I am plain fed up of Google Talk refusing to allow any third-party clients to connect after about 18:00 BST. I have no idea whether anyone else has this issue, but I certainly do and it’s starting to really annoy me. It seems to happen almost every day at the moment.

I’ve tried connecting with Kopete, Pidgin, Adium and iChat, but still, nothing works. Regardless of OS or machine, I can’t get a single third party client to connect.

I want to use GTalk as my primary IM as it’s nice and compatible with Jabber as an open standard and all that, but at this rate, I’m thinking about just getting myself a standard Jabber account. All I have right now is the damn Gmail chat interface.

A couple of days ago I got my private beta invite for web statistics service Reinvigorate. I have to say I much prefer Reinvigorate’s interface to that of Google Analytics and hopefully over the next few weeks I’ll collect enough data so that I can see whether it really is better or not.

In other statistics news, I’ve also downloaded and enabled the Automattic Stats WordPress plugin. It’s free, you just need a WordPress.com API key (which you will have if you’re running Akismet) and supposedly also tracks stats in the same way that a blog hosted on WordPress.com does.

I’ll give both a try and see what they’re like!

It took a bit longer than expected, but I’ve finally managed to top myself on Google, so searching for Peter Upfold in Google now takes you to the new URL (the old one redirects, but the new one is better and we want people linking to the new not the old).

Yahoo actually managed to get there a few days quicker than Google, so credit there. Microsoft Live Search is still reporting the old URL at the top (the new one is listed below as a separate entity despite there being permanent redirect codes being issued by the old one). And Live, no I did not mean peter uphold.

Actually I’m really lucky that my name is unusual enough that I can top search engines for my name. Very lucky. +1 for weird names.

Just finished the first proper part of my documentation wiki.

While I did do a screencast for SleekTabs to explain a little how it works, there are still gaps as far as a comprehensive install guide goes.

Well, I’ve made a nice start at one on the wiki, which you can take a look at here – https://peter.upfold.org.uk/devdocs/sleektabs:gettingstarted.

Any feedback is welcome and of course if you want to make it better, please do get on the wiki and get editing!

I also have some great things planned for version 0.2, so I’m looking forward to working on those when I get a little time. I might get a chance to work on SleekTabs on Saturday. Don’t expect a release too soon though!

@cvp – I think I’ve addressed the two points you made in your email a while back, but let me know if there’s anything I missed out that’s important.

Wow, using @username notation in blog posts. What is the world coming to?

You’re not allowed to do this:

So why are Google Ads for services like this showing up in Gmail? I suppose it’s not illegal so it’s not Google’s job to enforce, but it is against the WoW ToS to use these services.

Ironically, it wasn’t actually an email conversation about World of Warcraft, just the word ‘wow’ (as in “wow look at that”) appeared a couple of times.

In other Google-related news, I’m getting Google Apps For Your Domain set up on upfold.org.uk, so I’m looking forward to trying it out!

I am very happy to announce that SleekTabs has been nominated for the April 2007 PHP Classes Innovation Award.

This is the second time I’ve been nominated (the first time was for WPGet, and I’m honoured to receive another nomination!

Bearing in mind that I don’t really consider ST to be ready for production use yet and I was just getting the code out there with the intention of working on it and upgrading it to a better standard, I’m really really surprised to be nominated again!

You can of course vote for me if you so wish by going to the Vote page (you’ll need an account at PHP Classes.

As always, you can see the SleekTabs page at PHP Classes here.

Recently, I made the decision to use Dokuwiki as my wiki solution. I’m going to put up a wiki which will feature developer stuff and documentation for all of my coding projects that are hosted here.

The URL is https://peter.upfold.org.uk/devdocs/. There is nothing of any interest on there at the moment, but I’m going to get some content on there as soon as I can. With any luck, you can expect to have some good stuff up there by the end of this week.

Please note – due to some continuing issues with email sending from the new server, you may not get your password via email if you register for the wiki. This is likely to happen with at least Gmail, possibly other services too. If you don’t get your password, email me and I’ll sort things out.

