Blog

I have been blogging about it for ages (well, a month) but today I launched the Alpha version of Blog to it.

I bet there are loads of bugs, since launch at 4pm GMT I have fixed three, but I want to get a real world view of how it is being used. I have loads of new features that I am developing for it which will come over time and be moulded to fit the usage.

If you have a blog, or have been thinking about setting one up go over to http://blog.to.it and sign up and get listed. If you have no interest in blogging still go and take a look, you may find something good to read, and if you do make sure you vote it up.

Yesterday Rackspace announce their purchase of Slicehost and Jungle Disk.

Rackspace hosted what they called a Cloud event to talk about their current Cloud hosting solution Mosso. Mosso allows users to setup site, this site can then then be easily scaled to meet demands. There are now a few similar systems, Media Temple Grid Service (gs), GoGrid, Amazon Ec2 etc each of these vary in price and features.

At their Cloud event Rackspace discussed how Mosso will be chaning. Mosso now features three products, Cloud sites, which is the old Mosso, Cloud files, which is the old Jungle Disk and Cloud servers which is the old Slicehost.

Blog to it development seems to be getting to a point where I know what I am doing. I like to work in a way that I develop something to a point where I know what I am doing, then finalise how it should be done, then develop a prototype / beta.

On the current development site (http://blogtoit.millwoodonline.co.uk) there is all the features and functionality the final site will have. It just needs to be finalised to aid usability, and all the little bits like, only showing comments for the current blog in the recent comments block, need to be added.

Since my last post about Blog to it, 1 week and 20 hours ago, I have been working solidly on the idea. So far the development site features the creation of your own blog using wmostrey's DrupalMU install profile, Twitter integration using walkah's Twitter module and rating of blog posts using Eaton's Fivestar module.

I have been maintaining this blog since March and been using the Drupal content management system to run it. A Skribit question asked was "Why do you use Drupal?", well the reason is, when I started my current job at International Baccalaureate I was required to help with the development of their Community Theme web site, which was Drupal based.

This sparked my interest in Drupal and showed me just how powerful it was. I had not heard of Drupal until I applied for this job and the only content management system I had used before was PHP-Nuke.

After finishing the Community Theme website I built this site and carried on developing using Drupal at home and in work.

Last week I came up with what I think is a great idea, I have Twittered a little bit about it and this has started questions on Skribit about what "Blog to it" is?

Well, Blog to it will merge many Web 2.0 ideas and technologies together into a site where you can find new blogs, promote your blog and even start blogging. The idea is, when a user registers for Blog to it they will be able to add blog RSS feed URLs to the site. These blog posts will then be imported into Blog to it where users can read and rate the blogs and their posts. When adding the feed the user would of selected a category where the blog and all it's posts will be stored making interesting blogs and posts easy to find.

Wordpress first appeared in 2003 as a single user blogging system, there is now both a hosted version and a downloadable open source version. Some time after the first release of Wordpress, Wordpress MU (or Multi-user) was released. This enables the creation of multiple Wordpress blogs from one Wordpress MU install.

When I got my iPhone about 9 months the one app I wished for was a terminal. I wanted somthing to enable me to quickly login to my servers and fix problems when in work and stuck behind a proxy or when away from the desk.

There was first a web app which turned out to be a joke, luckily I had that thought and tried it with bogus details. Then there was a homebrew app, but I failed at jailbreaking my iPhone. Then there was another web app, but this time hosted on your own server. This took a little bit of fiddling and messing about to get setup, and was a little clunky, but did do the job.