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… 😛

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.

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.

We get a fair amount of traffic over at FOSSwire. Like most of the WordPress installations I have a connection with, we have an Akismet installation running there to deal with comment spam.

To its credit, it’s pretty good, but recently I’ve been having to manually clean up a load of trackback spam that’s getting past the filter. It’s a real pain and irritates me immensely. Usually Akismet works so well…

Maybe it’s worth installing an additional spam comment solution such as Bad Behaviour. I really don’t know. Anyone else had any success with any other anti-spam solutions?

If for some stupid reason you don’t follow the Gizbuzz feed, then you won’t know anything about episode 7 of the Gizbuzz Podcast.

Huw, Chris and I interview Dave Hoff of IMified.

We spoke with Dave about all sorts of things: what IMified is, the challenges faced, the instant messaging interface, APIs, and more. It’s a great service with a lot of potential and we got an interesting look into the early stages of what may well become a very influential startup.

A great interview – I think it went really well. Special thanks to Chris for the speed editing and one of the fastest podcast post-productions ever.

Listen to it here. You can also get subscribed to the podcast on that page.

Sorry for the lack of postings here for a couple of days, I’ve been busy with lots of stuff.

First of all, I’ve implemented a new download system on this site. Any stuff you download through /files goes through this new system. The new system helps me track and monitor downloads and make sure everything is going just great in regards to bandwidth/downloads.

The consequence of this new system means that every time you download a file from /files, the following information will be recorded:

• Your IP address
• Your browser’s identification
• The time you made the download request
• Which file you downloaded

Note that this is no more information than my server logs would tell me anyway, so it’s not really a privacy issue. However, if you do feel uneasy about that, don’t download files from this site. The purpose of storing this information, as I said, is for me to easily track what’s being downloaded so I can optimise the site and to make sure one person doesn’t abuse the download service for everyone else.

There are a couple of issues still unresolved with the new download engine, mainly concerning the WPGet old archives, but I’m addressing them and the archives will be back up pretty soon.

Second up, it’s Megaphone news. I’ve been working on it again, and we’re making good progress. I can’t give another source dump as there’s some ported stuff from other projects that is too messy and useless to open, so once I’ve been through and optimised that and of course, done a bit more, there’ll be a new release.

Also, I’ve been busy blogging at Gizbuzz and FOSSwire (both part of the Oratos Media network). I do hope you’re subscribed to them and of course all the other Oratos blogs and podcasts!

I’ve just finished a mammoth sized review of Mandriva Free 2007.

Get reading!

Strange title, you reckon?

No.

Not really.

Something really big is happening. I’m a founding member of Oratos Media, a blog and podcast network.

Joining the already founded Gizbuzz, YouMakeMedia and PodDev in the network is FOSSwire, a free and open source software blog. Don’t worry, the tutorials will still keep coming here too, but they’ll be more (and not always written by me) at FOSSwire. Subscribe to it now!

Anyway, you can read more about the network at Gizbuzz (or any other Oratos blog actually).

This is so exciting…

A couple of things today.

Gizbuzz has been given a fancy new redesign by our good friend Chris Van Patten (of PodDev and Comitar fame). The new theme is awesome and big thanks to Chris for the redesign!

And in other news, PodDev Episode 2 was recorded last night (after last week’s technical problems), so once it’s been through post production it will be ready for listening.

Until then…

I’ve played around a bit and now it’s time for the review, of Google Reader.

Check it out at Gizbuzz now (with screenshots!).