I’ve been using DivShare for a while now to host a lot of the images on this site and some large download files. It’s been a great service, totally reliable, fast speeds and a really nice, clean interface. Recently they released some nice embeddable flash players for mp3s and video files too. That opened up a whole new range of possibilities for hosting podcast files (such as our church’s), but in the back of my mind I’ve had a nagging doubt about their long-term staying power. There didn’t seem to be any revenue generation model other than a couple of Google ads. Considering the fact they’ve been offering unlimited storage and transfers with a 200MB file size limit, this didn’t seem like a profit-making enterprise.

Fortunately my fears have been unfounded and DivShare have just announce a ‘pro’ version of their service which allows for a 2GB maximum file size, unlimited number of uploads at a time using the Power Uploader application (normally max of 10) and possibly the most important feature: FTP access. These features are available at either US$0.99 per 2GB file or a US$9.95 per month subscription. This now puts them in direct competition of services like DropSend, and with double the individual file size and no storage or transfer limit, they beat out DropSend’s pricing by a country mile and that’s without the image / video / audio hosting options DivShare provide. DivShare already provided a facility to directly email people a download link for any file you upload.

Now I don’t have a huge need for the pro subscription. US$9.95 per month is not really a lot if you’re doing massive data transfers, but then, I don’t need to upload 2GB files. Even if I started using it as a podcasting hosting service, the files are usually less than 5MB in size, so that’s well under the free 200MB limit. What this new service means for me though is that they now have a revenue stream, and are therefore more likely to be a stable, long-term hosting option. And it’s nice to know that if I do have some need to upload some huge file, I can.

I’ll still be keeping a local backup of all my files just in case, but I do that for any hosting service I use, paid or not. Kudos to the DivShare guys for creating such a great service & I hope they make an insane amount of money off this new service, they deserve a payoff for all their hard work.

[tags]DivShare, Images, Hosting, Uploads, Podcasts[/tags]

Matt Mullenweg has announced that the 2.2 release of WordPress that was due on Monday (23rd April) will be delayed.

The WP dev team has decided to hold back version 2.2 for at least a week or two from the original date of April 23 while we polish things up. I’ll post an updated release date as soon as we figure out how long everything is going to take. (Which is extra-hard in open source development.)

This is a real pity, but I guess it’s better that they get all the bugs sorted out now rather than later. Lorelle VanFossen has more details on what is coming.

[tags]WordPress, WordPress 2.2, Matt Mullenweg[/tags]

Microsoft has taken the covers off its high-def Flash competitor, Silverlight.  The browser plugin is available for Windows & Mac for IE, Safari & Firefox (but not Opera for some reason).  It’s still only the February WPF/E CTP that is available for download, this is really just a marketing name change and launch (ala Atlas becoming ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions).

Not being a flash developer or a graphic designer, there really isn’t a whole lot I could intelligently contribute to this discussion, so I’ll just point you to a whole bunch of other smart people.

• Read/Write Web: Microsoft Silverlight Takes On Adobe’s Flash
• Gizmodo: Microsoft Silverlight Pits High Def WMV Against Flash For Web Streaming
• Tim Sneath: Introducing Microsoft Silverlight
• Somasegar’s WebLog: Silverlight - The next generation web experiences

[via OffBeatMammal]

Quote of the week from Mark Pilgrim in the middle of a hilarious fisking of a David Heinemeier Hansson post on the recent Twitter scalability issues:

Rails is an ogre, and ogres have layers

[tags]Mark Pilgrim, Ruby, Rails, Twitter, Shrek[/tags]

Hot on the heels of me plugging the beta release, JetBrains have released the 2.0 version of the TeamCity continuous integration & build management server. Originally written as a Java development tool, it works great for .NET projects too, supporting .NET solution builds natively (for 2003 & 2005 solution files, unlike NAnt)

Notable new features:

• Delayed commit and remote run functionality now works for Eclipse/Subversion and MS Visual Studio 2005/Team Foundation Server.
• Out-of-the box search for code duplicates in IntelliJ IDEA Java projects.
• Dependent builds support and Ivy integration
• New version control systems support: ClearCase UCM and Team Foundation Server (note: I wouldn’t be bragging about supporting ClearCase, but anyway…)
• Web diff tool with informative highlighting
• Easy integration of any third-party reporting tools
• Smarter build agents management

Download today!

FeedDemon 2.5 Beta 3 is now available.  The big addition in this release is a completely rewritten “Popular Topics” feature, which includes the most popular topics in everyone’s subscriptions.

NewsGator Support Blog - FeedDemon 2.5 Beta 3

Best new features:

• Synchronised news bins with publicly available RSS feed (hello lazy link blog! Here’s mine. I’ve now added this as a permenant link up the top of this site.)
• Offline pre-fetch, great for people with laptops without remote wireless access on the train
• Dinosaur report (dead feeds report)
• Popular topics for everyone.  Sort of like a feed subscriptions version of TechMeme or TailRank.  Along with this, the ‘Links to this article’ button on each news item, showing who’s linking to that item in your local feeds and in all NewsGator subscriptions.

Download here, report bugs/issues/questions in the beta forum.