No, not 25 posts in 30 days here. That would be something.

Over on FOSSwire (where I write about all sorts of Linux and open source stuff for those who don’t know) we’ve hit a goal of bringing monthly posting frequency back up to 25 or more.

You can see the frequency of posting over every month of FOSSwire’s history on its archives page. As you can see, we’re back up to an impressive level compared to recent months, which have been difficult.

The major reason why we’ve managed to hit this goal has been my fellow writer and editor at FOSSwire, Jacob Peddicord. His increase in posting frequency (plus an extra two posts compared to last month from me) have allowed us to get back on top of things.

Also his articles always get the big traffic. 😉

I’m looking forward to hopefully being able to keep a solid posting frequency up on FOSSwire to make sure we’re always delivering fresh content.

When you have several thousand RSS subscribers and more than a thousand uniques a day, you have to stay fresh. Not that I’m boasting about numbers or anything… 😛

One year ago today I announced that I would be moving my site here over to a new hosting provider. Me.

Therefore, today marks the one year anniversary of this hosting arrangement! I’m very happy I’ve had an opportunity to do this. I have learnt a lot about running a server and all the different things involved with it and doing everything myself gave me complete freedom and control over every aspect of my personal site.

There have been issues along the way, but most of those minor. A brief security scare (which I now am pretty sure was nothing, but it was all reinstalled just to be sure), a hard drive failure and one occasion where my database backups failed for a couple of months without me noticing, to mention a few!

Overall though, I’m really glad I did take the step to self-host. It is undoubtedly more work, but it is rewarding as you get complete control and I have gained very useful experience of doing things on the server end with Linux (or Unix in general).

Sadly, it’s not 365 days uptime, but as of writing the server reports “up 49 days, 3:41” which I think is pretty good.

Here’s to the server. Hopefully much more service from it to come.

Also before I go, I’d like to thank everyone back last year who updated their links over to the new domain at the time. Your prompt action in taking that step allowed me to climb back up Google with formidable pace!

… not that I actually said on here that I was going anywhere. Oops. 😛

But yeah, I’ve spent a week almost completely unplugged in South Wales, and now I’m doing the whole mad catch-up cycle to get back up and running tomorrow (there’s a certain FOSSwire target to hit this month and plenty of other offline stuff going on right now too).

If you do happen to be in the Carmarthen area, I can recommend a great little café type place called Time Coffee Bar in Nott Square in Carmarthen itself. Their website is rubbish, but the coffee is good and you can go sit upstairs and use their wifi (just make sure to ask specifically so you get the wi-fi key). Good price, good coffee, and an opportunity to get online. Can’t argue with that.

Today and yesterday I was tasked with representing IT and the IT courses that were available at my college; perhaps marketing them a bit too.

To do that, I did a couple of presentations on two topics that tie in nicely to some of the things that the courses offered do, one on operating systems (specifically, the differences between Windows and Mac OS X) and one which focused on mobile communications, with a Bluetooth demonstration. Turnout for the IT presentations was a little disappointing, but still, I think it went very well.

When you think presentation, you think PowerPoint.

Recently, I tried out the trial of Apple’s iWork 08, specifically because I wanted to play with Keynote and use it in a real setting, for these presentations I did.

I ended up buying iWork, mostly for Keynote. I absolutely love it – I think the results it makes can look more professional than the average PPT and the process of putting the presentation together involves significantly less screaming and hair-pulling (and once you’re used to it, almost none at all).

In my opinion, Keynote is the best program for making visual aids to presentations that you give that I’ve tried. Of course, using a great tool doesn’t mean you’ll have a great result, but it might help you along the way. 😉

I haven’t talked about it too much, but over several months all the university stuff has been brewing.

A few days ago, I accepted an offer to go and study Computer Science at Reading University from September this year.

It’s exciting that I’ve finally sort of mostly set in stone what I’m going to be moving on to do and I’m very happy that I’ve made an informed choice and that I will be doing something worthwhile and enjoyable.

I applied to both Reading and the University of Kent, both for Computer Science. As far as the course content and credentials of the two universities, there is not a lot to choose and I think either one could have been very successful. Ultimately, the decision did come down a lot to travel distance and being somewhere that I am already somewhat familiar with.

I’m also in the process for applying for funding, the ever-so-fun student loans business, and should get my accommodation choices in the next few days as well.

The cogs that will define tomorrow have been set in motion. Or something like that.