There's been a bunch of press lately about Google Reader's new features, most notably the "Friends' shared items" section and Profiles. A handful of people were instantly complaining about the lack of privacy and control, but I don't really see Google's implementation as a problem. It seems pretty simple to go to "Manage friends" and hide the contacts you don't want looking at your shared items, but this really kind of defeats the purpose of using your shared items to begin with. If anything, I think Google's decision to automatically include your GTalk contacts just makes it that much likelier that I'll read and see my contacts' shared items. I wouldn't spend the time to go through my contacts to subscribe, but having them there automatically is great. It's giving me the benefits of filtered reading list through a social network I wouldn't have bothered to use otherwise.

However, I can see this causing some annoyance in the form of repeated posts. If a lot of my contacts are subscribed to the same stuff I'm subscribed to and decide to share it, I'll see it twice - once on my own feeds and again when I go through their shared items. This has been annoying me on my Techmeme feed enough to want to consider unsubscribing from techmeme, and so I can see this becoming a bigger problem as I get more contacts who read the same stuff I read.

Whenever Google gets around to fixing the duplicate feed problem (and I really hope they do soon), they should also add an "Undo" button in Google Reader. In GMail, anytime you archive, delete, flag as spam, or otherwise move an email from one view to another, GMail gives you the option to undo the operation. This is great because Archive, Report as Spam, and Delete are all right next to each other and easily mis-clicked. Even if Undo wasn't an option, it would still be possible to manually reverse the change.

What really annoys me with Google Reader is that there is no undo option when you click on "Mark all as read." "Refresh" is stupidly directly next to "Mark all as read," so I regularly end up clicking on the wrong button. The best you can do is switch over to the "All items" view and hope that you could skim through to see what you might have missed. Maybe I should take this as a blessing so that I can get through my feeds faster.

I'm a bit baffled why the smart guys at Google haven't fixed these problems. Surely I'm not the only Google Reader annoyed by duplicate posts and the inability to undo a "Mark all as read" mis-click.

A little bit of the YUI Library, lots of Drupal, and about two weeks of on and off work has resulted in a new theme for my site. It's been long overdue for a makeover. The overarching goal was simplicity and good UI, and I'm pretty happy with the results so far.

Yahoo's YUI is pretty easy to integrate into Drupal, and allowed me to get started quickly. From the YUI library, I'm getting a good Grid-based layout and a ton of rendering and UI improvement tweaks that I would otherwise overlook. I highly recommend the YUI library.

Right now it's about 75% done, but that last 25% of CSS is where the quirks and bugs start to show up and will take a ton of time to iron out. I think it's good enough for now, and I'll try to fix things over the next few weeks as I notice them. If I ever get around to generalizing some of my hacks, I'll probably put the entire theme up for download.

I recently got married, and one of the results of marriage is that you gain some new family members. So I was pleasantly surprised to see that one of my cousin-in-laws, Jackson West, is writing for NewTeeVee, a newly found GigaOm-network website devoted to web video. It was only a few months ago that I found out Jackson was as much a pyromaniac as I am, as we tried to rig together as many bottle rockets as possible in one go. We both survived unscathed, and now it's definitely good to see Jackson doing his thing for NewTeeVee. Looking forward to the new gig, Jackson.

Months ago Amazon announced S3, which promised unlimited, fast, and inexpensive storage of any kind as a web service. For $.15/gig/month storage and $.20/gig/month bandwidth, it instantly gives anyone with some programming knowledge the ability to use an enterprise class storage network with zero up front cost.

Anyway, today I stumbled upon jungledisk and elephantdrive. JungleDisk seems more like a project than a commercial venture, since you download one of their clients and plug in your own s3 account. You pay nothing to jungleddisk (for now) and pay Amazon for only what you use at s3. Elephantdrive is definitely a commercial venture and completely hides their affiliation with s3, but they do extend amazon's SLA to the end user. I signed up at Elephantdrive, but unfortunately for now they only have a Windows client and so I'm forced to wait until their cross platform comes out.

JungleDisk's linux client (I believe written in C# and then mono'd) seems to work in that it allows me to upload and download files using my personal s3 account. There's something wrong with it however, in that it pegs my CPU at 100%. I verified this on two machines and posted on their forums to see if there's a known reason.

Amazon is truly proving themselves a technology company and not just a glorified online bookstore. With bittorrent support, we're bound to see some more really cool stuff in the near future.

Check out this Flickr to S3 backup script.

Brian Fioca of Jobby recently talked to Owen Bryne, senior software engineer and one of the co-founders of digg.com, about the scalability of PHP on big sites.  It turns out at digg.com, PHP scales really well:

To get a better idea of what was in store for a heavily loaded PHP application, I set up an interview with Owen Byrne, cofounder and Senior Software Engineer at digg.com. From talking with Owen I learned digg.com gets on the order of 200 million page views per month, and they’re able to handle it with only 3 web servers and 8 small database servers (I’ll discuss the reason for so many database servers in the next section). Even better news was that they were able to handle their first year’s worth of growth on a single hosted server like the one I was using. My hardware worries were relieved. The hardware requirements to run high-traffic PHP applications didn’t seem to be more costly than for Java.

Continued