Archive for the 'Meta' Category

I had a bit of a muck around with the Google Chart API last night. It’s very neat, you just make a request to google with your chart data and parameters all encoded in the get request, you get back a jpg image. I’ve used the API to generate a nice “spark line” graph of my blog posting frequency from July 2002 to the present. You can see it at the bottom of my index page.

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As reported on the Google Maps API blog they’ve vastly improved the speed of the addOverlay() function. My bbc travel warnings mashup loading time has greatly improved. Nice one google.

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So I finally got bored of tweaking my re-design and just decided to stick it online. Still got lots of bits to tidy up…

Update: So I’ve tidied it up a bit. Made the logo clickable, added the old design to the design archives, updated the about page. Oh and yeah, it is a bit web 2.0 ain’t it? I think its the cheesey reflection under the logo. I should probably have mentioned earlier that I now have embedded hReviews for my ‘review’ type posts along with linked hCard.

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• “revolver plot explanation” - I seem to get a lot of these, it obviously makes everyone elses head explode aswell.
• “working for waterstones” / “how do i get a job at waterstones” / “waterstones job interview” / “working for waterstones blog” - wow, someone is really keen on working at waterstones.
• “carhartt fellow jacket” - 2nd result page!
• “pirate toilet roll” - yarr
• “continuous high pitched beeping from motherboard” - I did hope someone would find that post useful
• “techno clubs prague” / “desert eagle shooting prague” - ahh, that brings back some memories.
• “rome s first episode naked pics” - someone fully utilising the internet there.

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This design is starting to bug me too much. I’ve started a re-design which I’m going to aim to finish “properly” before revealing (yeah right).

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Now that IE 7 is going to use the orange feed icon developed for Firefox Matt Brett decided it was about time to vaguely standardise the thing. Seems like a good idea to me. Accordingly I’ve stuck a grey-scale version in my menu.

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Crikey! I’ve been doing this for three years!

Admittedly, my first post wasn’t that inspiring.

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So I did that Flickr thing I was muttering about. The pictures area now has a flickr section which shows my photo sets from flickr. I’ve only got one up there at the moment but it’s pretty neat.

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Here you go:

• crotch shot - err, ok
• selkirk common riding and selkirk common riding 2005 - woo, popular
• drunk - me? never!

(If you’re wondering what the heck these are, click below)
read on…

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I’ve posted my photos from Rick & Rach’s wedding in the gallery for your viewing pleasure.

The gallery has been having a bit of a scrub lately. Using some mod-rewrite dark magic I’ve made the URLs much nicer and easier to read. Instead of having:

/gallery/index.php?mode=gallery&id=38

we now have:

/gallery/38/

A vast improvement!

The other main change is now when viewing a gallery the page is much simpler. Before I had things like: the image size, resolution, data and the filename. People won’t actually care about those things! All they want is to see all the images and maybe click on one to see a larger version. Working on customer facing e-commerce stuff has taught me a lot about removing barriers to navigation and generally making a users life easier. I figured it’s time I implemented some of it around here.

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