So far, it’s been a week spent primarily on work for a single client–very much a rarity lately–and it’s been good to be able to focus. I even ended my period of avoiding looking at facebook by working with some of their APIs and once I deciphered the documentation it wasn’t too bad. It’s not so much that the documentation is bad, but like the platform in general it makes huge all-or-nothing assumptions and all I wanted was something equivalent to oAuth.

Meanwhile things are gathering pace for the next couple of months’ projects. There’s a big one that Matt’s heading up that will occupy the majority of March and is quite exciting, and yesterday Jenny and I met to work on a proposal for another. Our estimate was substantially above the rough budget that the client had floated, but we’ve got a range of ideas of how they could fund it, other outcomes we could demonstrate that might justify an increased spend, etc. I really enjoy working on plans like that, expanding the vision of what a project could be and really hope this one works out.

We also have a new officemate. Ben Griffiths will be joining us next week and we’re very glad to have him. Not only is it a relief to have the rent distribution a bit closer to what we’d hoped, but it’s always fun to have new people, new ideas and new energy in the space. There’s one desk remaining for a full time occupant, plus we’re keeping a couple of spares in case anyone needs a short-term workspace in town.

The train’s not quite ready to pull out of the station and I’ve already covered everything I planned to. So I should sign off and decide whether to settle back with an In Our Time podcast, or get some work out of the way first…

The NoSQL (or LessSQL) movement has garnered a lot of attention over the past few months, but numerous people have pointed out that MySQL can be adapted to cover many of the most common use-cases. Flickr’s Kellan kicked off a series of posts on that topic with Using, Abusing and Scaling MySQL at Flickr and Richard Crowley responded with OpenDNS MySQL abuses. On the other side of the coin, Luke Melia has a write-up of how he uses Redis to build a “who’s online now list” and Sean Cribbs’ (fairly convincing) Why Riak should power your next Rails app is worth a read even if you’re not a ruby developer.

It’s good to see that the twitter engineering team have started blogging. They’ve also extracted and released the code they use to extract key terms from tweets (links, @replies, etc).

Thanks to Ajaxian I spotted Plupload – “a generic component that allows you to create a rich upload experience on the back of a variety of transports. Whether it be HTML5, Gears, Silverlight, Flash, BrowserPlus or normal forms, you can get an upload experience with drag and drop, progress, client side image resizing and chunking.” The file upload experience is one clients are constantly asking me to improve, so this could come in very handy.

There was a flurry of posts this week about whether web designers need to know HTML, with a number of good contributions. Elliot Jay Stocks kicked things off and I principally noted contributions from Mark Boulton and Rachel Andrew. It seems that the key is that designers need to understand the capabilities and constraints of the medium, and having a basic grasp of HTML and CSS is a quick route towards that, though as Mark points out there are plenty of others.

From Mobile World Congress comes a projection that “cell phone subscriptions [are] to hit 5 billion globally” this year, and 1 billion mobile broadband subscriptions. Another MWC announcement Vodafone’s launch of the “world’s cheapest phone” puzzled me. At $15 it’s $5 more than the phone I bought during our last trip to the US.

I use god on a number of servers to monitor the various moving parts of my apps. For the most part it does a good job and recent patches that squash a memory leak have been very helpful, but it sounds as if Bluepill might be worth a look as a possible alternative. Hugo Baraúna has written up a tutorial on monitoring delayed_job using it.

I also got to enjoy a day away from the office yet free from evenings, attending The Story. It was an entertaining day, with very little that was directly applicable to my work but a number of provocative thoughts. Exactly what I was looking for after a hectic few weeks.

Aside from that it was a mostly unremarkable week—maybe that’s why I was able to hit a good rhythm—continuing to move various projects ahead, prepare some upcoming ones, catch up with the news from some friends’ projects, and finally getting a chance to implement oAuth in a project. The coming week will hopefully continue in a similar manner, at least until Friday when a meeting in Exeter beckons.

In free moments I was contemplating code names for projects. It feels like I keep making vague references to projects in the pipeline, but while reluctant to refer to specific clients and without another way to name them it’s hard to be more specific. So I’ve been throwing around a few ideas, but not settled on anything for sure. Perhaps I should just make them up as-and-when, but the idea of having some theme really appeals.

