Wikia just released an open source social networking extension to MediaWiki, allowing anyone with a MediaWiki install to let their users create profiles, upload avatars, message each other, and do other traditional social networking activities. There are already a number of open source SNS platforms, but this makes for a tempting starting point for any wiki-centric community site.

ReadWriteWeb has a longer overview.

Well, I've had it. I must get at least a dozen "please join my crappy network" invite messages each week from Ning networks. I haven't yet found a way to prevent them from "inviting" me, and all the emails violate CAN-SPAM in a number of different ways (no "unsubscribe feature", no physical address).

Their FAQ says

“To protect your privacy, only your friends and certain members of social networks you belong to can send you messages on Ning. If you’re a member of a network, the Network Creator and Administrators can send you messages and you can message them back. Further, if you belong to any groups, the Group Creator and Admins can get in touch with you. In order to send another member of a network a message, you’ll need to ask them to be your friend first.”

But apparently any Ning network can send me emails like "Come join me on Lame Group on SpamNetwork...".

Just this morning I got 6 different invites from "Members Only Network", all within the space of 10 minutes.

So for now I would suggest not joining anything on Ning until they address their growing spam issues.

Edit: Ok I found the culprits -- the spams were coming from some of my Ning.com "friends." *sigh* I knew there was a reason why too many friends was a bad thing.

SubText - http://www.subtextproject.com/

BlogEngine - http://www.asp.net/downloads/starter-kits/blog-engine/

dasBlog - http://www.dasblog.info/

FYI we use dasBlog here, but SubText & BlogEngine look interesting ...

Unfuddle's forums has a discussion on alternate Subversion clients for Mac users.

SCPlugin is a free Subversion plugin that integrates with the Finder, and works similar to TortoiseSVN (a Windows SVN explorer plugin). Syncro SVN is a commercial standalone SVN client ($60) that works on Mac, Windows, and Linux.

Most Mac users use the svn command line program, but I know from experience how handy TortoiseSVN is for me to visually view the state of my working folder, compare files, and other operations.

TechTarget has an article on how to set access control lists to define default file permissions. This came in handy for us, as we have several developers who work on our sites. The default file permissions would get annoying, as developer A would create some files which only he could edit, so developer B would have to use sudo to change the file permissions to a developers group.

With the TechTarget article, now all newly created files in our code directory are owned & editable by the developers group, making shared development much easier.

If you need to recursively FTP files (e.g. you're pulling down data, or doing offsite backups), take a look at lftp. It's normally available on Linux boxes. One nice thing is that by default it will only transfer changed/new files. You can use it in a script or cron job.

Rimuhosting has a nice FTP overview on how to use it.

ncftp is another, more powerful FTP client that is also worth checking out.

Another helpful page, using the Unfuddle API. Now users can submit a ticket into an Unfuddle project without having to log in.

We've been using Unfuddle for a while and have been pretty happy with it, although we always felt that the built-in RSS feeds didn't have enough information. Recently they released an API, and so we decided to make a new Unfuddle Project RSS feed, using PHP, that displayed richer information like times, people, and comments.

To install, edit the settings near the top of the PHP page to use your domain name, login, project id, etc, then load onto a friendly local PHP server. It requires PHP 5 due to use of the SimpleXML extension.

One thing to note -- the file doesn't contain any caching mechanism because different PHP hosts have different things available. So feel free to add in caching support, or lmk & I'll upload a version with caching included.