Argh. I really need to find more time to update this more often. It’s suffering right now and I’m sorry about that.

I’m here today to talk about a few things. First of all, projects. WPGet and SleekTabs still have had no time on them - right now stuff is just too crazy and it’s currently impossible to fit them in. I haven’t abandoned them and don’t want to, I just don’t know when the next time I’ll get a chance to sit down and work on them will be.

For my work on Vaveo, and just anyway, I actually have a couple of small projects that I might want to release in the future. First of all, there’s a JavaScript based image and text rotator script (I’m not sure the best way to explain it, but sort of like Jeroen Wijering’s script but not in Flash and supports text along the image) that I wrote for the Vaveo homepage.

I’m really happy with how simple yet elegant the code is and I think it might have utility in a lot of other situations and for a lot of other people too. What I don’t want to do though is just throw the code out there and not be able to commit to supporting it if people need help and updating it. Is it better that it’s out there though or not out there until I can be sure I can deal with it?

I don’t know the answer to that. Thoughts?

The second project I have is a home-grown download tracking system I use here on my site. Basically it’s a fairly simple PHP script that records information about people who access it, and then transparently passes them onto the file download. Now this one I won’t throw out there immediately; at the moment it’s quite tailored to my needs and would need a proper reporting interface built to view the logs and a lot more attention to make it portable. Still, I’m keen to get that out there too at some point as it’s nice to contribute back code.

On a completely different subject, I am going to be away and offline from the 18th-25th of this month inclusive. That might mean I may possibly get some time on my other stuff (albeit without an internet connection), but that is definitely not a guarantee.

It’s never easy to give up on a project. Unfortunately, it’s something that we have to do from time to time. I’m here today to announce the official death of the Megaphone project.

From the start I must admit it was poorly defined and doesn’t really seem like something that made sense as a part of the then strategy for Oratos.

It has also succumbed to the somewhat inevitable technical obsoletion as I gain more experience with PHP. Having now worked quite significantly with the MySQLi library in PHP, it is clearly vastly technically superior to the standard MySQL library. On top of that, I just don’t want to work with the underlying architecture of Megaphone any more.

Add to that current time constraints and it isn’t feasible or worth continuing, I’m afraid to say. In the coming weeks, I’ll slowly phase out the Megaphone project page. It and the last source release will remain up for the foreseeable future, but I don’t plan to link to, publicise or support it any more.

It’s a bit frustrating to have left a project, but it’s also worth remembering that without failure there would be no success and that nothing is really lost as every line of code you write makes you more experienced.

It’s not an easy thing to do - but I think it’s right that it officially is given dead status rather than continuing to stagnate. I remain committed to WPGet and SleekTabs, but progress will be slow while Vaveo continues.

I love PHP. More specifically, I love PHP 5. All the web development I do is in the latest stable version of PHP 5, and this server also runs the latest and greatest PHP as well to bring you all the stuff here.

A lot of web hosts and systems still run on the much older PHP 4 however. Frankly, it’s about time we all moved into 2007 and moved over to PHP 5. It’s too late/early for me to eloquently go into all the details, but the point is, PHP 5 is better and is where the future of PHP is.

That’s where GoPHP5.org comes in. It’s a campaign to kick start people into moving into PHP 5. I’m fully behind this and encourage everyone else to put pressure on developers, hosts and users to start thinking about moving to PHP 5 if they haven’t already.

Anyway, it’s pretty late, so I’m off to bed (to start full time Vaveo development as of tomorrow).

[via Jacob Peddicord's awesome looking redesigned Drupal blog (aka Code Chunk for the rest of us)]