As I’d hoped, February has seen a reduction in the amount of juggling. Each day of the past two weeks has had a major theme even when I’ve tried to fit smaller requests in around the edges. I like working that way: take an hour or two in the morning to get through email, make small fixes, and so on, and then allow the rest of the day to be focussed around a single project. That’s hard to maintain when a lot of projects require some level of maintenance, but I remain optimistic.

The meeting with my accountant is to begin to think about how the business might develop in the coming months. There are various arrangements that I suspect could be much simpler but I need a little advice there. And then the rest of the day will likely be spent on planning out a few projects, some for clients, some not, and figuring out how to help one (music industry) client build their revenues up to a point where they can actually afford the work they want us to do.

Tomorrow I’ll be back to working on a brainstorming app for a client. From their perspective we’re working on completing a first iteration, from mine this is the third. Either way it’s moving along. And then Friday promises to be interesting as we meet with the publisher of the book tied into the JLL project to discuss how we can have the web and the book play off each other well, without creating too much work for authors or editors.

For now, I see a suite of Oracle buildings passing on my right and a Staples coming up on my left, which means I’m arriving into Reading and it’s time to sign off.

As with so many of these things, I heard bits and pieces about the Amazon-Macmillan dust-up over the past couple of weeks, but I really appreciate posts like this that lay out a good chunk of the story

node.js has been really exciting to watch over the past few months and it’s exciting to see Plurk adopting it to serve up “Instant conversations using Comet.” Apparently they ported from JBoss Netty over to node.js and saw a 10 times memory saving! Also getting a lot of buzz is redis and Mathias Meyer has a nice piece on “When To Redis“. It sounds like Redis 2 is going to adopt a Virtual Memory approach, a detailed write-up of which can be found here.

I’ve been doing a lot of work with jQuery this week and found this source viewer invaluable as a way of navigating the library.

Matthew from Bytemark–who I host numerous sites with–has been getting cross with people claiming libel but failing to supply URLs for the supposed instances, so he engaged Carter Ruck to help him work out an appropriate position. His writeup is well worth reading if you bear any responsibility for online discussion fora.

The tremors following the Apple iPad announcement continue to be felt including the ongoing debate about flash. It’s good to see a number of voices (such as Jeffrey Zeldman and Dorian Ray) pointing out that Adobe are well positioned to build tools to help with HTML5 adoption. That would seem a good way forward for them, specially as video players like this one demonstrate the goodness awaiting us.

Handling recurring payments (for subscriptions and the like) tends to be a pain. Recurly looks an interesting entry into that space and I’m looking forward to trying it out.

And then of course there’s Rails 3, now in beta. The announcement is on the rails blog, the release notes are a good place to start. Having had some deployment/gem version issues lately I’m very glad to see bundler stabilising.

Caliper is a hosted version of the metric_fu gem, providing a very simple way to get lots of stats about your ruby app. I’ve had trouble getting metric_fu to run cleanly, so this could be a handy tool, though I’d rather get metric_fu properly integrated into my own Continuous Integration system. Speaking of which, my office mate Matt wrote up his experiences setting up Hudson for CI. I’m using Hudson too (partly thanks to Matt’s recommendations) and would highly recommend it.

I enjoyed reading about Tim Bray’s experience teaching his son and his classmates about blogging. Tim’s approach of having the students start by writing seems a great way to instil a positive vision of the web and also introduce a sense that web content isn’t necessarily to be trusted. On an entirely different note, I also enjoyed Russell’s brief piece “lowering the point point” arguing that:

Playing with something like Gowalla or Foursquare is worth doing – to see if it’s worth doing.

It’s been good to see Rachel Andrew blogging more frequently of late and I’m enjoying her pieces about running a small business. I’m particularly intrigued to see what responses come in to her piece about responding to tenders/RFPs as that’s a topic I’ve been wondering about lately too.

Google Sites suddenly becomes more interesting thanks to the addition of a Data API. On a not-entirely-unrelated note, I’ve been watching Tom release extractomatic and Paul release docent with some interest. It used to be that the potential ongoing work of maintenance was a disincentive to releasing tools that others might use, but things like Google App Engine and heroku really help with that.

Oh yes, Google are phasing out support for IE6. Could this be the move that pushes those last hold-out large institutions to upgrade to browsers created less than eight years ago?

