October review: Top 10 and editor's picks

October was a solid traffic month for Opensource.com, with 681,334 page views and 110 articles published.

We published 17 articles by first-time Opensource.com contributors, and we kicked off a new community column, My Open Source Story. We reported from All Things Open and the 2015 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, and we started speaker interview series for OpenStack Summit Tokyo and LISA15.

In The Open Organization channel, we published 16 articles from 11 unique authors. October saw the conclusion of The Open Organization online book club and we launched our new Meet the Ambassadors page to spotlight our growing team of community evangelists. 

We held our annual Opensource.com Community Moderators meeting on October 18 in Raleigh, and 14 moderators were able to attend and join us at All Things Open (October 19-20). We awarded plaques to moderators who have been with us for more than one year, including Robin Muilwijk, who is our first moderator to publish more than 100 articles on Opensource.com (113 as of October 31).

October Opensource.com highlights

Editor's Pick 6

Here are six of our favorite articles from October:

1. An Arduino-powered My Little Pony donation box—Michelle Leonhart explains how she created a donation box worthy of the CRASH Space hackerspace.
2. Geriatric Linux: How an 'old geezer' came to terms with computers—Emery Fletcher had neither the need nor the desire to become involved with computers for the first 70 years of his life. Then he discovered Linux.
3. The importance of face-to-face in the open source world—Jono Bacon explains why face time is an essential part of building a healthy collaborative culture.
4. A troubleshooting process for Linux problems—David Both offers tips for troubleshooting your Linux system.
5. Jane Austen on Python: The intersection of literature and tech—This article is for the English majors, the bookworms, the lovers of literature, and the people with humanities backgrounds who sometimes struggle with the question, "So do you ever use your English degree?"
6. Writing documentation with AsciiDoc—Steve Ovadia explains why AsciiDoc is a fantastically thorough markup language for writing books.

Top 10 articles published in October

1. 3 open source projects for modern COBOL development
2. Top 5 open source desktop email clients
3. Top 3 open source Python IDEs
4. I'm an artist who loves Linux
5. Exploring the Raspberry Pi Sense HAT
6. Stephen King's practical advice for tech writers
7. Why use NGINX as a load balancer?
8. One uncle's gift of Linux
9. Raspberry Pi answers: Are my hamsters lazy or super athletes?
10. Top 4 Java web frameworks built for scalability

Find out what's coming up this month in our Opensource.com November preview.

Send us your story idea, and see our 2015 editorial calendar and columns for more writing opportunities. We've rounded up 7 big reasons to contribute to Opensource.com. Got questions? Email us at open@opensource.com.