What if Olav is really gone? or, the future of Blueprint
Over the past month, a lot of concern has been expressed on the Blueprint mailing list. Olav, the project founder, has not been heard from since he updated the framework to version 0.7 in February, and the last sign of any activity from him was 2 months ago on his Twitter account. Being that he's from Norway and none of us knew him personally, we have no idea why he's M.I.A. All we know is, we can't reach him via e-mail, and now we have this important project used by designers and developers from around the world that has no owner.
It gets worse, though. Olav never appointed any other users as managers of the repository on Google code or the mailing list on Google Groups. We've received countless spam there over the past month and no one has been able to delete it or block the spammers. We have also lost the ability to update the repository, so Blueprint has sat at version 0.7 without a single ticket being cleared. Something had to be done.
So, over the past week, I and other members of the core group have undertaken the task of migrating Blueprint to new waters, that being a repository on Github, a new Google Group, and a new website. Here's what we have so far:
- The official site for Blueprint (blueprintcss.org), which I am hosting on my Mappdev server.
- The official Blueprint Google Group, of which the address is different by a single hyphen.
- The official Blueprint repo on Github, which should be very familiar to those of you who have worked with projects there, and includes the now up-to-date-and-carefully-maintained-by-yours-truly Blueprint Wiki.
And of course, we are taking steps to make sure that all of these important resources can be managed by more than one person, so that this mess will never happen again. Consider this our initiative in making sure that Blueprint lives on, because we all know that it's a very important project, and I like to think that it's the most popular CSS framework in existence. At least, I like it a lot.
P.S. If you are subscribed to the old Blueprint mailing list, please unsubscribe and join the new one. We need to switch everyone over!
3 Comments
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this seems to have a mobile number for Olav.
Wow, that's some sleuthing. I'm not sure how comfortable I would feel about calling that number directly, but I do think I should contact the e-mail address for the group and see if they know anything about Olav.
It helps that I'm a fellow Norwegian. If all else fails, I can try to send him an SMS at least.