I am officially back from the Lake District. Well, actually, I was back on Saturday, but as always I’ve jumped straight back into all sorts of stuff and haven’t got round to updating this blog yet. Had a good time up there – did lots of walking, seeing things and just generally spending time with the family and getting away from things. Wasn’t completely unplugged, got some (expensive) wifi while I was there for a couple of hours over the week.

Actually I had re-enabled my Zooomr photos in the sidebar of my site (on all pages except blog pages). It now works as the feeds from Zooomr which got lost during the transition to the new Mark III version of the site have reappeared.

Unfortunately, I’ve decided to take them off again. Even with Magpie caching (I have a neato Magpie RSS-based parsing solution for the feed to make the photos appear on the sidebar), it slowed down the site loading times to an absolute crawl, so I’ve disabled it.

If I get time, I might redo it and do the Magpie execution via cron, store the results in a static file and just read that at runtime. But that is a big if. For now, no photos!

FOSSwire is doing amazingly well. We’re on track to hitting a very significant visitor number milestone (not telling you exactly what just yet!) by the end of this month, so right now we’re doing a massive push to get as much content in the next few days as possible.

College starts again soon – which means even less time for all this stuff, unfortunately. I have to go in on Thursday and do the whole re-enrol and all the admin tasks associated with that and then on Monday it’s back to the daily grind. 😛

In the meantime, I’ll try and keep this blog a little more frequently updated – but no promises!

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. 🙂

If you’re like me and open Terminal.app quickly under Mac OS X to do something, but then want to open your working directory in the Finder (perhaps to drag something to another location or just see the current directory graphically), I found a really neat trick.

The simple command:

open .

Will open the current directory in the Finder. Very useful for me anyway.

How immature of me. 🙂

Go Digg (if you want to of course).

Huge props to fellow FOSSwire blogger Jacob. His Linux/Unix command line cheat sheet hit the front page of Digg (with 1335 votes right now).

It did bring down MySQL on the FOSSwire server for a time, but we’re now back online and serving the site.

Over 25,000 hits so far and counting!

Jacob, you rock.

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.

Uploaded with Skitch!

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. 🙂

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