It’s been an interesting day for several reasons:

1. I reminded myself why I never want to work in London, after I had to suffer the discomfort of a morning train and tube ride at the peak of rush hour,
2. I went to the second Blogs and Social Media Forum at the Marriott London Grosvenor Square Hotel (more about this in a mo’),
3. I think I may have found a solution to something BritBlog related…., and
4. I’ve made some career decisions….ish.

So the main event of the day was the Blogs and Social Media forum, subtitled “The impact of social media and enterprise 2.0“. This was useful for two reasons: (1) it has given me some interesting ideas to play with at work, which could have a significant impact on both our business and my job, and (2) it helped me crystallise some thinking around BritBlog and what the right next step is.

I’m afraid I can’t really go into point 1 much at the moment - I really need to think about more about the pros and cons of what I’d like to do at work, but point 2 is quite interesting.

Those of you that have been following the BritBlog saga over the last, umm, ‘many’ months, will know that I’ve been working on lots of new ideas for the site. Alas I’ve not managed the work very well (the day job kinda interferes…), and it’s been getting quite messy and very depressing.

Anyway, today has given me some time to stand back and think about the project, and I’ve pretty much decided to scrap all of my work from the last few months. A chap called Lee Bryant from a company called Headshift was talking about a project they’ve recently done for BP/Castrol, and he made some very interesting remarks. I suppose the two that may the biggest impression with me were these:

1. Firstly, they didn’t mind so much about releasing a site to the public before it was finished. There is a theory that an unfinished project encourages members to get more involved than they would otherwise, because they feel like they are able to participate. The example given was MySpace — you know how messy it tends to look? — but it made me think of flickr also, as it was in public beta for years.

   Anyway, this made me worry less about getting things right with BritBlog straight away, and it leads me into point 2:

2. They would make frequent small changes/releases to the website, and gather feedback from users about them. This stuck a chord too: rather than getting all the new ideas out there in one mammoth go, we could release them it stages, making fairly small changes at a time. This will allow us to get the changes right each time, and will give us the room to fix problems that may arise before they get too complex. There are loads of incremental changes I can see us making to BritBlog, and tackling it in this manner makes it all feel much more achievable.

So perhaps nothing ground-breakingly new there, but I clearly needed someone to spell it out to me…

The final thing that happened today was I was able to give my career a bit of thought. This is something I’ve been putting off for a long time because it’s something I don’t really like thinking about! Anyway, although I’ve not made any concrete decisions today, I have at least had some interesting ideas. Again, I want to discuss these with other people before saying anything here about them, but perhaps the future is bright…..^*.

^*And no, that is not by any means a clue. I have absolutely no desire to work for Orange. Or at least not yet!

Tags: Blogs and Social Media Forum, britblog, careers, headshift, web20

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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It’s been a productive weekend. I’ve been a bit ill over the last week, so have spent a lot of time in bed or just in my room (at a constant temperature), and it’s given me a brilliant chance to get on with BritBlog! Starting out on coding isn’t so easy for me at times (especially when you know you’ve got to struggle with lots of old and messy code) but I get into it then it gets much easier. This rewrite has been one of those projects that’s been especially hard to get into, so I’m quite pleased that it’s finally rolling.

I won’t bore you with the details, but I’ve been stripping out loads of redundant code and re-writing chunks for improved performance. I’ve also written a great wrapper class for Memcache that gives me some pretty cool features (like ETags and 304 headers). I’m going to open source this class when I get some more time and I’m happy with what it does. Anyway, there’s still quite a lot to do with BritBlog, but I really am hoping to get an interim release out soon. Don’t hold your breath, but it shouldn’t be too far away now…

It will be good to test the water with this, and if all goes well we can start on all the new features that we promised ages ago. It helps that I’ve finally got a sensible development environment with an identical set up to the production server too. I know that seems like something I should have had ages ago, but I’ve not been so organised on the BritBlog front. We’ve also got everything in version control too, which is brilliant. I’m almost ashamed to say this, but I’ve never bothered with version control for BritBlog before. Now it’s in subversion it seems to make the whole work process actually enjoyable!

Oh, and did I mention that Memcache kicks ass? OK, maybe that’s a bit too strong, but it really is nifty!

Flat hunting tomorrow, so better get to sleep now.

Tags: britblog, caching, performance, subversion, memcache

[to the tune of “When I’m Cleaning Windows“]

Well Happy New Year to both of my readers; I hope you’re having a thrilling year so far!

Over the Christmas break I’ve been working on a tool to help me flag dead or suspect blogs listed in BritBlog. It’s been quite interesting, and I’ve already removed quite a few none-blogs from the database.

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Christmas has come rather quickly this year! However, as it is now upon us it seems like as good a time as any to wish you, dear reader, a Merry Christmas, however you choose to celebrate it.

I seem to have had a few productive days since my holiday began on Thursday afternoon. I spent yesterday trying to track down splogs in Technoranki using SpolgSpot. Sadly, SplogSpot’s database seems to be full of rubbish. Yes, the do have some splogs in it, but they have more than 100 of our valid blogs in their database too (including our very own BritBlog Blog!). I just couldn’t be bothered checking all the ones it threw up as none that I checked were actually splogs.

So after yesterday’s rather failed attmept to locate splogs, I switched my efforts to locating dead and missing blogs in the BritBlog directory. I’ve written a little tool that goes and visits all the blogs in the directory and decides if the blog us there or not.

I’m going to run it each day (probably), and if a blog is missing more than 10 times in a row say, I’ll remove it from the database (probably after emailing the owner to tell them).

There is some room for improvement with this: for example I haven’t decided what to do with URL redirects yet. I think I need to sort out the trailing slash issue first, then worry about the remainder of these issues. It’s been a good chance to have a practice with Python though. Seems like a good language, but I’ve got a long way to go

Anyhoo, the tool seems to be doing it’s job so I’ll bolt it into the live application over the next few days. Will be good to remove some of the deadwood from the directory. That remonds me, the spider is running silently in the background. There’s a lot of work to do before it can go live, but it should be another useful tool in the battle to purge dead blogs from the directory.

Right, can’t sit up all night — I don’t want to scare off Santa!

Merry Christmas!

Tags: splogs, splogspot, santa, christmas

Here are the November Ping Relay Server Survey results. For details of the methodology take a look at the first post on this topic. I am currently monitoring the following three ping services: Autopinger, Blogflux, and Ping-o-matic.

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Those of you that know me will be aware of my general distaste of working for a living, but from time to time it can actually be quite interesting. Last night was one such occasion.

I don’t like to talk about my day job on my blog, but it should be OK to give you a bit of background. Part of what I do involves the testing and monitoring of web applications, helping to identify performance issues. This means I sometimes find myself sitting up through the night running performance tests against our clients’ web sites too, which is what I was doing last night.

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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