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.

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.

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. 🙂

An IM conversation a little earlier today:

Chris Van Patten: drupal 6 is going to be preinstalled with openid support
Peter Upfold: awesome
Peter Upfold: when is it out?
Chris Van Patten: soon, i hope… i have to digg up the email
Peter Upfold: digg lol
Peter Upfold: ;D
Chris Van Patten: hahahaha
Chris Van Patten: wow i can’t believe i did that
Peter Upfold: that’s what the web does to you 😛

Also posted on Chris’s Tumblr but I wanted to repost it here too. 😉

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!

Left – MacBook with Firefox open, with the project I’m developing open and tabs with any other resources I need to hand.

Middle – IM and other random windows so I can stay in contact and stash stuff I want close. Only 1024×768, but ah well.

Right – code open in (one of) the world’s greatest web development IDE(s) – Quanta.

For those of you who don’t already know, I’m extremely pleased to announce that I won the PHP Classes Innovation Award of April 2007 for my latest free software release, SleekTabs.

I’d like to thank everyone who voted for me and everyone in the PHP Classes community. I am very proud to be recognised.

I may well get some time this weekend to work on the next version, which should improve some of the annoying quirks in the first release, add some new features and stabilise the code a bit.

Once again, thanks to everyone who supported me. I hope that in time SleekTabs can help out a lot of people and I of course welcome all suggestions and comments regarding it.

Super-secret project development is coming along nicely. Due to unforeseen circumstances (that I may well explain a little later), I didn’t get quite as much time as intended today, but nevertheless things are chugging along very well.

No I can’t tell you anything more yet, but I’m sure everyone who reads my blog will end up with a beta invite anyway. 🙂

If you tried to get on the site yesterday at all, depending on what time you tried to visit, you probably didn’t get here.

Unfortuantely my ISP Tiscali experienced some heavy downtime yesterday, so I had no connectivity (and neither did the server). From looking at logs, I can estimate the downtime period was between around 2pm BST yesterday and 1am this morning.

Very frustrating for me, as it has been the first major downtime on the self-hosting setup (almost a month now) and there was nothing I could really do about it.

It also meant that last night I was unable to get any development done on The Project.

Ah well, never mind.