I usually have a long list of books that I want to read, although I know I won’t have the time to read all of them. Trying to be smart, I categorise them into different categories, such as technical, photography, design, fiction, and etc. And to avoid the tendency to read only certain type of books, I also logged the books I have read. You know, it is important to be well-rounded (kiasu). =)

Currently I am maintaining the list in an excel sheet, and I find it pretty cumbersome to maintain. Whenever I plan to read a new book, I need to refer to the list and re-search BookJetty to check the loan status in the library. I thought if BookJetty can be enhanced to support this feature, it is going to be useful.

Basically users should be able to add books to their account as either ‘Wanted’, ‘Reading’, or ‘Read’, and they also should be able to tag books based on whatever names that they like.

From there, we can derive some interesting lists such as most wanted books, what are the popular books currently read or had been read. And we should be able to link a book to other users who had bookmark this book.

With the membership feature, in the future, BookJetty can be extended to support other features, such as book reviews, groups, and group dicussion threads similar to what Flickr has. Meanwhile for the upcoming enhancement, I will be focussing on just the membership and bookmarking features.

I have just completed the design for these enhancements, and this is how the new BookJetty will look like.

The startup wave is getting warm here. Thanks to Entrepreneur 27 Singapore for helping to foster entrepreneurship among the young, especialy for those under 27.

I was invited by Justin Lee to say a few words about BookJetty.com on their upcoming event, E27 3.0: Startup Republic (hm… I know that I’m slightly overage, but rest assured I am still 18 at heart, we all are, aren’t we?). Anyway thank you Justin. There will be other speakers from ping.sg, blurbme.com and Woolert as well.

If you are free, do drop by for this rare event. I bet it will be fun. Say hi ya, shake some hands ar, ask questions, get to know some new friends there.

Seats are limited, so reserve fast, click here or image for more information on reservation details. For those who are coming, will c ya there.

It seems nowadays everyone is upgrading their service to 2.0 following the trend of Web 2.0. And it is not exceptional for library.

Krafty Librarian, a librarian/blogger, wrote about Library 2.0 Theory: Web 2.0 and Its Implications for Libraries. She said some people are turned off by the just the term Library 2.0, but whether or not you like the term, you have to agree that libraries must evolve with technology to provide user-centered and innovative services to stay relevant to the users.

She covered how Instant Messaging, Streaming Media, Blogs and Wikis, Social Networks, Tagging, RSS Feeds, and Mashups are going to work around the library services. And BookJetty is as one of the examples for the Mashups. I’m glad that BookJetty is taking a part in reshaping the library services.

ProgrammableWeb.com is ‘the website’ that showcases mashups around the world.

Today, BookJetty is featured as the mashup of the day. It gets an average rating of 4 stars. Thanks guys for your votes.

Bookjetty gets a fresh coat of paint and 3 new sections on the main page:

• Latest Discussions, latest posts in the forum.
• BookJetty Picks, some recommended books to read.
• News and Updates, latest happenings.

The wait is over, BookJetty finally gets its own server, and it is now hosted in Singapore. The response time has improved and it now feels lighter to surf BookJetty.

Some new updates to the BookJetty are:

• A book forum, feel free to recommend some good books you have read lately.
• The URL has been shortened (using URL Rewriting) to be more user friendly and for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). If you enter the old URL, it will be redirected to the new URL format.
  http://www.bookjetty.com/app/search.html?terms=SEO => http://www.bookjetty.com/search?terms=SEO

Yesterday, Justin Lee, a fellow blogger who blogs about Internet Technology, Enterpreneurship and Web 2.0, bumped into BookJetty and has interviewed me on BookJetty (Hooray…BookJetty first interview).

I shared a bit on my background, how Pluit Solutions and BookJetty got started, what are the main challenges when putting up BookJetty, what’s the future plan for BookJetty, and a few other areas. Justin also wrote a short review on BookJetty, do check it out. And thanks Justin.

This week has been full with activities involving Linux, Linux and Linux. And the Dell server for BookJetty is finally up, loaded with LAMP (Linux, Apache, My SQL, and PHP), Tomcat and also the new vBulletin based BookJetty forum. Now it’s just pending the green light from the webhost, Qala.com, to move the server there.

