I checked Freshmeat for updates every day for a number of years, both to find out about interesting source updates to my favorite software, as well as to discov

I checked Freshmeat for updates every day for a number of years, both to find out about interesting source updates to my favorite software, as well as to discover new software. I have strong memories of writing my first piece of fairly decently-used software (Ticketsmith) around 1999, then carefully hand-packaging the tarballs and crafting the FM entries. At one point, once I had learned a bit more about web servers, I moved the downloads from my web host to my own Linux-based Apache box running on a cable modem out of my apartment and watched the download logs with FM referrers in realtime. It was exhilarating. One thing I clearly remember about FM was a very nice color scheme and font choice. It had a certain polish to it in what was often a land of Apache auto-gen directory entries full of tarballs. Tangentially related: I worked briefly for VA Linux, as part of the first paid staff of Linux.com. I learned a lot of large-structure PHP site architecting that summer. My boss was OctoberX of Themes.org fame.