Yay, I’m back online!

Got loads of mail to catch up on (can you spot the running theme here?) so please bear with me if you’re waiting for a response.

In other news, I took delivery of a brand spanking new server for BritBlog yesterday. Nice to have something new for once, and it should be a decent machine. It’s got dual processors (which are dual core xeons), and 4 GB RAM, so it should be able to cope with all the new features we’ve got in the pipeline for BritBlog. It’s going to take quite a few weeks to be built and setup, but it’s nice to know we finally have it. Sorry to anyone who has noticed all our downtime lately (on the live site)… the old server has a hardware problem by the looks of things, and there’s not a lot we can do about it.

Any other news? Well the reason for the lack of connectivity is because I’ve moved into a nice little flat all on my own, and it took a while to get the ‘phone line sorted and the internet connection. The new place is all nice and clean, and I’ve got loads of space. It’s great!

Right, better get on with work before I get hit over the head…

I’ve been offline for the last few days, and will contiue to be without internet access fora couple of weeks as I’ve just moved home… Sorry to anyone waiting for a reply to an email!

The Houses of Parliament just after sunset, uploaded by Mark Sweeting.

I was rather surprised to find that someone else posted my photo to their flickr photo stream, passing it off as their own.

When prompted by someone else, the person did at least admit that they “found the photo on the web” (so that makes it alright?). Once I’d recovered a little bit from a rather odd feeling (I can’t describe how I felt — it was very odd), I emailed the person and asked them to remove the photo.

That they did, but not without saying they thought I was over reacting slightly.

The single biggest thing about flickr that annoys me is all these people constantly posting and reposting the same photo, either found from the web or pinched from another flickr user. I really don’t understand what the point of it is — how can anyone feel proud of someone else’s work?

This goes on such a lot, and there really isn’t an easy way to report it to flickr.

I know that if you put something up on the web then the chances are someone somewhere is going to download it and copy it etc., and for private use I guess I don’t have a problem with this.

But what gets on my goat is people taking something that isn’t theirs and either passing it off as their own, or even worse making money or some other benefit from it!

In this particular case, the copy of my photo got explored (quite an achievement on flickr — it means your photo is one of the most interesting at a given point in time), and I didn’t get any credit for it.

Ahh well, my sounding off is complete. Something like this makes you realise what these musicians and other artists must feel like when their music is distributed on the web for free… But that’s discussion is for another time!

Tags: flickr, annoyance, copyright, theft

I’ve been meaning to write a post titled something along the lines of “10 things you can do to improve the performance of your web application” for the last few months, but so far I’ve not had the time! There are lots of articles out there on the web that tell you in general terms what you should do, but I like to provide examples when I do these things so I’m afraid you’ll have to wait for that one.

In the meantime, here’s a handy tip to reduce some of the load from your web site.

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