Well I recently registered on facebook, and while I found I could add friends and maintain a profile they were friends I already had, knew and kept in touch with, posting pieces of information I already had knowledge of onto a profile. My profile is also a direct syndication of my about me page here on this site so it was a bit mundane really.

I could quickly see this becoming boring and not something I wanted to spend much time dealing with when, much to my delight, facebook announced today that they had introduced the ability to add notes to your profile, and one way of doing this is to provide an RSS feed to an external blog.

While the immediate advantage of this is that people like myself don’t have to log into facebook to keep facebook people updated on what I am doing and whats on this site, it may also get me additional readers who weren’t aware I had a website and blog.

These are not however the main reasons for wanting everyone to be on facebook and syndicate their blogs. The real reason is a significant reduction in the requirements on students who have many friends with blogs to use a feed aggregator. You see, facebook also provides a page that lists the latest blog postings from all your friends, and indicates in your friends list who has updated their profile, blog postings being included as a form of update. This is great as before I had RSS feeds for each friend who blogs, and clicked on it to visit the specific posting when it was flagged as having new content. Now I can get all of this on one page - its great!

I knew it would happen eventually - a facebook feature that would get me to use it every day, despite every indication from me that I would register and never return. Still I like to think that rather than prove me wrong, in persuading me to register my friends have actually saved me time, so thanks folks!

Well we all do it, punch our names into Google and see if we come up. Those of us with sites want to see what key words we think potential readers might type in and see if our sites come up in addition to the ego induced self-searching. It was therefore a pleasant surprise to see that I have not only come top in Google on a search for my full name, with a number of other sites I run coming in the subsiquent positions (I have known this for quite a while), but that on a search for just my first name I now rank 6th on world sites and 5th on UK only sites. True I’m not top, but as most Google users only see/use the top 10 entries its good enough for me to be in said top 10. Screen dump shown below in case I slip down the rankings in a few weeks or so

On my monthly stats trawl today I realised the true potential for success with RouterTech. We now get a huge amount of traffic every day, and while many of the hits are from people who arrive, cruise for answers and then leave once they have found what they are looking for it shows we are doing a good job. Hits this month will top 700,000 and this looks set to rise in the near future.

We get several new members every day and our firmware download counter now stands at just under 400 meaning that what started out as almost an experiment to see if we could better a number of commercial firmwares now has a firm base of users. This looks set to increase still further with the forthcoming release of a couple of new firmwares; one upgrade to our exisiting offering and another for a different type of router.

Its a great thing to be a part of and big thanks goes to all those who continue take time to contribute and keep the knowledge fresh, especially the developers that make a better job of firmware improvement than many in the commercial business who are paid to do so. RouterTech couldn’t happen without you.

If readers haven’t already done so please link to RouterTech and recommend it to your friends. We really can squash a huge variety of networking issues and we have a high success rate of solving problems. The more people come and visit us with their issues the more technically minded people we can get on board and make the experience a whole lot better.

Could this be true? Me writing about MS making some kind of progress, well yes actually, your eyes are not decieving you. Today I have been doing battle with the age old issue of getting valid CSS to behave the way the standards say it should behave in IE 6. This is an issue that has always driven me stark raving mad, to the point of shouting at the screen simply because I know I am right with respect to the CSS and its MS’s fault that it isn’t showing properly, worse, I know that if I don’t employ hacks to make it show correctly a whole load of my IE using customers will think my sites are non-functional.

In sheer desparation today I decided to install IE 7 beta 3 and see if there was some hope that the issues that frustrate me every day as a web designer would one day come to an end. Amazingly the first thing I tried (the site I had been trying to iron out issues with) rendered correctly. This has to be at least some progress as it gave me a little bit of hope and started to bring me out of the pit of dispair. I started noticing other things too, mainly valid code showing as expected.

There are still many old issues remaining; things like gaps where there should not and automatic indents and suchlike not specified in the style, but it is making progress, at least progress when bench-marked against older versions of IE. I will never be an everyday Windows user, but I like to think that looking into the future there is possibly a glimmer of hope that one day the code I write that validates at W3C will be displayed on IE in Windows the way I see it in Firefox and Opera for Linux.

After a long time away from the frontline of maintainance and modification to the core code of RouterTech, I’m back on the case in earnest. A fair few jobs have racked up during my time in the university library revising for exams, and while individually the items of work needed are quite small, in total there are a fair few things to get through. Thanks to Neo for doing signficantly more than holding the fort while I was spending time elsewhere, you’re a star.

RouterTech has gone from strength to strength so far, and while I won’t go as far as to say it is the most successful community I have ever set up, it certainly has the potential to be

I’m not generally someone to go crazy over a super animated or feature rich desktop, but I spotted this link on the SoC newsgroups and just had to post it up here. If this is the future of tablet PCs, I may well have to consider getting one in the future. It seems to have an accute understanding of my paper filing system!

After the success of Akismet for WordPress and the number of comment spams that get stopped, it was great to see that a member of the phpBB mod team is developing a modification that checks posts made to a phpBB forum using Akismet. As far as I am concerned this is a superb step on the road to a more spam free forum system, and one that will have moderators and admins alike feeling like they have a weight off their shoulders; being able to deal with issues involving real people rather than editing/deleting posts made by bots. You can read more about the development of this mod here.

