The Red Spider Project

[https://github.com/the-xkcd-community/the-red-spider-project]

Why

Because we like to combine our love for the xkcd comic with our love for coding, and we want to share the experience.

How

For the impatient: fork the project, then

git clone git@github.com:yourname/the-red-spider-project.git redspider
cd redspider
git remote add upstream git://github.com/the-xkcd-community/the-red-spider-project.git
git config branch.master.remote upstream
git config branch.master.merge refs/heads/master
./setup.py
rsshell

The project is like a small, self-contained operating system layered on top of your actual operating system. People can add programs at will. It's an open-ended process without deadlines or a final goal and we're very open-minded.

What

When you run rsshell it displays a list of available commands. You can review that list at any time by running rshelp. rshelp <topic> will show you documentation for <topic> if available. This works for most commands.

There's always work in progress. If you want to know what is going on or you want to know what you can do, the issue tracker and the wiki are your places to be.

Where

• Home page
• Issue tracker
• Wiki
• IRC channel: #redspider at foonetic.net
• xkcd forums thread

When

We started in March 2012. In the first few months we spent most of our effort on the infrastructure. In July we were treated to some splendid logo designs and we got a homepage. In December we launched our IRC channel and in March 2013 the wiki took off. The builtin documentation was introduced in October 2013.

Who

Julian coined the idea, qubital set up the GitHub repository, Neil wrote most of the initial infrastructure code and Joey designed the logo proposals. Please also refer to the copyright notices in the source files and to the Authors.txt, which lists all the authors who decided not to add their name to some file they edited.