I’ve decided now to focus my spare time on SwallowCatcher development and poking around with cool technologies that I come across, with some write-ups here. This means that I’m ditching the Unofficial Python Module of the Week segment. This is really because I just can’t hack the schedule and don’t want to be tied down to blogging at specific times.

However, on the up side SwallowCatcher development will resume from today and I hope to have a new release soon. Of course the new release will be posted here as soon as it’s ready.

Also, apologies to anyone who came across my site in its eye-offending pink and grey glory. I’m not sure what happened there. I’m hoping that the site wasn’t hacked in my absence and I can’t find any other evidence of that, but its weird nonetheless.

Having said that I’ve slacked off a bit recently (this is only my second post this week). This is mainly because I’ve been putting a lot of work into SwallowCatcher, managing to get a release out earlier this week. Hopefully, in the coming weeks I’ll be able to balance both projects.

In terms of the other action points I had for the site:

• Google Ads are still here. This is primarily because AdBard have not approved my account yet. I’ve even queried this via their support address and had no response, so I don’t know what’s going on there.
• Flattr is here! And its actually making me some money, with a total of three flattrs last month. Please, if you like my stuff consider flattring me, it’ll help pay for the site and encourage me to produce more content and software.
• I have a new theme! Although its just an off the shelf one for now, I haven’t modified it.
• More pages: well, I’ve posted the project section and a project page for SwallowCatcher. There’s still more I want to do and I haven’t got around to doing a proper profile page or online CV yet.
• More content: well that speaks for itself. The last month has been a time of unprecedented blogging activity for me. I’m really quite enjoying it and its made its way into my mental todo list for each week, which is a good sign.

That’s just about all there is to it. For those that are interested in SwallowCatcher, since I released on Tuesday I’ve been working fixing some of the issues identified in the release notes and those that people have reported to me. I’ve also been using it day to day to download my podcasts and fixing any issues I encounter. In fact, tonight was the first time I’ve opened my laptop in the last two days. The laptop’s primary use for the last few months has been downloading podcasts when I’m at uni. Now SwallowCatcher is just about filling that niche! I’ll hopefully post an officially updated version sometime over the weekend, with the announcement again going out here.

I’ve also been working generally on my ‘personal cloud’. I’ve put up a gallery where I can put my photos which is something I’ve wanted to do for a while. I’m using Gallery 3 (Beta 3) which is nice. I tried this a while ago with Gallery 2 and it was horibly complicated and overengineered so I gave up in the end.

The new interface is really nice, there’s come nice AJAXy stuff in there which makes it feel nice and polished – kind of like using Flickr or Facebook only with Freedom. As you may have gathered I’m not a huge Facebook fan, although I do have an account, this is mainly because of concerns over privacy and what control they have over your data (including any photos you upload). I’d rather just retain control and ownership of my data.

Anyway if you want to have a look at the gallery, click the gallery link at the top of the page (it currently uses javascript to redirect you – something which I will fix in future). I think that’s about all for now. I’m hopefully going to get back to posting some techy stuff soon, I still have a couple of things lined up I just haven’t had time to write them up yet.

Bye for now!