Anything Else

This is a very old news for all directly affected. About a year and a half back, I started this project to allow category support to blogger hosted blogs. It went well in intial testing, and near the end I had about 300 blogs using it. It was a django powered website, and hosted on dreamhost, and for some reason dreamhost was just not reliable enough for this service. One of the specialty of this service was if it goes down, it takes down all those 300 blogs with it. After a series or reported incidents I was forced to shut it down, for lack of any technical solution, as I did not have time and money to get a new hosting service. So here is an apology for all the people using labelr, for its shutting down abruptly.

The culprit here was my stern requirements, "not a minute downtime", especially difficult for shared hosting services. Dreamhost should not really be faulted, as they do not officially support django, and are ideally suited for PHP based and static websites. They are still my favorite for running mediawiki and keeping backups [they give huge amount of space] and are really cheap. There support staff is usually good, so please do not look at this take down as to indicate too badly on them.

Off late I am using webfaction for hosting my blog, and other django applications. They are really seamless to start, I had the website running in less than 20 minutes since I got the account activated, including all learning, configuration etc. They give you your own instance of http, which is really cool. Trac is much easier to install with webfaction than dreamhost for example. If you are looking for a place to host django website, I highly recomment webfaction, for mediawiki, enormous amount of disk to archieve all your mails, or for running wordpress/mediawiki, go for dreamhost [they have the best backup solution I have seen implemented, snapshots].

I intend to release the source code of labelr, but its right now in terrible shape, may be I will write a few articles about the specific things worth taking away from that work.

So dear labelr users, sorry for the shutdown, and thanks for the enormous amount of support and interest I recieved from you guys, I still have more than thousand unread labelr beta request in my mail box.

And comments are not working as of now, so please mail as of now.

This fellow dropped by, telling about his solution to blogger's lack of category problem. Smart. Not as integrated as labelr, but definetly much easier to "install". We seem to think alike, dude, you ever visit India, I will buy you a drink. :-)

• You use transparent images, which means your server will be hit by n+1 times for each page load, where n is the number of categories for that post page, you can change this to 1, by a "post ping", let javascript come, let it come with information about the categories assigned to this page, known by your server, and let the javascript find a discrepency between that and what the current page says, notify the server if there is difference.
• Use <div class="category">Name of the Category</div> to assign categories to a post instead of <img src="">s, this way they can appear at the bottom of the post, which is more "traditional", and in you javascript find all instances of divs of class category, and convert it to links, which when clicked will do the same thing that you do in the sidebar.

If you notice carefully, you will see something different in this blog.

Presenting you

Currently under beta as every self respecting web 2.0 application has to be :-P. There still may be some stuff left to debug, so you will have to hold off for the moment, my day job takes lot of time of mine. In the meanwhile if you want to beta test it, please drop a comment here, or mail me.

Enjoy!