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Blog Refinements

I have just spent the weekend upgrading my network infrastructure and finalizing some changes in the blog. Having learned a lot from reading other blogs and expecting this to be helpful for people visiting this site this is the list of the main changes.

• Upgrading to Wordpress 2.3: This have been a surprisingly smooth upgrade. I only had minor problems with UTF-8 conversion (I had to disable the line define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8') from the configuration file). It seems that with this new Wordpress version, categories are going to be deprecated in favor of Tag Clouds. I have yet to convert my post database to tags
• Feed Icons: I am using now what is supposed to be the standard for RSS icons
• Email subscription: Thanks to FeedBurner now you can subscribe to this blog via email. If you are not using a Feed Reader, please use this method instead of bookmarking
• W3C Validation: Now, the XHTML and CSS of this blog are fully validated by the W3C tests. I use a simple text editor to modify the HTML and CSS, so there were lots of errors. After a lot of minor changes (like eliminating warnings in C++), the blog passes all the tests becoming a more standard blog and, supposedly, more friendly to bots navigating through my rumblings
• Amazon book links: I do not like putting ad in my blog (and you probably won’t ever see any), but now book links pass though my Amazon account (I receive a small percentage if you buy using that link). It is a non-intrusive modification so I expect you don’t care about it
• Wordpress plugins updated: I have updated and added new Wordpress plugins. This is the list of plugins I am using:
  • Askimet to combat the spam. 95% of the comments I receive are spam
  • All in One SEO Pack. Meta information, that invisible information that only bots can read, is important. This plugin gives you control over the generated metadata
  • Counterize for tracking internal visitor stats
  • FeedBurner FeedSmith to get feed usage stats. FeedBurner have been bought by Google and now all the pro services are free
  • Subscribe To Comments. This is a very interesting plugin that is increasing the number of comments in the blog. It allows email subscription to posts where you contribute
  • Ultimate Google Analytics to collect info for the Google Service Analytics
  • WP-PostViews for getting visit stats for each post
  • WP-UserOnline. An online users counter

Comments are welcome, thanks for reading.

Working At Home

I have been working at home for a week now and I have to say that it is being quite a good experience. At first I was not sure if this would work but, now, my old ideas about how inefficient you can be when you work in an office with an strict timetable are coming to my mind. It may be a coincidence, but in this week the Flow Moments (moments of maximum concentration where you forget that you have internet in your machine) have been before lunch (12-14), middle afternoon (17-19) and after dinner (22-…). More or less all the days have followed the same pattern. My objective is trying to enlarge those Flow Moments. Rest of the time I have tried lightweight tasks (attending the email, participating in Mailing Lists, reading books, white papers, elaborating my personal planning, thinking about the next things I have to implement, etc). In those periods, maintaining focus is quite difficult. When being out of the flow, strange forces drive me to distractions like opening the Firefox. Anyway, I have been all my life a Late-night coder, so that is probably where I am being attracted to. To the (22-…) zone, where I am probably most productive.

I think that the development of the project (at least I have a clear idea about the phase zero) is going on the right track. The pieces are starting to fit together. I am not alone in this trip and that helps a lot. Having a shared vision with more people is incredibly satisfactory.

About my infrastructure: I can work wherever I want! I am using a Subversion repository installed in my server that can be accessed from internet using a ssh connection (MyEntunnel is very useful to create a background tunnel without having a PuTTY window). For task scheduling, bug tracking and Wiki I am using Trac. It integrates perfectly with Subversion and all the items can be linked uniformly (tasks can be linked to Wiki pages, Subversion commits can be linked to bugs, etc etc). For very small teams is definitely a great application. I don’t know how well it scales to bigger groups. And that is all about the admin software. There is still a lot of work to do in this area, but for now it is enough. I have the basics and all the work is being backed up every night in my NAS. One day I will write about how nicely you can organize your working environment in Windows to mount shared that are backed up (w: for work, h: for home…), how to set up a PDC with Samba, etc. But that will be in another post.

In short, a positive and productive first week.

Thanks for reading!

Bye, Bye, Pyro Studios

Last Friday was my last day working at Pyro Studios. The decision was taken months ago but due to diverse circumstances I still continued working at Pyro for several months. As you probably know, I was working in the Technology Team which I led during a short period of time. It has been half and a year working at Pyro Studios where I have learned a lot and met lot of great professionals and good friends. I expect to work with all of them in the future. Anyway the objectives and philosophy of the studio were different from mine so the split was needed.

I think that time for building my own future has come. I have lot of ideas where I want to start working on and I have some money saved. So I think I will probably try the invest. At the moment, I cannot tell more about that. Expect news very soon.

Blog Refinements

I have been doing some improvements to my blog. Most of them are internal ones (like upgrading WordPress, updating admin plugins, improving the CSS compatibility, etc) and others are visible ones, like the new About image, the link to my LinkedIn profile and the Blogroll with the blogs I have in my Bloglines account.

By the way, I discovered FeedBurner and started to use it to manage the feeds from this blog. All the requests are redirected now to FeedBurner. You don’t have to change anything to continue reading the feeds. May be some old articles appears as new in your feedreader, but that should be temporal. I have changed the information that appeared in the feeds; now you get only a brief summary of the post and if you want to read it entirely you have to click and visit the page (there is a open debate in internet about this: Full Text vs. Summary Feeds. Well, I changed my politic, but I could return to the full text in the future. I am only experimenting).

And that is all. Tomorrow I promise a more interesting entry.

PD: Thanks, to my bro for creating the caricature. He is the creator of the great comic site TiNoMi.

Hello World!

After some experiments with MSN Spaces, I have decided to run a new blog on my own server. I’m expecting to keep this updated. I’m a computer engineer, so you will be reading here topics about computers. I specially love realtime, 3d, linux and videogames.

I’m from Spain but I have decided to start this in english so I can get to more people.

Thanks for visiting me. Now you can syndicate to me, read my posts and comment them. Let the Fun Begin.