Have you ever wanted to check your server is up and running and if not be sent an e-mail to say so? Better still not be charged for it? Now you can! I came accross Site Uptime today, and while I’m sure they have been going for a while I haven’t noticed them before.

They provide a free service that allows you to check an unlimited number of sites/servers/services to see if they are “up” at intervals of 30 minutes, send reports to you every month on downtime and number of outages and when they all occured and the icing on the cake; a link to place on your website that allows others to view stats on the uptime of your server/sites. Ideal for web hosts or those who pride themselves in having a site that is accessable for the majority of the time.

Last night I finally registered on the phpBB area51 forum which is running a CVS version of olympus - the new era of phpBB! Not being satisfied with the user side investigation of the features, I installed my own copy from the CVS onto my linux box so I could have a play with the admin functions. WOW is all I can say.

The improvements to existing phpBB features are really good and very welcome, but there are also a whole load of new features which have really made a dramtic impact. While many of the improvements and new features are in the admin panel and will assist greatly with forum administration, there are also some wonderful little differences for the average user such as:-

• Adjusting the order threads are displayed in
• Creating folders for PMs
• Creating rules for dealing with incoming PMs
• PMs to full inboxes don’t bounce, but get “held”
• Ability to manage all user settings from one control panel
• Subscribe to forums is built in
• A watch list for threads and forums in the UCP
• Loads of other goodies

Administration wise, there are lots of things that will save the time of Admins on busy boards. The long awaited ability to automatically can users who have not actiavted or posted anything after a preset amount of time is here, as is the option of setting very finite permissions from a number of angles. You can also create “custom” admin/moderator panels with access (or not) to different features, meaning you really can have a structure of control and management that is so much more than “all or nothing”.

Suffice it to say I am going to love using, modding and installing this new phpBB when it is released. While I won’t be upgrading existing forums due to the time taken to port mods, I will certainly be installing it for people who request new forums, and continuing to recommend the webs best free, open source, forum solution

Oh, and if you want some bits to read and play with;

• Feature List
• Development Board (Read, Post, Test as a user)
• LIVE Admin Panel (Same as above, but test drive the admin functions - username/pass = bbadmin)

Last week I was sent a brand new VoIP phone from Safecom to try out, test, report faults and write guides/reviews on. It is from this test that I formed some views on VoIP technology that I want to share, and hopefully some hints and tips that those looking to use VoIP may find useful.

For those unaquainted with the technology, at least in its use rather than what it stands for, VoIP is Voice over IP, and is the technology used to make telephone calls using your internet connection rather than a conventional phone line.

The advantages are easy to guess, even if you don’t know what they are from the off, its cost. You can get an incoming number, with no line rental that never expires from pretty much any area code in the country, and recieve calls on that number and make calls to all free numbers for no cost whatsoever. Not only that, but calls that do cost can be made at a fraction of BTs call costs and there are unlimited call packages available also.

After some tinkering and very little (read no) reading of instruction manuals, I had my new phone connected to my router and had popped it in the DMZ for ease of testing. I had also registered with Free World Dialup and SIPGate as two service providors to try out. The former just allowed calls in the VoIP world, the latter gave you a PTSN number as well.

I have to say, that despite initial issues with the phone that required firmware upgrades and other such things (no surprise as I was testing the phone and its was VERY new), all worked very well. The phone provides superb call quality, multiple incoming lines (and so numbers), and the ability to dial PTSN numbers when you have credit on your account as if you were using a normal phone.
One of the main downsides is bandwidth usage. The phone requires at least 100Kbps up/down on your connection for crystal clear call quality, otherwise you get distortion and breakups on call. While this is much less than many broadband connections provide, on the upstream it uses nearly half of what most ISPs provide, 256Kbps. For people who already struggle to run home servers on this upload bandwidth, it can cause problems in terms of slow server speed and call problems. If you run servers I would therefore recommend that you have a faster uplaod than the stock 256Kbps, or emply bandwidth limiting on your server(s) so that your calls don’t get swamped when more users than normal come online and use your servers.

The final issue, and its much smaller than the bandwidth one, is reliability. Free World Dialup is almost perfect. If you use STUN or direct access without a NAT all calls are made peer to peer and the connection reliablility is superb. Calling the PTSN network or recieving calls from it however can be a problem. The gateways are not perfect, and of the 50 or so times I have tried to make calls to and from my phone on SIPGate using the the PTSN network somewhere in the equation, 5 or so calls have failed. This is a high proportion, that I am sure will get better with time, but it is something worth considering - with VoIP be prepared to have to try to dial a couple of times sometimes and for people who try to call you from normal phones to have to do the same.

On the whole though, for normal home and small (home) business use, I would recommend VoIP, and in particular buying a VoIP phone for use with a VoIP type service. It allows you to not lose the familiarity and style of a normal phone, but to avoid line rental and have multiple lines at no cost. You also get caller ID, call waiting, voicemail, and calls on hold for free too. While there may be some teething problems when you first start, and calls may not be quite as reliable, once connected they sound just as good (if not better VoIP to VoIP) and so its well worth checking out.

Please leave your views on my posting or your own experience of VoIP in the comments section.