phpODP meets github. lives happily everafter.

A couple of generations ago (at least in “internetz-years”) I wrote a tiny php script called phpODP that would let people put the content of the dmoz directory on their own site. Now, I know what you’re thinking – no dmoz didn’t have a problem with that – they even have a category for sites like that. Anyway, I initially gave it away for free, it turned out to be hugely popular at the time (so much so my blog got hundreds of thousands of backlinks and a PR9 together with CNN and other equally notable sites). At the time, before Google decided to mirror the dmoz content themselves, they actually liked these dmoz-mirror-sites – so no wonder it became popular. Anyway, long story short, I decided to charge $20 for it so I would get less support emails and would actually answer the ones I got.

Fast forward to current time:

I just put phpODP up on github. Here is what this means:

1. It’s free, anyone can improve / modify / use / fork / abuse it.
2. It’s no longer supported by me on e-mail

I want to thank Mark Dickenson for the inspiration to do this. I got an email from him a couple of weeks ago notifying me about a bug in the script. I told him I’d fix it, but it wasn’t exactly on the top of my priority list. Some days later I got an email from Mark again with the fix included. So I thought – what the hell, why not just put the code up on github? After all, we’re just days away from 2010 ;-)

And here we are! My Christmas present to whoever is still interested in phpODP / dmoz

For downloads and github info go here: http://www.bybjorn.com/phpodp/