Bugzilla has a very interesting feature called Whining. With it you can schedule reports to be automatically sent by email to you or anyone else in your team.

As an example, I have sent to me on the weekend a report of all items that were created or worked by our dev team in the past week.

Creating a whining report is pretty easy:

• save a search criteria that interests you (eg. all open items, items closed in X days, etc);
• fing at the bottom of the Bugzilla page a “whining” link;
• create the subject and description of the email;
• select the mailing interval;
• recipients;
• and saved report.

This way you’ll have a nice list on your mailbox with the bugzilla tasks that are most important to you.

If you’re working on a localization project and would like to have the translation work done online, Pootle is currently the best option I found. Having an online translation platform is a great option for collaborative work since your team of translators can work from different parts of the world simultaneously.

Pootle has a nice user rights management feature allowing you to set the responsibilities of each team member in your project:

• those that can submit translation suggestions;
• reviewers;
• team leaders designating specific tasks and setting deadlines;
• technical management of the translation files.

All of the translation work done easily online. The translator chooses the project page, sees the source string on the left and on the right just start writing the translation. If needed, he/she can also leave notes for other translators or reviewers.

Pootle works well with PO or XLIFF files and you can export these to offline .csv format or directly to .mo for direct usage.

Knowing well Pootle, you’ll discover an incredible number of other features such as: setting translation memories; direct integration with version control systems, acquiring translation statistics and more. A large number of famous projects are currently using Pootle, including Firefox, OpenOffice, Compiz Fusion, and laconi.ca.

With a project I’m working on, it was a bit of a hassle to get it installed but once ready to go, a try life saver it was.

In the past, to run online surveys I used GoogleDocs and SurveyMonkey. One was a paid service and the other too minimalistic. LimeSurvey though is a very nice open source platform to run complex online surveys however you choose.

The list of features is quite incredible, the best ones I found were the export / import format options (including SPSS, CSV, PDF, and .xls); large possibly of question types; integration of pictures and movies in a survey; and plenty of graphics options for you to analyze results inside the platform.

I was very glad to find this platform so I can run surveys the way I want to and be sure that all of the data is kept safe with me.

The open source based microblogging platform identi.ca has recently added some cool new features:

• hip new design giving the platform a fresher look;
• cloud tags for individual micro-bloggers;
• and the best of all, groups! You can create groups, join existing ones and write posts inside groups writing “!” in front of the group name.

Adding groups functionality is a nice feature, inspired (maybe?) in FriendFeed’s rooms. People with similar interests can discuss topics together and you’ll always receive posts of the groups you’re connected to.

Since identi.ca’s platform is completely open source, you can download the laconi.ca and create your own microblogging instance with all of these features.

First, my truest apologies for the disappearance. Due to health reasons, work, then more health reasons my tech life was drastically minimized. But, now all is well and coming back on track.

And, we’re coming back with a sweet web service called identi.ca. Once Twitter got all crazy and full of never-ending glitches, many web services jumped in the opportunity to win the hearts of frustrated users, identi.ca being one of them.

But, what is so special about identi.ca? First and foremost, the software that powers it, called Laconica, is completely open source!! (released under the GNU Affero General Public License) Which means that the community can jump in and produce a much better service in a shorter amount of time. For example, translation to several languages are already in the works.

Secondly, anyone can download the source code (Laconica) to make their own branded identi.ca, creating a de-centralized micro-blogging platform. This is possible because Laconica uses the OpenMicroBlogging protocol, allowing the user to post a message in his own Laconica-based microblog hosted in his/her own server which will then connect directly with other microblogs using the platform.

Other features I love: API (same codes pretty much that Twitter uses), GTalk integration, and OpenID login.

So far, the folks at identi.ca are doing an awesome job, kudos to them! If you’d like, add my identi.ca account here.

Reddit is trying to strengthen its web presence, as a competitor to Digg, by releasing their code to the open source community.

Being released under Common Public Attribution License, reddit is now allowing users to download the full code that powers its website. The real intent is to have developers provide improvements for reddit itself, making it a bigger and more powerful platform that only their small team of 5 can not possibly manage.

There are more Digg-like open sourced platforms for you to choose, such as Pligg. So, the real threat of someone building a strong competitor for them is weak. The community is what powers these sites, not technology. So, by opening their code they are trying to engage the community more and allow the possibility for faster development time.

In summon, by no means an altruistic approach but an action that is nevertheless applauded since now they at least reassure users that their algorithm is clean and fair.

You can download the full code here. For more info, read the official blog post annoucement or watch their video announcement:

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia is now coming out strong with Wikia Search, an open source collaborative search website. It was first released in alpha months ago, but most recently some new features have been announced.

It isn’t a Google killer (yet), but it surely has the potential to one day become quite visible.

Wikia Search takes on the same principles that Wikipedia does to generate and moderate content, but here for your web search results. Search for any term and if you don’t like something you see from the results, you can alter it the way you’d like. You can:

• add a different website to the search results;
• change the description of sites that showed up;
• rate the results so you can vote on the links you think are most important for that specific search query;
• leave comments on a result found or even delete any of the links!

The database powering Wikia Search comes from Grub, a distributed search indexing system. At this moment it counts with 30 million indexed pages, but as Grub becomes more familiar and different users install it on their machines, these numbers can grow pretty quickly.

I like the concept of Wikia Search from the fact that eventually with enough user activity it can probably give better results than Google itself. Eventually though.. If you’re an early adopter and have time and interest to test new web projects, give it a try!

Pligg is for Digg as GetBoo is for Del.icio.us.

I was happily surprised to have found this open source project. Besides from being a website that can organize my bookmarks, GetBoo also releases the entire platform for download under GPL license. So, not only can I use their services but I can also copy it freely!

The project was created in 2005 and the website already has 14000 registered members sharing their bookmarks.

GetBoo.com has quite a good number of features to make organizing bookmarks easy. After you’ve gone through their free registration, you choose to import your bookmarks stored in your browser. There are detailed tutorials for IE, FF, Safari, Opera, and Netscape.

Afterwards, you can install a Firefox extension so you can submit sites to GetBoo with a click of a button. One button is to make the submission and the other is to go directly to your GetBoo page.

Now, bookmark away! The submission page is pretty similar to other existing websites with title, description, tags, and the option to organize it all inside specific folders you choose.

The frontpage for GetBoo will display all publicly stored bookmarks. But, it looks like submissions from newbies will not be displayed there. You need to have an account older then 60 days to share public links.

There are also other options you can mange from your account’s page. Including import from Del.icio.us, exporting, and stats.

The platform itself seems to be very easy to install. Find our more and download link are GetBoo’s SourceForge page. It seems the only difference from this package and the released version for download is Firefox’s extension which isn’t available forgeneral release (yet).