If you follow me on twitter, you'll probably have noticed I've been playing around with Amazon EC2 lately. My blog is currently hosted on Google App Engine for two real reasons. Firstly, cost. Google App Engine works out free for my blog. Secondly, it seemed like something cool to learn and play with. Knowledge is power :-)

I'm a C# coder by trade, so when I came to update my blog a year ago, I naturally looked at Microsoft Azure, but it just worked out way too expensive to consider for something so small. I didn't really look into Amazon EC2 because it also looked too expensive, and I wanted to avoid having to manage the server!

Fast forward a year. I've spent a large part of the last 10 months working on an iPhone application. That means using a Mac, Xcode and Objective-C. These aren't really my tools of choice. I'm so comfortable with C# and Visual Studio that coding on the Mac in Objective-C is frankly, frustrating. The OS is different, the IDE and shortcuts are all different, I have to clean up my variables (WTF?), and I'm generally quite slow at it!

Now, I'm playing around with XNA again. I'm working on a Windows Phone 7 game, Badger Quest. The coding in Objective-C has really made me appreciate what Visual Studio and C# bring. It's good to be back! :-) Amazon have also recently launched "Micro" instances, for only 3 cents/hour, which makes running .NET on a reputable host a reasonable price.

So, I'm hoping to start blogging (about programming-related stuff) a little more. For any WP7 games I create, I'll need to code a reusable high score system, which would make an interesting topic. I was going to put this on Google App Engine, but I hear voices in my head telling me to use C#.

However, the overhead and cost in setting up some .NET hosting is quite high for something so small. I also need to set up a "website" for a family member anyway, so it makes sense to put all this stuff, along with my blog, in one place, on one platform.

So, what do I do? I love that Google App Engine would be free and scalable. However, I don't like the lock-in, or not being able to use .NET. The cost of EC2 is starting to look reasonable, though Azure is still way too expensive (though I hope Microsoft are taking note of Amazon's micro instances!)

Do I migrate to Amazon EC2 and write everything in .NET (which I can deploy anywhere, if circumstances change), or stick with Google, king of free, being tied in, and using a language I'm not a huge fan of to avoid spending a few quid?

Decisions, decisions!

Over the last few days, I noticed Google Wave Notifier complaining of login issues. I finally got around to looking at the problem today, and unfortunately, it's not good...

With no Google Wave API, when I wrote Google Wave Notifier, I had to scrape the pages and parse text out of some JSON to figure out what your new messages were. Knowing this was likely to change, GWN was written to alert the user if the parsing failed, explaining there had probably been an update to Google Wave, and GWN would be updated soon.

Unfortunately, Google changed the way Wave works recently, and I've been unable to figure out a way I can make GWN continue to function without significant changes. Since Google are ditching Wave soon anyway, I've decided not to invest the time required to make these changes.

It was great fun to work on an open source project that was downloaded by thousands of users across the many versions, but sadly that journey has come to an end. I'd like to give a huge thank you to all of the people that used GWN and reported bugs, spurring me on to continue developing. And let's not forget everyone that contributed a translation, allowing GWN, unlike other Wave notifiers, to be used all around the world.

I'm sure I'll find other little projects to work on with some of the spare time I have, and I'll be sure to post updates here. Subscribe to the RSS Feed or follow me on Twitter for updates!

I just updated my giffgaff earnings post with the figures from this month. I did a lot less than last month, but it still amounts to £90 in two months! I moved from O2 to giffgaff to save money - I never imagined they'd be paying me instead!

Now if I can just find an equivalent of giffgaff for my internet, gas, electricity, etc.!