Can I just say how nice it is to have a patron I can go to when I want to vet ideas and new features? Ed Vielmetti is that guy here in Ann Arbor and he just forked his blog with the latest offering, Superpatron. Already, he has a number of good posts, and I’d highly recommend you add it to your blogroll because what he’s writing can be applied universally (not just to AADL).

Do you have a superpatron?

The idea of having community advocates seems so natural. Ed talks about the benefits of a technology advisory board, but even that may be too formal. If you haven’t done so, try to get your finger on the pulse of your community by reading their blogs, their editorials, their suggestions. The other day I spent an hour or so pouring through several months worth of patron comments with the idea to find out what a) pisses them off the most and b) pleases them the most. While some things probably will go unfulfilled, it was an interesting read. I’m digressing a little, but my point is that if you don’t have a superpatron, maybe you ought to get a little proactive about finding one. Of course you will never find a superer patron than our superpatron, but it’d still be super to have a semi-superpatron.

The idea of community involvement in the development process is really a large part of the vision I have for AADL. I want 2006 to be a banner year for folks like Ed and Matt Hampel (created the AADL firefox plugin). I’m looking forward to building an environment both online and off that will foster that kind of creativity and hopefully bring more people from the community (and beyond) into that fold by providing the tools and services they need to get started.

Ed and I are currently working on an idea of his to produce microformat output from the catalog. As this progresses I’ll be writing more about it here and I’m sure he will on his blog too. His post gives a good overview of what this means. Essentially, I’ll be able to modify our existing catalog RSS feeds to accommodate this. Currently we are in the process of setting a standard for the output which can hopefully be used beyond the scope of this individual project.

Happy New Year!