As I write this I’m approaching the final stages (I hope) of a Google Reader feed reading marathon. Due to time constraints, I literally haven’t had a chance over the past few days to open it up and catch up with the world.

Now that I am doing so, it becomes a marathon of reading stuff.

Which brings me to an idea – why can’t there be some way to prioritise my feeds? Rank them perhaps, so that when I have limited time I can catch up with the feeds I’m most interested in reading and get the rest later.

This is sort of what products like Particls do I suppose, and said product apparently has some neat algorithms for working out what you find most interesting. While they only have a Windows version and my only Windows installation isn’t hooked up to the internet (I can’t be bothered to maintain it anymore and wouldn’t use it anyway for the annoyance of rebooting to get to everything else), I probably won’t use Particls though.

Additionally, I don’t know whether I’d get annoyed by using both Particls and Google Reader and end up reading duplicate stuff. I’m not a user – so I don’t know whether that would be an issue.

Which is a shame – because I think I’d really like it.

So here’s my idea – get some kind of ranking system built in to Google Reader so I can go for a quick 10-minute catch up hit on the most important stuff and come back to the rest later when I have time.

Either that or get me Particls for OS X or Linux (preferably both and with the data synced 😉 ).

Or maybe just cut down on the amount of content I’m consuming.

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Not so tactful methinks…

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.

UPDATE: references to the former Bird Site of short-form social media have been adjusted to avoid providing free publicity to something that is undeserving of such promotion. This is no longer how I feel about this website, but my historical feelings are to be preserved below, with the relevant site’s name obviously altered!

Just installed Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible Tools on this blog and I’m quickly posting to see if it’s going to update with the fact I’ve made a blog post.

UPDATE: it worked – woot.

I always sort of didn’t like mainstream social networks, to put it lightly, and never really wanted to consider using them. As it happens, I need have only had that attitude about MySpace, not the rest of them. 😉

What is my point here? Why has it been so long since the last blog post here? I’ll take those questions in the wrong order. Stuff has been pretty crazy recently – trying to fit in (literally) full-time Vaveo development, trying to keep up a post a day on FOSSwire and lots of other things has been pretty difficult. So this blog kind of comes at the bottom of the stack and never gets all that much attention. I’m sorry – a week between posts isn’t a nice place to be, but it’s all I’ve been able to do recently.

I’m still here though and doing well.

Now, to the point of this post. Well it all started when Chris decided that we may have plans to do a Facebook application for Vaveo. I have no idea whether I’m allowed to say that, but well, I just did. Sorry, Chris. 🙂

» Read the rest of this post…

The main 40 GB hard drive that powers this server has apparently given up the ghost. Yesterday, I woke up to check the server as normal and it had decided to remount the filesystem read-only, which is never a good sign. After rebooting (and losing my >25 days of uptime 😛 ) into my recovery environment, I was able to repair the filesystem, reboot and it worked fine.

Until about 2am this morning, when the same thing apparently happened again.

Unfortunately, that probably means the main drive is dead. There are actually two drives in this server, that 40 GB one and a 160 GB drive which important web server data is mirrored to each night (although which has question marks about stability for running a boot drive).

For now, I’ve copied everything over to the 160 GB drive until I can get a replacement main drive. Thanks to the flexibility of Linux, I simply copied the data over, rebooted off a GRUB CD-ROM, entered the boot commands for the second drive and it booted as if nothing had happened. 😉

Now, I don’t know whether to just get another drive and continue with the current setup or get two SATA drives and try doing some form of RAID. Or do that later. I don’t know.

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)]

This news is pretty cool – all of FeedBurner’s Pro features are being rolled out across all accounts for free. Clearly, Google don’t need the money and have a different business model in mind – people’s data.

Still, I’ve enabled ProStats and am looking forward to using the MyBrand feature (so I can pop my feeds onto feeds.upfold.org.uk in due course). You have to email them to enable that, so I’m still waiting for a response.

Pretty cool features to have for free though. Don’t worry, we’re working on them for FOSSwire too! Well, I’m not, but other people are. 🙂

I have 5 Skitch invites. If anyone wants one, drop a comment. 🙂

Don’t put your email address in the body of your comment, just put it in the email address field then I can see it but not the spambots.

UPDATE: all gone!