It has been far too long since I first released SleekTabs, my PHP class which makes it easy to create tabs on your web page.

Finally, after a lot of doing not a lot, and some sporadic bursts of development, I’d like to introduce SleekTabs 0.2. First of all, I want to thank Richard Fitzgerald, who initially contacted me with an idea for this release’s main feature – caching, and has advised me on various things during its development and continues to help me with the project.

Now, let’s take a look at the main features of this release:

• Caching – if you so wish, you can enable caching, so multiple requests for the same tab are fetched from the user’s local cache, rather than resulting in another request to your server.
• IE bug fix – this release works around a bug in Internet Explorer that causes it to undesirably cache the tab results, by introducing a timestamp into the SleekTabs request URI.
• Overhauled example script – the index.php example script included has been completely reworked, fully documented and commented to explain how to implement SleekTabs in your site and how it works.

I really have to apologise for how long this has taken – it’s been literally months since the initial release and this release isn’t exactly groundbreaking. However, it is a step forward in SleekTabs’ evolution and makes the installation and integration process much clearer.

You can download SleekTabs from the project page here and give it a try for yourself. It is also available from PHP Classes. All genuine feedback is appreciated – and if you do use it on your site, thanks!

SleekTabs is licensed under a BSD style licence – see the headers in the files in the download for more information.

It’s taken me a little while to do some testing and making sure everything is all good – but my personal blog is now upgraded to WordPress 2.3.

WPGet is also upgraded to 0.7 as well – so I’m now actually using the latest version of my own software too!

After a significant development hiatus, I am very pleased to announce the immediate release of WPGet 0.7!

So in case you sort of forgot what it is after all this time, or for any newcomers to WPGet, here’s what it does. WPGet is a script that is designed to allow you to include a short summary of your recent blog posts on your website. Specifically, it works with WordPress and is great for integrating a WordPress blog into a site that isn’t completely powered by the WP platform.

You can see a great example of WPGet in action on my homepage. The sidebar on the right includes a brief summary of what’s on this blog. That is, in essence, what WPGet does (although it is fully customisable for what you want to do).

So enough introduction (you can read more of that sort of thing at the project page), let’s take a look at what’s new for 0.7:

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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.

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)]

First of all, sorry for my lack of posting. I’ve been really busy trying to work on Vaveo (which is coming along very nicely), trying to keep up a post a day on FOSSwire (and pretty much managing it too) and of course trying to keep up with life too. 😉

That means my personal blog here has had to suffer over the last few weeks, so if you were expecting lots of awesome content here, try here instead.

Over the past month and a bit, we have literally gone from nothing on Vaveo to where we are now, where we have a significant number of features done. There are still features left to do, and lots of testing to do and bugs to squash, but I’m really happy that we are getting there and making very good progress considering I’m not even able to do this full time at the moment. By this time next weekend, it should be full time, though.

It is the weekend now, so I get a little more time (I don’t stop working on Vaveo, however, but I don’t do full days either or I’d go mad!) and hopefully get to catch up with stuff. Like this blog. 🙂

I recently won the PHP Classes Innovation Award for SleekTabs.

You do get a prize for winning, selectable from several generous corporate sponsors. I chose an O’Reilly book of choice, which happened to be MySQL Cookbook.

It arrived today, shipped all the way from California.

Massive thanks to O’Reilly and all the other sponsors and of course to the PHP Classes site for the recognition I have been given by this award. SleekTabs will hopefully get some well-needed dev attention pretty soon. 😀

Thanks again, everyone!

The Project, which can now be publicly known as Vaveo (I have no idea how to pronounce that, by the way), is what I have been working really hard on for the past few weeks. Since it all has been very secret up until now, there are some screenshots for the impatient and curious below. 😀

The screenshots below demonstrate only some of what is Vaveo – we’re not giving the whole game away just yet!

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