Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier writes a timely and thoughtful article on “Why Debian Matters More Than Ever” to coincide with the release of Squeeze as the Debian Project’s stable release.

It is well worth reading.

A couple of tidbits:

Yes, Ubuntu has appealed to a wider audience than Debian ever did — but it was Debian that inspired Mark Shuttleworth in the first place to create Ubuntu. As Brian Eno once said of The Velvet Underground’s debut album, “Only five thousand people ever bought a Velvet Underground album, but every single one of them started a band.” Likewise, Debian may enjoy a small percentage of the Linux market, but it’s inspired one hell of a lot of people to start their own distribution. … Debian’s most important contribution to the Linux community may be simply that it’s not controlled by a corporate entity. If 2010 taught us anything, it’s that having a single corporate sponsor can lead to a lot of uncertainty at best and total disruption at worst.

Now that this blog is running on Universal Time, I’m pretty sure that while it’s still Sunday, Feb. 6, 2011 in my particular time zone (Pacific), Monday has already been reached in UTC, and Debian Squeeze is now in its second day of being the Debian Project’s stable release.

And along with a “new” release, which many of us have been enjoying as Debian’s Testing distribution over the past months, there is also a brand new Debian web site. Even Planet Debian looks “refreshed.”

The best way to keep up with Debian news is via the project’s many mailing lists, a bunch of which I’ve been following of late. When that information is meant for the widest possible audience, it generally appears as part of the latest official news from the Debian Project.

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Sweet! You CAN call in a photo from the menu after you’ve uploaded it. FlatPress uses BBCode to drop it in. I’m starting to think I need to learn a whole lot more BBCode than I do, even though FlatPress responds very well to straight-up HTML.

Look at the wiki for FlatPress themes. I’m overwhelmed a bit by how many themes there are to choose from, many of which have been ported from WordPress.