[ImageJ-devel] Announcment: personal update sites

[Johannes Schindelin]

Dear all,

one of Fiji's most important contributions to the ImageJ community is
probably the updater. It makes it easy to stay up-to-date with 3rdparty
plugins, and it makes it easy for anybody to make their plugins, scripts
and macros available to every ImageJ user. See the list here (and extend
it if you see something missing):

	http://fiji.sc/List_of_update_sites

All that is required to offer an update site is some webserver.

To make that easier -- to take away the requirement of having a webserver
-- a couple of weeks ago, I suggested to use Dropbox to serve one's own
site: http://fiji.sc/How_to_set_up_and_populate_an_update_site#Dropbox;
Unfortunately, I can no longer recommend using Dropbox to offer an update
site due to a recent change in Dropbox' service.

So after some brainstorming with the good LOCI people, in particular Kevin
Eliceiri and Curtis Rueden, we decided that we can do much better than
to rely on Dropbox: we now offer personal update sites for everyone.

For security reasons, you need an account on the Fiji Wiki [*1*] and after
that, you can direct your web browser to

	http://fiji.sc/Special:ChangeUploadPassword

and initialize your personal update site which will be hosted at
http://sites.imagej.net/<username>/ (where <username> is your name on the
Fiji Wiki). When you do so, please do not forget to add your site to
http://fiji.sc/List_of_update_sites.

Over the course of the next weeks, we will work on making this easier from
within the updater, both for initializing your own personal update site as
well as following any update site listed on the page
http://fiji.sc/List_of_update_sites.

Have fun, and add a ton of update sites,
Johannes & the rest of LOCI

Footnote *1*: It is hard to imagine what an amount of maintenance a simple
Wiki requires (and so will the personal update sites). We still want to
offer that service to the ImageJ community because of the benefits, of
course. To strike a balance between ease-of-use and maintenance cost, we
currently require new accounts to be verified via emails, but not more
(i.e. we no longer require new accounts to be added by someone with an
existing account). Of course, we are always open to suggestions how to
improve things!