From June of 2007 to April of 2010, I was the project maintainer for Gnu Wget, a popular web-fetching tool that’s pretty much ubiquitous in the unix world.

I am not Wget’s original author; that distinction belongs to Hrvoje Nikšić. These days, I’m no longer very involved with Wget development or support.

My most significant contributions to the project would probably be

• the creation of an informational wiki, the Wget Wgiki (I still host and (passively) maintain this),
• instituting the use of a bug-and-feature-tracker on Gnu’s Savannah website,
• expanding the existing suite of regression tests to be much more comprehensive,
• moving the build system to Gnu Automake and Gnulib, and
• myriad small bugfixes and improvements.

Other major improvements to Wget that I oversaw while I was the maintainer, but which were not chiefly implemented by myself, include the support for traversing links contained in CSS files, updated support for ntlm authentication, and support for internationalized urls (iris).

My experience maintaining Wget led me to starting work on Niwt, a functionally similar project, but with different design decisions.