Welcome Back - Introducing a "new" Deb-a-Day
Thanks to the feedback (and well deserved complaints) from folks including Martin Schulze I have taken debaday "down" for the weekend so I could do a little work on it. I orgininally envisioned Deb-a-Day as one of those word-a-day calendars that simply gave you a new word each day along with its definition. And it worked! All I had to do was write a script that pulled the package description from apt-cache and feed it to the LiveJournal XMLRPC interface. But the question that I heard most was, "Why should I care about today's package?" And, frankly, some of the packages that got thrown into the queue were just plain silly (did anyone notice when telnet showed up recently?) because I couldn't think of anything good to add.

I've redesigned the system, set up a database to manage the postings, and have started loading up new packages from your suggestions into the queue. I will try to add some commentary on each package in addition to its description to help answer the why question. Let me know how it goes. If I managed to avoid making any silly mistakes, things should start showing up again weekdays at 1500 GMT. I'm skipping weekends for now until the queue builds a nice buffer zone. The database will be used for a future web page where folks can submit package suggestions along with their own comments for why they think that package rocks.

Thanks for reading. If you have questions, more complaints, or know of an awesome Debian package the world needs to know about, see the instructions on the debaday userinfo page.

- Andrew B. Sweger (aka </a></b></a>ydna)