I’ve just updated my amazon associates plugin to take into account the recent signiture changes which amazon have introduced for their webservices api.
This now also means you’ll have to enter your amazon secret access key in the plugin configuration page.
You can download the updated version over here.
It also means my wishlist has finally been brought back to life. Just in time for Christmas…
Oct 25
I’ve recently read a post over on the guardians technology site which gave a whistle-stop history of the internet as it turns 40. I thought I’d share here my own experiences of growing up alongside the web, more for my own record than anything.
I remember at school a time at which there was no external connection, nor internal network (which we the pupils used) so the Acorn machines used at our school at the time could communicate with one another. Computers, for me at that point were standalone. I had as much of an interest in computing then as I do now and I can remember early on, staying around after school to use one of the only PC’s in the school (which was bought to run a piece of career piece software called Kudos), in order to attempt to run the demo games from cds found on pc mags at the time (the only one I can remember was a lawnmower man demo). I did this until ofter one time a friend and I accidentally removing the autoexec.bat file which I hadn’t backed up…..oopsy
I of course had to stick around at school because we didn’t have our own pc at home, because they were very, very expensive (When we did finally get one, it was a Crappard Bell 486 DX2 66, 4 MB of RAM, 400MB HD and was over £1000). I felt a little jealous of my friends who both had PC’s and were able to use Microsoft’s Encarta to help them out with their homework at that time. (Interestingly Encarta later also became a website and is to be discontinued later this week).
Bizarrely, I’d opted for A-Levels at 6th Form which didn’t allow me to experiment with pc’s much, not that it would have mattered as although the rest of the world was transitioning toward them, the Gryphon school I attended had a whole computing lab full of RiscPC’s. I think I went there once in the two years of A-Levels I did and kept my nose upturned whilst I was there.
Some point over this time, I’d also got hooked on a magazine called PC Format since the latter years of school, which allowed me to get all the games demos I wanted without spending however many years (and £’s) it would have taken to download them all. (I kept all 4 years worth of magazines I’d bought and cds/dvds right up unto moving in with my wife). At home, even though we were now in the year 1999, my parents hadn’t yet opted to purchase a dial-up modem and make that leap online. I was of course, still jealous of those mates – who now were connected. I got myself a hotmail account, where I eagerly awaited emails from no-one.
I can remember going to college and being scared about the prospect of doing a computing course but never having had any prior experience of using the web. My parents finally got a modem that year, but I still used to use the computing labs after teaching. I could download 1MB samples of music from Juno records much more quickly over the leased line than I ever could waiting on the 56Kbps dialup at home. I also began working at Dixons (for my sins), getting paid a pittance to talk to many clueless customers about “stereos”, “cd players” and “N64’s”. Working at Dixons did at least afford me the opportunity to experience playing Quake in Yeovils one and only internet cafe on a LAN against my friends and the staff that worked there.
My LAN parties moved to the computing labs at the university, outside of working hours (because as their 10 year old posters claim, you’re not allowed to use games on them during working hours…). Over several years of using the web, I’d never once heard of Google until it was mentioned by one of the research students taking our internet computing lectures. “You’ve probably heard of this” he said. “Er, no”, I thought – why did no-one tell me? I’d used a number of search engines such as lycos and later webcrawler, but all were pretty awful in terms of giving me what I wanted – results. Instead they seemed content with a ridiculous number of adverts and making me hunt through a huge number of pages. Their pages now seem to indicate a new direction.
A bit of a trip down memory lane, but that’s how I ended up being introduced to Google. How about you?
Twitter is all over the news at the moment. For the uninitiated, it allows you to list short updates of what you are doing at any time. BBC News seemed to have an all-out assault at the end of January raving about it at every opportunity – the first moments of the Hudson plane landing, an short chat about it by Stephen Fry on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross and this short clip on iPlayer by Stephen Fry again. For Stephen Fry, this has meant an insane amount of new followers, indicated by the stats by twittercounter, which are shown below.
Notice the stats for 27th January – a full 20,978 extra followers in a single day! My own profile has a paltry 38 in comparison for all time!, which is about 30 more friends than I actually have offline…
I guess this huge upsurge is in part due to the fact that Stephen is such a well known comedian in the UK and by no means a stranger to the web. Just yesterday Jason Kottke observed his day as deciding “to start his own reality chat show after becoming stuck in an elevator”. He also has an awesome blog and podcast. He also is a very open advocate of open source and free software. How on earth he finds the time to live both his life virtually and as television celebrity I do not know. But I like the cut of his jib.
It seems micro-blogging is truly being picked up by the masses. I really enjoy it, but ideally I’d love to be using a decentralised open source service, hosted on my own personal webspace. I’d like to suggest the Open Micro Blogging service, laconi.ca as the way forward – but then I also want to be able to reply to my friends on twitter and them to me and I don’t think true two way cross network chat will happen for a while. I see wordpress to blogger as laconi.ca is to twitter. I’m actually surprised that there doesn’t seem to be a concerted effort from any one of the current big blog companies right now to push for a more open alternative. The automatticians have put out prologue but it doesn’t seem to have been touched for over a year and only supports sharing amongst groups (as in a working environment)…that’s no fun for the rest of us.
