Week 104. Which is 2×52, which means: two years of weeknotes, two years of freelance.*

Blimey. Last year, I wrote yearnotes, and I think I’ll do the same again when I have a bit more space to breathe. Which will likely be on a plane. Suffice to say: I think it’s still going well, and I think I’m going to keep on doing this, and gosh, what I lot I’ve learned and done.

For now, though, focusing on the micro-level:

Week 104 began with rebuilding my server – a VPS I run at Linode. An upgrade to the latest long-term Ubuntu (and necessary patching) led to more maintenance than planned. First, I brought all my PHP websites back up, having found all the compatibility changes in Apache 2.4 from 2.2. Then, onto repairing Ruby, which ended up with me installing the whole Ruby stack again – this time, using rbenv – and rebuilding all the cron jobs for the various software toys I run. With all that done, and all the latest patches applied, I could finally migrate to an SSD-backed Linode. More maintenance than planned, but nothing too heinous – any outage was reasonably short – and I don’t run much that’s mission critical on the VPS. And, of course, now a lot more knowledgable about what’s going on on the server.

On Swarmize/Abberley, I’ve mainly been writing documentation: READMEs for all the component apps, and starting to think about how to explain the project. I’m writing up a few case studies: each focuses on a different facet of the application, and they also serve as documentation for how to use it. I’m illustrating them with screengrabs and, after some experimentation, with animated gifs. I really like animated gifs as a way of explaining software: you get motion, and repetition, but no unnecessary sound, and usually, a few seconds of animation is enough to explain something that might otherwise take a paragraph. Tom Stuart uses them particularly well, for instance.

I’ve also tidied up lots of code: refactored the workflow around making graphs (and made the UI clearer); thrown out some unnecessary things; written an OEmbed provider, as we begin to think about embedding swarm forms elsewhere. The last few weeks of the alpha are all about tidying and explaining, and hopefully they’ll make the few months of weeknotes about Swarmize much clearer!

Finally, I begun the writing and tweaking of my talk for Web Directions South. As usual, it’s hard to pin the talk down – it’s all quite familiar now, and it slips off my brain a bit – but time spent re-familiarizing myself with the topic, getting myself back in the right headspace, is all part of the process, and I’m just going to have to trust the process a bit.

Update: Weeks are indexed from 0, a reader reminds me, so really, week 103 was the end of two years. Week 104 is the beginning of year[2]. Onwards!