Having lived and breathed Windows, switching to Linux was a bit daunting initially, but having played with it for a week, I started to fall in love; at least my typing speed has improved!!

Linux (also known as GNU/Linux) is the obvious choice if you are a start up or you just want to save some money to buy iPod. Linux is free, it is licensed under GNU General Public License (GPL), but what the @#$%, why Dell is charging me a couple of hundred bucks for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

Well, before answering that, the Linux here means the Linux kernel, the basic libraries that form an operating system. Since it is licensed under GPL, which in layman terms, it means you can use it, modify it, repackage it with other software, do whatever you want, but you have to give your version for free too. So pretty fair, isn’t it?

And the different repackaged versions of Linux kernel are commonly known as Linux distributions, the cool jargon is Linux Distro. So you may have heard of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora Core, SUSE Linux, CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu, Knoppix, and others; those are the different distributions of Linux.

So each distribution is different, though all of them are using the Linux kernel for the core. As for the RHEL history, it is a bit tricky. It was started as Red Hat Linux (without the Enterprise word), but in late 2003, Red Hat Linux was merged with Fedora Linux (another distro), and born out of that is the commercial version (RHEL), and the free version is known as Fedora Core.

But wait, how could they charge the RHEL, isn’t it still under GPL license? Oh hell ya…it is, RHEL source codes are still free, you can still download it from Red Hat Inc. web site. What they are charging you is for the binaries they have compiled in a CD, for support, for software update subscription. Smart move! And it makes sense for the ENTERPRISE, there’s someone to call now if anything goes wrong.

If you are a start-up like me, that is what we call luxury, and that, is a deadly sin. But no worries, there are other free distributions available. Fedora Core is one of them, but it is not as stable as RHEL, as new libraries for RHEL are first relased in Fedora Core, which then moved to RHEL after they are more stable.

But again, worry not, thanks to another open source community, they downloaded RHEL source codes (well, they are free right?), and create a final distro which is very similar to RHEL, called CentOS (Community ENTerprise Operating System). Halleluja!!

Another disto will be SUSE Linux (I’ll leave it to you to figure out how to pronounce). It’s by Novell, similar with RHEL, it has commercial and free version available. Free version is also known as SUSE Linux OSS (what a name).

Now you know why Linux is still not gaining as much adoption as Windows, though it has been gaining a lot of mementum lately. Just to understand the distros can be stressful enough. But, don’t you feel a little smarter if you know other OS other than Windows?

And the recent popularity of Linux was partly contributed by the latest very -user-friendly distro known as Ubuntu (it means ‘humanity towards others’). It is a spin off from Debian Linux project, which simply a more user friendly version. Ubuntu as two editions, the desktop edition and server edition.

And I have to stop now, or you will never visit my blog again. At the end, I chose Ubuntu for my server. It just took me a couple clicks and minimum inputs to setup a basic running LAMP server. But of course there are other things to work on after that.

So Linux for you? And which distro? :)

Three and a half months after going live, BookJetty is finally going to have its own dedicated server. I have just made an order for Dell PowerEdge 850, Intel Pentium Dual Core Processor 3.0 Ghz with 4GB of DDR-2 667Mhz RAM, and will be co-locating the server in Singapore.

Let’s see how the new dual core processor performs, hopefully the response time will be better and the speed will be consistent throughout the day.

I have also completed the book forum, but I am not deploying it yet; since the new server is coming, I’ll be launching it together when migrating BookJetty to the new server.

I think a sevice website without a forum is just like a house without a host. So, it will be nice if BookJetty also has a forum, a place where we all can talk, review, and share anything about books.

I just completed the design of BookJetty Forum in Photoshop. And just some notes on the design: I love the floral pattern of Borneo art, so I’m still keeping it at the top. I introduced a sleek black bar for the menu to add some contrast to the light overall blue shade. The black bar is consistent with the black colour of BookJetty logo. A light gradient background for the forum category header, and it turns up pretty nice I think. :)

Now, it’s time to turn the graphics into vBulletin template, a very popular forum software (sadly, it’s not open-source, so I have to fork out some money for it). Anyway, hopefully the forum can be up by end of this week, as I have to split my time working on the other upcoming Jetty as well.