If you’d like one and can collect them from me either at home in South Tottenham or from my office in Shoreditch, I’d be happy to pass them along. While I’d love to be able to offer them to people further afield, the cost and the time involved in posting them isn’t an option right now so collection is a must.

• Professional Plone Development
• Eric Meyer on CSS (Voices (New Riders))
• Practical Reporting with Ruby and Rails (Expert’s Voice in Open Source)
• Ajax in Action
• Cocoa: Programming for OS X
• The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More
• Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer’s Guide, Second Edition
• Practical RDF
• Pro Active Record: Databases with Ruby and Rails (Expert’s Voice)
• Practical Ruby Gems
• Programming Perl (A Nutshell handbook)
• XForms Essentials

(If you’re an author and you see your book above, please don’t take it as me slighting your book, a number of them have been very useful in the past)

The week will once again be about getting things signed off and trying to pin other things down. There are two or three meetings: one to review the work so far on the Greenbelt Programming/Scheduling Database and work out next steps; another to train a client on the CMS I knocked together with CodeIgniter (which I’ve grown to rather like); and a third to kick off the JLL project I mentioned last week.

One of the key reasons I’m keen to get these projects wrapped is the number of exciting ideas floating around the TCO team for building apps of our own. Based on experiences with clients and with our own processes we seem to have a nice list of product ideas. With lots of little projects on the go, sparing attention to work on any of those doesn’t seem realistic, but if we can bring the focus down to just a couple of pieces then maybe it’ll be easier to mark off time to work on our own stuff.

The new office seems to be working well. We’ve begun to meet our neighbours, we have a phone line (DSL should be active by the end of the week). And it’s really quite warm in there–we’re enjoying the novelty of occasionally being too warm. Ben’s been busy furnishing the space with bookshelves, angle poise lamps and other bits and pieces and it’s heading towards being presentable. We’ve still got space for two more regular tenants, and should also have space for people who are just looking for a space occasionally. Drop me a line if you’re interested.

This week youtube bought the rights to broadcast Indian cricket. This could be a very big deal.

The jQuery team really have done a marvellous job producing content and getting attention the past few weeks. Here John Resig talks about getting organised, with the new jQuery organisation and a few plans including a conference in London. Also on javascript I stumbled across this round up of progress on bringing ECMAscript 5 features to webkit. Quite a few changes that could be very handy – I’ve always wondered why there was no Object.keys available. And for debugging JS it was very good to see that Firebug 1.5 (with Firefox 3.6 support) appeared shortly before the launch of Firefox 3.6.

There’s continued to be a stream of Rails 3 focussed blog entries. José Valim has a good round up of links regarding generators in Rails 3 – it looks like they and templates (now merged) could be much more useful than they have been in the past. There’s also a nice detailed walk through the changes to the stack in Rails 3 on omgbloglol.com. Over on rails-core there’s been some discussion of how things stand with gem plugins in Rails 3, and Yehuda Katz has continued his excellent exploration of Rails 3 with a walk-through the new Railties approach.

I’m not using solr for search any more, but if I were I’d want to switch to sunspot (I wish I’d found it before diving into acts_as_solr…)

For some entertainment, I enjoyed tinker.it’s “making of” video to go with their space hopper project for Sony Ericsson – control space hoppers via twitter (via mattb) and the Living Craigslist project could be entertaining.

It’s been another week of small jobs. One of the small pre-Christmas projects that had sprawled into this year finally launched—there’s a bit more work to do polishing the CMS but the immediate pressure is off—and two others are in the final days of fine-tuning. I spent a lot of time in Internet Explorer testing things, and remembered why I’m so grateful that that’s usually not my responsibility. And I hit that point in a project where a tool you’ve been pushing and pushing finally snaps.

Alongside those bits of work I’ve been setting up a new server for the James Lind Library, a new client we’ll be working with this year. Right now their site is managed with Adobe Contribute, but the coming weeks will see me beginning proper data exploration and figuring out how to design and populate an appropriate database so that we can then work with them to enhance their metadata, rethink the design, and all those sorts of things.

There were a couple of meetings helping Joe at Street Action prepare for his forthcoming trip to South Africa. Setting up a posterous blog, advising and planning for how to capture, edit and disseminate content. I’m looking forward to seeing it all come in.

And now it’s time for my week to end.