Bring on a true open web status service, (complete with adopters) where I can update any one of my friends on my activities by them following a status feed on my homepage and vice versa. This requires clients who make use of such services though and right now twitter is stronger in that regard.
It has struck me over the last couple of days and it’s a reflection of my attitude to being interested in geeky things in general. I’m an elitist. When I started my blog back in 2003, I loved the fact that relatively few of them existed. It was a reflection of my day to day life and I felt my voice was being heard (even though I had no analytics tools to back that up and it was not particularly interesting).
Back then, I started out on Movable Type and quickly moved it over to b2/cafelog, which later grew into Wordpress. Fast forward 5 years to now and every manner of blog subject exists, whilst in the meantime my own seems to have fallen into a state of disrepair.
I think my blogs’ own slowdown has occurred because blogging about day to day life is not so much fun now – I’m no longer unique as I was in terms of the technical ability of being able to output my thoughts. Anyone can start a blog, tumblelog, lifestream or twitter account and use it to expose their daily activity online. They need to know nothing, or very little at all about how the back end works. So I’m now left thinking, what do I have to contribute in all this?
My own PhD research has had little exposure here, where if I had chosen to air my thoughts, it might be continuing in new directions from discussion which may have opened up around it. Instead, it is hidden away in research papers and closed forums which an average joe may never come across.
I’m proposing that I push to air my thoughts on all manner of subject here over the coming year, as well as my usual day-to-day activity. Hopefully I’ll be contributing something new, something interesting, something playing on my mind and which I want to discuss with each post.
I’d love it if you’d join me for the ride and I promise I won’t be at all elitist.
Jan 13
It seems that all I do these days is talk about what’s going on over at Fair & Bare and if you’re here because you prefer the more geeky side to me I apologise I’ve not been indulging you recently. However, that said, these posts do represent a significant part of me right now and what’s going on in my life so I think it fair I shout about it.
We’re holding our second design challenge right now and calling for designs based around the concept of a unique twist on a fairy tale. The prize is our biggest ever, at £200 + a copy of Adobe Photoshop CS3 (which was kindly donated by one of F&B’s community!). You have until 15th February to both submit a design and get it voted on by the F&B peeps!
It looks like I’ve also failed to mention over here the winner of our Snowdodgers competition as the amazing Mister Shrew. The shirts we printed look amazing and you should pick one up now if you haven’t already.
May 31
Just a quick note to remind people that this coming week is the third Cardiff meetup for web types in wales. It’s in 10 Feet Tall on Church St on Wednesday 4th June from 6.30pm. Featured speakers include Matthew Cashmore (Development Producer for BBC Future Media & Technology, Research and Innovation) and Tim Holmes (Course co-ordinator for the Postgraduate Diploma in Magazine Journalism and the MA International Journalism: Magazine Pathway at Cardiff University’s School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies). It sounds like its going to be two really interesting talks with Matt discussing BBC Backstage and Mashed, whilst Tim will be chatting about journalism for the web. If thats not enough, there is even bands that you would normally have to pay for on afterwards.
One of the things that’s bugged me for a while whilst having a website is that at certain times of the year when people might actually like to buy me a gift they’re unable to find my wishlist. This is mainly because they’re simple folk who might not think to check amazon for my name. I’m also signed up with amazon associates, so I decided it could do me well to post my wishlist items along with my referral tag in the links in order to earn a bob or two on my own homepage. All this data is available on the web already its just a case of putting it together.
Some keen readers might of noticed the wishlist page I stuck up recently and want something similar on their own site and (like myself) either can’t be bothered or didn’t have the time to create a plugin to pull this data together. I’m putting up here my own quick and dirty plugin I built a few weeks ago to achieve this.
It uses amazon web services to look up a wishlist, stick in a specified associates id in each of my item links and replace where I put the text (without spaces) in a post with my wishlist items. The plugin regularly updates this (hourly) as a scheduled event in wordpress in case someone decides to actually buy me something. Of course you’ll need a services key to use it, which you can easily get by signing up with amazon at aws.amazon.com. Fill out your services id, your wishlist id (found by logging into amazon and heading to your wishlist page) and your locale (the bit after amazon. so mine is .co.uk) and press the fetch items to pull all the items in. If you don’t have an associates id, feel free to leave as my own : )
I used curl to get the remote data from amazon as the file_get_content methods generally aren’t enabled on normal web hosts. If you’d like the items to be fetched less regularly, then install the plugin with and updated wp_schedule_event method in the main wishlist.php to a value of your choice.
You can download it over here.
Double alliteration in a post title? Not sure I’ve attempted that before.
