site
After almost eight years with Open Source Catholic as a Drupal 7 website hosted on infrastructure generously provided by Midwestern Mac, I migrated all the Drupal site content into a static Jekyll-powered site hosted on GitHub Pages (thanks to a suggestion from Michael Bianco).
To maintain consistency we migrated everything, including comments and forum topics (we’re now using Disqus for commenting), and made sure all the old link paths were redirected to the new Jekyll structure.
Please let us know if you find any problems on this...
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Open Source Catholic - moving towards a more open site
I just wanted to post an update at the end of 2015; as stated in The Future of Open Source Catholic, I wanted to find a way to move this site forward, being honest that I probably won’t have a lot of time to do much myself.
My main goals in doing so are to ensure Catholic developers and companies who are interested in OSS and an ‘open’ philosophy in their technological development have a central resource to learn and share ideas and software.
Some of the earliest...
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Open source is 'only reliable way' to preserve human history, argues Vatican
From The Inquirer:
"The main question at the start of our project was which format to save the texts. We needed to make sure [people] could still read the digital files in 50 years' time." Ammenti explained that, in order for the manuscripts to be readable, the Vatican Library opted for open source tools that do not require proprietary platforms, such as Microsoft Office, to be read.
Ammenti goes on to explain that the Vatican has chosen to use the FITS image format in order to preserve digitized scans...
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