Author Archives: Ian

If You Build It

If my years in academia have taught me anything, it’s that insight obvious to you isn’t often obvious to others. As a result, I’ve pretty much adopted a gung-ho hacker attitude towards getting my own ideas built whereby I’ll just … Continue reading

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How to Switch Your VPS in 2 Hours

Friday last week I woke up to a barrage of emails coming into my inbox. All of these were coming from notification of spam comments upon this very blog. By the time I’d woken up I’d had something like 75 … Continue reading

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Where’s my Full Stack Payment Service?

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll realise that there’s an uprising against paypal amongst developers. Most of this stems from the multitude of crazy requirements they put upon sellers and the locks they can put upon your account … Continue reading

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New Adventures 2012 – Self Help for Web Designers

Last week, like many others working on the web, I took the trip to Nottingham for New Adventures 2012. I’d seen the wonderful praise dished out for it last year and felt like I wanted to see what it was … Continue reading

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Goodbye 1 & 1

I just sent the following email to 1 & 1′s billing department. I’ve been with them for coming up to 7 years now and they were, when I first used them, the only registraar I knew about and I was … Continue reading

Posted in Computers and Internet, General | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Pagination in CouchDB Apps

I’ve been working on some fun little node.js / couchdb projects of late. Given the fact I don’t use either as part of my work, I’ve spent some downtime experimenting and slowly iterating my approaches as I learn best practice. … Continue reading

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Hosting an Octopress Blog on Amazon S3

Octopress is a framework for blogging based on the static site generator jekyll. In short jekyll takes markdown and turns it into blog style html ready to be served straight away with Apache whilst Octopress dresses it up nicely with … Continue reading

Posted in Computers and Internet, Geek | Tagged , , , , , , | 7 Comments

Lovefilm Filmstream Plugin v0.2

Just a quick note to say I’ve updated the plugin that generates my filmstream pages. It’s become obvious that the Lovefilm API only exposes the last 10 features that you’ve rented in their “at home” list. This isn’t that great … Continue reading

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Participate, Don’t Preach

Last week, tickets went on sale for dConstruct 2011 and sold out within an impressive 7 hours. Having attended in 2010 and 2008 and judging it to be filled with the highest calibre web celebs from across the globe, I … Continue reading

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Maintaining References to Sockets with Express and Socket.io

I hit a frustrating problem when trying to use expressjs alongside socket.io recently. The solution may seem somewhat trivial, but I struggled with it for a while, until finally asking for help on the socket.io irc channel. I’m not sure … Continue reading

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