Wow, it's going to be weird saying/writing/typing "2010" for a while. Also what do we call it? "twenty ten"? "two thousand ten"? "oh ten"? "two thousand and ten"? Someone let me know please, I don't want to be one of the un-cool kids saying it all wrong.
Anyway, welcome everyone to the new year, I hope that your Christmas and holidays was fun, relaxing and spent with family and friends. I know it can be a bit of a grind getting back into work in the new year (speaking from experience, 5:30 am comes really early when you're used to waking up at the crack of noon), but I hope that I can (continue to) throw a few random links your way during the day to keep you amused and thinking. I figured I'd throw a few random thoughts up here about what I hope the coming year will bring.
The Server
The server setup is pretty strong. There are two machines running, the main server and a backup machine running with a mirror of the current server on it. In the coming year I want to set up the database to be properly master/slave so in the event of a crash there's less chance of losing any data, and also setting up the second server to be properly hot-swap (or at least minimal manual interaction) instead of needing someone to go and change and copy things all around to have it working. The big thing though is it's there so (in theory) nothing will be lost. Anyone storing important data is encouraged to do their own backups and database dumps and store them off site just in case.
The Site
Hopefully I'll be able to put up a new look and feel and features. I'm guessing that most people mostly view the site through RSS from Google Reader, Bloglines or the like, so they never see the site. Lets be honest though, the UFies.org site looks like the holdover from a bad 2002 site built by a programmer because it is. Any graphic designers out there who are interested in some practice please contact me if you think you can make the site look nicer.
I'm going to continue to use the @ufies twitter account to tweet out stories and server updates if you get your news that way, as well as getting a bit more into the web 2.0 world of "conversations", social media, fan pages, and the like. For example, I noticed while hitting the Internet archive that UFies wasn't included in 2009 at all, so I have to go and rectify that :)
Myself
Outside of my own (numerous) personal goals for the new year, I want to keep on posting things of interest. I've sort of disconnected from the Userfriendly community that this site was originally set up for back in 1999, and I want to get back to the roots of the site, and find out what the few readers I have are interested in so I can better serve the people who I risk my job every day to post random links of interestingness.
That's my diatribe for this morning, there's a pot of coffee in the kitchen on the other side of the office calling me. All the best to you and yours in this new year, hopefully it'll be "your year" (or at least suck less than the last one), and I now return you to your random collection of fake Apple slate rumors and video game updates!
tl;dr everything is fine, things continuing as normal.