wabson

The irony that when you have lots of blog-worthy things to write about you never seem to find time to do just that has been commented on many times before in conversations with friends. More worrying though is when you don’t even seem to be able to find the time to read other peoples’ musings anymore. And I guess I’ve kinda got out of the habit of doing both of those lately.

So yesterday I invested some of my remaining time off in setting up a whole bunch of subscriptions on my Google account. Their Reader has a few too many bevels and waaay too much baby blue for my liking, but at least I can access it from any of the three computer accounts I regularly use and should I get that fed up of it I figure I can always export the feed list list to something else - so long as it can read an OPML file.

I haven’t even added half the feeds I want to yet (since the process is a little cubersome in Firefox), but I’ve already managed to get back into quite a few blogs that I haven’t read regularly in a little while.

It’s nice to catch up. So today I’ve discovered (via John Dale) that Warwick’s new VC seems much more down-to-earth that the last guy, and that Amazon’s MP3 download service is apparently open for business - with pricing particularly attractive to those of us lucky enough to be living in a country that’s not headed straight for a recession ;-).

Who knows - at this rate I might even have Planet Afterlife working again soon. But don’t hold your breath.

LinkedIn is like MySpace but for grown ups and is a great form of procrastination. I’m so addicted to this right now.

Never change the password for your web-based email account when you’re drunk a little worse for wear. You’ll never remember it the next day and then Google will make you wait five days before letting you go through the security questions.

Arse.

Disclaimer: This is a medium-length entry about photo sharing on the web and the merits of one popular platform versus a more hetergenous and open approach. If you haven’t heard of Flikr and you don’t remember what wabson used to be like back in the good ol’ days, then the following probably won’t interest you. Otherwise, please read on.

Unlike many people I know, it’s only recently that I’ve started actively using Flickr to share my photos on the web. Before that most of you will remember that I used to blog the occasional photo by uploading JPEG files through WordPress, and that before that I had a cool home-grown PHP solution that got trashed when I decided it was all a bit too much effort to maintain after all.

I resisted using Flikr until now - even though it would have no doubt made my life much easier - for a few reasons.

• You have to be a registered Flickr/Yahoo! member in order to comment on other people’s photos. I don’t like shutting people out from my work, simply because they choose not to use Yahoo’s services.
• I don’t like the idea of my photos being owned (or at least appearing to be owned) by some third party. My blog is hosted on my own domain (and not, say, with Blogger) and I like the feeling of independence that gives me.
• I find the Flikr interface sometimes difficult to navigate and inconsistent - why do I get a column of medium sized pictures in one page and a grid of small thumbnails with another, for instance?

Granted, Flickr is a great tool for sharing photos with others and has built a huge and enthusiastic community around that, but should that community be limited to signed up (and in a lot of cases paid up) members of Yahoo! Inc.?

Take blogs as a counter-example. We in the Planet Afterlife circle have our own blogs all hosted across different servers in different parts of the world and use different software to manage them, but it’s still a successful community, right? Afterlife continues to pull in these heterogeneous sources of literary profoundness thanks to Laurie and that works pretty well, doesn’t it?

I’ve started thinking again along the lines of “why can’t I have my photos hosted on my own domain?”. The previous incarnations of wabson with photo management functionality built in also worked pretty well for some time, so could I perhaps somehow ressurect that functionality?

The code would no doubt need some modification to get it working again, and there may be some issues with the new web host. It would also likely need some work to clean up the interface and separate it from the integrated blogging tools that never were quite up to scratch. But it could be done.

The only question is - is it really worth it? I might well do it anyway just to see if I can produce an open source web app that’s less annoying to use than Flickr, but I’d be interested to know how many of the people who used wabson so enthusiastically in the old days would use it again in whatever revamped form it takes? I’m not asking you dump Flikr, just perhaps for a bit of help in testing whatever I manage to produce.

And yes - I may even put the old photos back up

Via e-lab’s Blogbuilder news blog comes an article from the Guardian’s Online section all about Warwick Blogs.

There’s no mention of us pioneers of course, not that I’m bitter. Did I mention we were here first? Nor did they mention Kieran or Rob, both of whom I know put a lot of work in to set up Warwick Blogs in the first place. Perhaps more embarrassingly, they refer to John as the “head of IT services at Warwick”, something which I suspect may not make Rosemary very happy.

Despite the omissions and the almost Warwick Boar-esqe inaccurancy in the text, the article seems quite balanced, if a little short. If anyone has a paper copy lying around that they want to send to me then please do, as apparently the presentation is a lot more impressive in print than online.

I fixed Planet Afterlife again. This time its cache had got corrupted somehow, which I think was what was causing the old entries to pop up a few days ago. In the end it started crashing while halfway through the update job, swallowing huge amounts of memory and CPU time until the computer seized up completely.

I cleared the cache and it all seems fine now. Although perhaps I should have copied it off somewhere else so I could use it to file a bug report against Planet instead. A rm cache/* command isn’t particularly helpful in allowing me to do that but never mind, eh?

Nice to have Matt back up there, even if most of the entries up there are now his! I wonder if it’s possible for one to spam one’s own blog?

I got Planet Afterlife working again, woot! Perhaps I need to simplify the current updating process somewhat from it’s current form:

1. The Ubuntu installation running under VMware on my work computer runs Planet’s planet.py script on a cron job
2. The script pulls in all the necessary RSS feeds and generates the HTML and RSS files for Planet Afterlife
3. Another cron job running on mimosa (one of our multi-user UNIX servers) uses wget to grab the HTML and RSS files from the work computer and deposit them in my public_html directory

All this happens once a minute, every day. Except when it doesn’t, either because of a problem with mimosa, my work computer or the VMware installation running on it, or because of something getting turned off or unplugged, or (in this case) the IP address of Ubuntu changing after I rebooted it.

I freely admit that this method sucks and I’m actually quite surprised (though glad) that it doesn’t break more often.

Perhaps one day I’ll find a reliable*, UK-based** web host who have Python 2.2 or greater installed on their servers and will let me run a cron job to update Planet Aftelife every minute or so. But that day hasn’t come yet and until it does I have to make do with the current system.

Which sucks. A lot.

* If you remember the frequent downtime I was getting on wabson.org until I changed back to Easily last summer then you’ll understand why reliability is my top requirement.

** As I said to Laurie yesterday, I want someone in the same country as me who I can phone up when problems crop up. Admittedly the need to do this is much reduced if you have a reliable hosting company, but call me paranoid.