Welcoming Ludo, Jerome and Lightpress

I’ve been talking with Ludo for some time and have become increasingly impressed with both him and his work, so I want to welcome Ludo and Jerome, and their lightpress project to TextDrive.

Ludo

Ludovico (Ludo) Magnocavallo fell in love with programming a loong time ago when he got a TI/99 for Christmas, and has never stopped since. He lives in Milan, Italy where he spends his days as a Technical Architect for Italy’s largest financial institution, and his nights working on LightPress and other assorted projects.

Jerome

Jerome Lavigne is a very tired consulting engineer living in beautiful Vancouver, BC who would prefer not to squeeze his 6’3” frame onto another economy flight for as long as he lives (or 2 weeks, whichever comes first). While not doing fun stuff in the great outdoors, he spends far too much time with computers, exploring the intricate world of software engineering and contributing to LightPress.

LightPress

LightPress was born in October 2004, when the infant nanopublishing start-up Ludo co-founded (and later left) needed to run a dozen blogs on a very tired, old Celeron 900. After trying a few commercial and Open-Source blogging platforms, it became pretty clear that developing a new frontend on top of WordPress would have been faster than trying to implement all the needed customization, and would have allowed us hte young and pennyless company to delay the costs of buying and setting up a new server.

After a couple of months of internal use, LightPress was released to the public. Soon after, Jerome posted a review on his blog critizing the (non-existent) architecture of LightPress, which prompted a complete rewrite that transformed LP into a modular, object-oriented application and saw Jerome join the development.

In the next few months, LightPress will become better integrated with WordPress (some of the new features are already in the latest unstable releases), and hopefully acquire its own multi-blogging backend which should make it even faster.

·:· Posted 19 June 2005, 05:17 by Jason Hoffman to About TextDrive  |