I wanted to highlight some recent changes that I hope people will find useful. Following on the recent new website for ROS, http://www.ros.org/ (Which I highly recommend you checkout if you haven't already.) we've been doing some more housekeeping to make things easier to use on our various websites.
We have updated the CSS styles for the wiki, improving the look and feel for things like buttons and font spacing. We have also added some new information to package pages, for example: http://wiki.ros.org/roscpp_tutorials On this page you will notice the new badges for "Released", "Continuous Integration", and "Documented". This should give users more information at a glance for packages which are documented on the wiki. Additionally, there is now a "Jenkins Jobs" link on the right hand side "Package Links" box. If you click this it will expand to list all of the build farm jobs related to this package and their status. We will add more information to the package pages as we can, suggestions and pull requests are welcome.
We have also just launched the http://status.ros.org site. This site gives you an overview of the status of our services as well as some realtime metrics. This site is hosted externally, so we can communicate outages and progress on repairs even when our other infrastructure is down. We would encourage you to follow @rosorg or add our RSS feed/signup for email notifications on the http://status.ros.org site directly.
We're also actively working on preparing for ROS Indigo Igloo. A major part of this perparation has been preparing for Python 3. If you'd like more information on that there's a thread on ros-release@code.ros.org http://lists.ros.org/lurker/message/20131231.003813.311b5072.en.html and we have recently update REP 3 for Indigo http://www.ros.org/reps/rep-0003.html#indigo-igloo-may-2014 Also in perparation for turning on the Indigo buildfarm we have removed all Fuerte jobs from the farm. Fuerte packages will continue to be available however it will not be possible to build new packages.
While I'm on the topic I'd like to encourage all maintainers to make sure that they're on the ros-release mailing list to make sure to stay up to date on release specific information and discussions.
I'd also like to encourage everyone to send announcements and updates on their projects here to the ros-users mailing list or submit them to ros-news@googlegroups.com for posting on the ROS Blog. And if you're blogging about ROS related content submitting your blog to http://planet.ros.org/ where you can get an RSS feed of ROS related activities. One of the strengths of ROS is it's large user community sharing project updates and announcements is a great way to contribute to the community.
2013 was ROS's strongest years with more and more people releasing packages against both Groovy and Hydro. The packages available for these distros have grown to be more than 750 and 850 respectively.
Thank you to everyone who's contributed already and to everyone else I encourage you to start by making a small contribution such as answering a question on http://answers.ros.org or updating or extending a wiki page.
Happy New Year!
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