phpODP meets github. lives happily everafter.
A couple of generations ago (at least in “internetz-years”) I wrote a tiny php script called phpODP that would let people put the content of the dmoz directory on their own site. Now, I know what you’re thinking – no dmoz didn’t have a problem with that – they even have a category for sites like that. Anyway, I initially gave it away for free, it turned out to be hugely popular at the time (so much so my blog got hundreds of thousands of backlinks and a PR9 together with CNN and other equally notable sites). At the time, before Google decided to mirror the dmoz content themselves, they actually liked these dmoz-mirror-sites – so no wonder it became popular. Anyway, long story short, I decided to charge $20 for it so I would get less support emails and would actually answer the ones I got.
Fast forward to current time:
I just put phpODP up on github. Here is what this means:
- It’s free, anyone can improve / modify / use / fork / abuse it.
- It’s no longer supported by me on e-mail
I want to thank Mark Dickenson for the inspiration to do this. I got an email from him a couple of weeks ago notifying me about a bug in the script. I told him I’d fix it, but it wasn’t exactly on the top of my priority list. Some days later I got an email from Mark again with the fix included. So I thought – what the hell, why not just put the code up on github? After all, we’re just days away from 2010 
And here we are! My Christmas present to whoever is still interested in phpODP / dmoz
For downloads and github info go here: http://www.bybjorn.com/phpodp/
