This post is related to my earlier one about the technoranki peer group, but it’s probably healthy to get input from as wide a range of people as possible.

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I’ve had the last few days off, and my plan was to migrate BritBlog away from MySQL and on to PostgreSQL. The reason behind this awkward move is that our new and rather whizzy ping server/spider combination is sitting on top of PostgreSQL. Matt has done a great job with this (as you would expect if you knew him), so it’s just down to me now to fix up the BritBlog front end.

Anyway, I think I can say with complete confidence that I have wasted the entire three days:

• I’ve had problems converting a MySQL dump into something suitable for PostgreSQL to work with (I’m still getting import errors).
• I’ve forgotten what little I knew about PostgreSQL - need to wade through the documentation again.
• I’ve had problems getting Apache to run on my Windows laptop (I thought it would be more convenient to work on my laptop than at my desk).
• I’ve not even started updating the website code, nor have I gone anywhere near subversion yet.

I have, however, managed to get PuTTY working with public/private keys so I can access different servers more securely. Mind you that’s not really impressive when there are instructions as good as this to follow.

So all in all a total waste of time.

I think I’m going to start again, but will first nuke my laptop and put debian on it. Then I’ll have a perfectly working Linux, Apache, PHP, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Perl and Python setup - exactly what I need. Just wish I’d taken this course at the outset…

What a frustrating week! Sometimes I wish I could just lob my computer out of the window, unplug the web servers, and go live in a cave.

Tags: britblog, postgresql, mysql, aarrgghh

Well I’ve had an exciting night working on technoranki tonight! OK, maybe not that exciting, but its been productive at least. I’ve tweaked the ranking algorithm for the system, so we’ll see how that affects the scores over the next few days.

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I’ve been monitoring the perfromance and availability of some of my websites for two years now. By measuring things like how long it takes to connect to the web server, how long it takes for the web server to respond, and how long it takes to download all the content, I’ve been able to improve the performance of several websites, including of course, BritBlog.

The website monitoring service that I use also alerts me by SMS and EMail when the web sites die, or if they fail to respond in the expected fashion. This has been particularly handy for BritBlog which runs on a rather temperamental server!

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Over the weekend I picked up a little GPS device (a Garmin Geko 301). There has been a lot of talk about geo-tagging your photographs so that you can overlay them on maps (e.g. Google Earth) and so that you can find other photos taken at the same location as your (e.g. flickr). This GPS can be accurate down to 10 feet or so (it is WAAS enabled), and it’s very small and waterproof so seems like the perfect companion for this sort of thing.

Anyway, geotagging my photos is something I want to have a play with, and while I was thinking about this the idea of GeoBlogging popped into my head. It’s often said that you’ll never hav an original idea, and this is one of those occasions. Still, I thought it would be a great idea to geo-tag your blog posts so that people can find posts from people near them, or blogs from events or holiday destinations etc.

This is something we’ve been trying to do with BritBlog, and are in the process of dropping postcodes in favour of GeoURL-style metadata in a blog template:

< meta name=“ICBM” content=“51.2327,-0.3309″ />
< meta name=“DC.title” content=“Mark Sweeting’s Blog” />
< meta name=“geo.position” content=”51.2327;-0.3309″ />

If you could do this on a per-blog-post basis rather than just on a blog basis then you’re half way there. I was thinking microformats would be the correct approach for this, but you’d need better blogging software support for wide adoption. You’d also need to think about how you mark up RSS feeds.

As I mentioned above, it turns out this isn’t a new idea. If you’re interested in this sort of stuff then you probably want to do a google on the topic, and take a look at GeoRSS. I’m in a bit of a rush at the moment, but if anyone has any useful tips/links or thoughts on this, I’d be interested to hear them.

Tags: geoblogging, georss, geotagging, gps, blogging, microformats

Well almost. I’ve finished moving everything to do with technoranki over onto a new server (from the old BritBlog server), so once the DNS updates have filtered through this should all be pretty much up and running.

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Everyone seems to be pinging everyone else these days, so I thought it would be interesting to do a bit of a survey so see how these ping relay services perform. I’m talking about services like Ping-o-matic and Pingoat.

If you don’t know what pinging is (in the blog sense), then take a look here (geeks look here). Essentially, it is a means for a blog to tell any interested parties that it has been updated, and if you want to read the latest post then you should drop by now.

There are many lists of sites that accept pings, but getting your blog to ping all of these can be a bit of a pain (and slow down the posting process). This is where the ping relay services come in. These ping services relay a single ping from your blog on to several other services on your behalf. This makes it easy for you to notify loads of services that your site has been updated, all from one ping!

There are usually two methods to use these ping relay services: (a) by visiting the site, manually filling out the form and submitting it, or (b), by using XML-RPC, and getting your blog to notify these services directly.

For the first part of this survey I’ll be testing the latter - using XML-RPC. I’ll be using a really good monitoring service to measure both the performance (how quick they are) and availability (how much of the time they are up and running) of these services, and will report back here in due course.

The test will involve pinging these services every ten minutes, and measuring things like DNS lookup time, connect time (establishing a connection with the server), initial response time (time before the first byte of data comes back in the response), and time to download the complete response.

The services I’ll be measuring for this first survey are:

• Ping-o-matic
• Blogflux
• Autopinger

Sadly, the XML-RPC interface to Pingoat is down at the moment.

The second part of the survey will look at some of the web form based services. The three services listed above all offer this feature, as do the following sites:

• Pingoat
• King Ping
• Feed Shark
• Ping The Empire

In the meantime, if anyone knows any other XML-RPC ping relay services, please do let me know and I’ll add them to the survey.

Tags: xml-rpc, ping, survey

I took this afternoon off work today and deposited BritBlog’s second web server up at Sovereign House in London’s Docklands. The journey in the car was a bit of a nightmare (with four hours of driving) but it’s good to finally get that done. It will take a bit of time to get the box ready for use, but it’ll make life a lot easier over there.

I don’t know what it is about the drivers in London, but driving up there feels like a constant battle. You have to drive right up the backside of the car in front or else someone will try and push into the gap. In fact, people will just try and push in anyway. And what really pi**ed me off was when an ambulance was trying to get through some traffic, and other drivers saw it as an excuse to gain a car’s length in the traffic — with absolutely no regard for the ambulance truing to get though. Unbelievable! Still maybe these drivers will one day die in a car accident while waiting for an ambulance stuck in traffic to get to them. OK, that’s a bit harsh, so maybe they should just come very close to death so that they realise what obstructing an ambulance can do

France are into the finals, so I know at least one person who will be pretty happy, and I’m totally zonked, so think I’ll go to bed!

Night night!

Tags: britblog, drivers, france, world cup, zonked