A rather unoriginal idea by myself, and somewhat of reinventing the wheel, so to speak. FeedMailer (as I have so aptly named the project) can take an RSS/ATOM feed, parse it, and send you the updates by email, unlike a fancy RSS Reader. If you enjoy receiving emails and reading your Inbox moreso than opening an RSS Reader and wading through all the updates, then you might like this. Otherwise, you will find it a horrible waste of your time.

I have half a notion to start over from scratch and re-code this entire thing from the ground up, to make it more user-friendly, efficient, readable and more poetic, if I may say so. It works for now, though, and does what I have programmed it to do.

Unlike Feedburner, where you can only subscribe to a user's feed via email updates, so long as they have registered and subscribed with Feedburner, Feedmailer allows you to add any RSS feed and receive email updates every half hour (it could be every minute, but I figure 30 minutes is good enough).

In order to use Feedmailer, you must first register with it. An email address and password is all the data that it requires to get you set up. (For your information, the passwords are md5 encrypted in the database). Upon registration, Feedmailer sends out a verification email to have you verify your account. From there, you should be able to login and add feeds to your account.

There are several options in the Settings page, which include adding feeds, deleting feeds, changing your email/password and enabling the 'vacation' mode (to opt not to receive any emails from Feedmailer while this mode is enabled). I also have statistical blog buttons which meerly provide data as to how many users are subscribed to that Feed's URL. (For instance, see my Buttons on the sidebar).

Also, there are quick and easy ways to Subscribe/Unsubscribe from Feedmailer feeds, like this:
http://levi.obeyingthetruth.com/apps/feedmailer/subscribe.php?url=http://levi.obeyingthetruth.com/feed/&type=rss2

If you would like to subscribe to my Feed notification via Feedmailer, use the link provided above. Also, if you would like to see the project index, please go here.

Also, to reiterlate my point, you don't have to use Feedmailer just for subscribing to my Feed. Use it for other Feeds too, that you wish to receive email notification for. That's what I do, and I'm subscribed to about 6 or 7 different feeds. But don't blame me if you Inbox fills up from having subscribed to a Feed that is updated very regular!!

As a quick side note, I have also set up a public calendar for us bloggers to post Birthdays/events to. You can find it here.

I have had a support ticket open with IXWebhosting for six days on about migrating our account to the new server block which has newer software. There is alot of updated stuff, but here is a list of what interested me in specific:

Operating System: CentOS release 5.2 (Final)
apache-1.3.37
php-5.2.6 or php-4.4.8
OpenSSL – 0.9.8b
gd-2.0.33-9.4.el5_1.1
curl – 7.15.3
crontab-1.10-8
MySQL Server version: 5.0.51-log
phpMyAdmin – 2.11.8.1

So yesterday, they finished creating our account on the new server and I had to start uploading all the backups from the old server to the new. This included all of our 8 databases, several which are over 4MBs in size. Seeing how PhpMyAdmin runs on Php which most generally always has an upload limit of 2MBs, importing the databases through PhpMyAdmin was utterly impossible.

I did find a solution, though, and that was by installing the mysql client package on Arch, and importing them from this command:

mysql -u username -p -h hostname database < dump.sql

That was simple enough, so I went through both blogs, a forum, a contact form and several other small database applications and had to change the configuration files to the new mysql server.

I was testing everything live on the new server while everyone else was still being pointed to the old server (by the DNS), to make sure everything was fine before I changed the nameservers. (Viewing the files on the new server was as simple as entering a few lines to me /etc/hosts file).

Then last night, I was given permission to 'press the button' to change the nameservers! Changed from ns3.ixwebhosting.com/ns4.ixwebhosting.com to ns15.ixwebhosting.com/ns16.ixwebhosting.com. Apparently, since you are reading this post, the nameservers have been updated in the DNS server on your ISP level.

The only small complication that I had was from my mistake on forgetting to copy the .htaccess files from the old server for the blogs, so the mod_rewrite rule would apply for the links on the blogs. Other than that, I think the transition was very smooth and easy. (Which reminds me, I need to close that ticket!)

I will post some more tomorrow with pictures of what we have been doing around here. I do not have time for that tonight!