This wiki should address the inexcusable complete lack of documentation thus far. I’d also encourage people to contribute to it as well if they can and want to. That’s why I’m going for the wiki format. 🙂

It’s been online with this domain name for several hours now, and things seem to be working good. I’m extremely happy with how things have gone and I’m looking forward to doing some really cool stuff with my new dedicated server.

So, how does it work?

The server is my spare PC. It’s an AMD Sempron 2600+ (clocked at 1.6 GHz) with 1.5 GB of RAM and it’s running CentOS 5 Linux. It has a 40 GB drive which has the OS and the data on it, and also attached is a 160 GB drive for backups and any other data I need to store.

The relevant ports are forwarded on the router to the server’s internal IP address (which is static).

The clever bit is the bridge between the router and the internet. Our ISP gives us a dynamic IP address, which makes running a server a little tricky.

I bought the domain name upfold.org.uk yesterday (damn those squatters who already got the .co.uk).

I also bought the Custom DNS service from DynDNS. I let DynDNS manage my DNS. The router updates DynDNS with our IP every time it changes, and DynDNS then updates the relevant DNS records so people can still get to the site. Also, DynDNS sets the DNS records to a very short time to live (TTL), to prevent caching which might mean the IP would be out of date for some users.

It’s a pretty nice system and it seems to be working thus far. Hoping it holds out!

Despite a downgrade in connection speed, you should get the pages a little faster, as you’re getting the full 1.6 GHz grunt of the Sempron, not CPU time shared with many other people.

And I get complete freedom. Now I need to get one of those “I am root” t-shirts. 😛

I’m working on putting together a ‘Server Status’ page, which will hold possible downtime alerts (not that anyone cares particularly about my site, but I want to document the evolution of this setup) and some statistics too. Will blog here when it’s up!

You should be reading this courtesy of the new server as this post only exists in the new database. The migration appears to have gone fairly smoothly thus far, apart from some strange DNS name server delegation conflicts at the start. I’m hoping that problem is now solved.

I must apologise to everyone reading in feed readers, you may see a set of duplicate posts from the feed. This is a symptom of switching the FeedBurner source feed over and shouldn’t happen again. Once again, sorry everyone for that.

For those interested in my new server setup expect a post coming soon – I’m still enjoying a moment of post-migration elation. I need a quick break as well, been working quite hard to get things sorted over this weekend (I kept it secret quite well, didn’t I? 😀 ).

Feel free to comment on this post to test that comments are working properly.

UPDATE: please please please update any links to my site to peter.upfold.org.uk. The old domain should redirect for the short-term future, but it would help if you’d update your links as soon as you can to the new address. Thanks!

I’d like to announce something quite exciting – I’m migrating my personal site and the blog over to a new server. It’s not just any old hosting solution though. I’m moving to self-hosting – using my own computer to actually deliver the site to you.

Why? Have I gone completely insane?

Well, no, I haven’t gone insane, I was anyway. 😛 But seriously, here are some of the reasons:

• Control. With my own server, I control everything. I am root. Getting this privilege with a paid-for hosting package usually needs a lot of money every month.
• No limits. With no-one to tell me how much disk space, databases, <insert commodity here> I’m allowed, I can do whatever I want. Apart from bandwidth, of course. I still have to be within the ISP’s terms (which I will be).
• Learning. The best way to learn how to do system administration, is to do system administration. I’m hoping that administering a real-life site will help me learn lots. I like learning.
• Hosting your own site is just plain cool.

There are, of course, disadvantages. There may be more downtime. If I have a powercut, my ISP goes down or I mess up some configuration, then the site will go down. Thankfully, it’s only my site, so it’s not vital to keep it online 100% of the time.

Still, you can’t learn without screwing things up occasionally.

I’m pretty excited about this move as it marks a new era for my personal site and blog. In fact, the domain name will also be changing as well, for technical and other reasons. I’ll keep the new domain name a secret until the move is completed, so I can check everything’s working properly first!

By the time you read this post, I will have frozen the database so I can move it over. Until the move is complete, I’m disabling all comments (otherwise things will get out of sync and that will not be fun).

Watch my Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible for up-to-the minute updates on the move.