[Edit: You'll need to be running on PHP5 to make use of this plugin]
[Edit: I released an updated version based on Amazon's move to use of signitures, see the details here]
In this book, author David Upton walks you through use of the Code Igniter framework, which is essentially PHP’s answer to Ruby on Rails. I’ve been a avid user of Code Igniter since I discovered it last year, which is a nice waypoint for anyone trying to understand model-view-controller architectures and not wanting to make the move over to ROR quite yet.
The angle of this book is taken from a first time CI developer, but one with some knowledge of both PHP and web development in general. The initial chapters begin by exploring why you’d choose to use CI and some of its benefits over straight PHP code (such as saving on code reproduction or easing development burdens), though doesn’t really offer any real comparison of features of other similar frameworks. A traditional chapter on setup of CI is also included, (though I think at 4 pages could have perhaps been merged with another!).
The book then proceeds by tackling the subject at the core of CI, ‘model-view-controller’ and how this relates to traditional methods of programming. David breaks down how CI is structured very well and gives suggestions of how applications built within it should be designed to be successful. Some of the example code savings at this stage are somewhat minimal over a standard approach, but I think David conveys how these rack up throughout a web app. Useful chapters of how active record and CRUD can be used to ease DB interaction and also how views can be organised to avoid repitition complete with examples should allow any new CI developer to get to grips with it very quickly.
The later chapters quite extensively cover more “geeky” complicated subjects (using objects and namespaces, localisation, getting CI to interact with other services) which might be a bit much for a hobbyist user, but it gives some room for learning for others. The book also includes some good descriptions of how to make the most of the testing and profiling features which CI has out of the box to debug some of the larger web applications that you might undertake (Both features which I’ve previously been unaware of).
The use of friendly language is a welcome change from other texts, but I think in places it does get in the way a bit of the particular functionality which is being talked about. The constant reenforcement of the MVC throughout will be welcome for new converts, but my own practical experience suggests this might be better bent in places. A number of the descriptions of features provided in the book are at the CI site, and I think what might have helped this book is if a single larger running example led the way to describing each of the features.
At the moment, this is the only CI book available and it does well at covering the large featureset CI has. For a seasoned CI veteran it won’t bring any revelations, but if you’re new the framework it will serve you extremely well at getting your head round what makes it shine.
[Disclosure: This book was given freely by PackPub for review within the Cardiff Geeks group.]
Jan 30
One of the most frustrating things I find about hearing about possible web development jobs on certain sites is the sheer amount of them which are simply unviable due to my UK location. Previously I decided to post all those jobs I could find to my own webtyrant site and the recent job and profile sites in the django communities has got me thinking about how these two pieces of information on locality could be aggregated together (I don’t have time myself to do this though unfortunately – perhaps someone might like to chat about collaborating). What I’ve concluded is that being aware of those jobs within a certain area might be quite useful – and simple to implement. What you’d basically end up with is a situation where you could subscribe to updates on jobs in a particular field within a certain area (think – “tell me about all dev jobs within 50 miles”). Whilst this feature may exist on some other sites (though I’m unaware of it) my experience tells me that it probably isn’t executed particularly well.
Learning jQuery takes a look at the JavaScript library jQuery by Jonathan Chaffer and Karl Swedberg, whom run learningjquery.com, a popular resource to jQuery developers. Jonathan and Karl work through a example based approach of common problems in web application development to demonstrate how jQuery can be used to minimize the amount of code written by developers and instead focus on the functionality of their code.
The book is set for the developer with some knowledge of HTML, CSS and Javascript but a jQuery novice. The examples in the first few chapters offer solutions which may be achieved more simply through alternative approaches (e.g. applying styles with JavaScript, rather than applying it directly in HTML), but they serve their purpose of introducing what can be done without introducing a huge amount of features of the library too quickly. The following examples are far more realistic, focusing on tasks more suited to the library.
Each example is explained so thoroughly it includes exploring many eventualities that the less descerning developer may glaze over, with many set over the course of a chapter. I certainly found that many of the examples highlighted problems I just wouldn’t be aware of. The applications built through the examples include style switchers, animation effects and Chapters 8-9 cover much more completely how to build more full featured scripts such as AJAX based searches, a shopping cart system and image shufflers and rotators. Other topics of note include how to perform manipulation of the DOM tree of a HTML page and how to handle particular event requests. The book also does really well at consistently suggesting in the later examples the must haves of any page featuring JavaScript, progressive enhancement and graceful degradation.
One of the things that frustrated me slightly however was the frequency of code repitition and screen captures for each new added feature, but this is a minor problem considering how well the books covers the subject.
I found this an extremely easy and interesting read, with the example based approach keeping me engaged in how each situation could be enhanced with use of jQuery. The sensible organisation of each chapter means that many asides are covered enough to give the reader a working knowledge of how complementary technologies are able to be used with the library. The book also includes appendices documenting a number of useful web development sites, not all specific to just jQuery. Overall, a thorough introduction to the language.
[Disclosure: This book was given freely by PackPub for review within the Cardiff Geeks group.]