These are posts tagged ‘online’

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St Paul’s School Intranet

4pm, Friday November 6th, 20094 CommentsTags: , , , , ,

St Paul’s School updated the installation of their Content Management System, Firefly.NET, . Along with this update they included a new template that I built, changing the layout of the Intranet which had been there since, I believe, 2001. Here’s a few screenshots to compare the two:

Homepage Comparison CompSoc Comparison ICT Department

This redesign made use of Firefly.NET’s template architecture, so the template files were built with XSLT and various stylesheets. While the old template was built using tables (back in 2001, I imagine this was fairly common), the update changes to use <div>s and more common stylesheet positioning instead. It’s technically HTML5, in that the first line of every document is <!doctype html>, though this doesn’t really mean anything for the time being. My favourite part of the redesign? The name of the school now has a proper apostrophe (St Paul’s vs. St Paul's). Apparently I can be a little picky.

Firefly.NET is the system St Paul’s has been using to manage content on its website and Intranet for quite a while now. It was developed by two former pupils of the school, Joe Mathewson and Simon Hay. You can read more about their work and their clients on the Firefly Solutions site.

Bedouin Foundry

7pm, Wednesday September 16th, 20092 CommentsTags: , , , ,

Bedouin Foundry Main Page

I’ve spent the last couple of months working on a site for a new company, Bedouin® – it was great experience, and really good fun. The site isn’t particularly extensive, so it’s based on flat files rather than any kind of content management system or database; though as it grows, that’s definitely something to consider. The artwork was done by Zeke Wade, the design and layout by Silas Grant, and the coding (PHP, HTML 5, CSS and JavaScript) by me. The site works in IE6 with surprisingly little work – my favourite part is it serves a not-as-pretty GIF background if you’re using Internet Explorer 6 or older instead of any other browser. And as any web developer knows, if it works in IE6 it’ll work in just about anything else. Except IE5.

Feel free to check out the live site now, and make sure to admire the beautiful illustrations: Bedouin®.


Bedouin Foundry Development

CWU Spelling Fail

12pm, Sunday September 13th, 20091 CommentTags: ,

When your ‘title’ field affects so many parts of your site and you fail to spell correctly, I laugh at you. This is made even funnier when you’re trying so hard to be taken seriously.

CWU: Post strikes for w/c 14th “Septmeber” 2009

Jack Waterhouse

10pm, Saturday July 11th, 200919 CommentsTags: , ,

Earlier this week, news that Nottinghamshire teacher Peter Harvey was arrested for the attempted murder of one of his students broke. BBC News is now reporting that he’s been remanded in custody.

Regardless of what you make of the story, it should be obvious that details are a little sketchy; things have only been going for a few days or so, and nothing major has got out yet.

Nevertheless, some people have managed to prove their stupidity by offering completely unwanted and idiotic opinions on social networking sites like Facebook. Here’s a couple that made me cringe:

Jack Waterhouse looks like a little shit that deserves beatings.

— from the Facebook group of the same name, by one Scott Haynes.

You are a hero to the average, respectable, working man. Kick these little gobshites back to their chavy council estates. Another fooking kid whose mother is sponging off the state

— Phil Mcavity

Jack Waterhouse is almost certainly a fresh-mouthed little smart arse that needed a good slapping. I blame the (single) mother.

— John Fitzgerald

Apologies for the language and distasteful comments, but I wanted to get this across. Why people think they have a right to do this on the Internet is totally beyond me – it’s not even like they’re doing it because of anonymity. It’s ridiculous; part of me hopes it’s illegal, because frankly I’d love to see what would happen if some of these people had legal proceedings taken against them.

Oh, I couldn’t help but update this post after seeing the latest comment on the original group, linked above:

He looks like a right cheeky shit , unaware of who his father is.. what the class put that teacher through was awful, no respect at all

That from Jake William James French of Coquet High School, Newcastle. No offence Jake, but if we’re judging based on looks—as I’d guess you yourself are—your profile picture doesn’t seem much better.

13th July, 1am: I keep telling myself there’s no point arguing with trolls, and there’s no point arguing with idiots. I need to spend less time on Facebook, before it drives me insane. Joe Jimothy, from the lovely state of Pennsylvania, has this to say:

In my country we would have stoned him.

Really, Joe? Stoning’s legal in the US, is it? Moron.

“Web 2.0” Support

7am, Wednesday July 1st, 2009CommentTags: ,

While talking to Adam last night, he mentioned that a certain online bookmarking company had been particularly unhelpful when he was emailing their tech support. Imagine my surprise when I woke up this morning to find ‘Luke’ had updated my Twitter support ticket. I’m not sure whether it’s the person, the coders or the company, but something’s crap here. This is the story…

Twitterrific Spelling

On the 8th of April I opened a ticket to let Twitter know that they’d spelt Twitterrific incorrectly on their downloads page. Fine, it’s a tiny problem, and an easy fix, but nonetheless something that should be fixed. ‘andr8a’ replied within a day, and was very grateful.

Thanks for the heads up! We truly apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.
Andrea

Poking around towards the end of last month, the problem still hadn’t been sorted. Fine, another support ticket opened, how tough can this be to fix? After jumping through hoops (they now close your ticket with a list of FAQs without even reading it, sigh), this is the reply I was left with this morning:

Thanks. This will not be fixed at this time.

What the hell? How hard is it to fix one typo on their own site? And I didn’t need an essay back, but did he have to sound so pissed off when I was clearly trying to help? Thanks, Twitter. You guys rock.

Perceptions

2am, Saturday January 3rd, 20091 CommentTags: , , , ,

I find it really interesting hearing people’s thoughts on copyright, legality and entitlement. The red is me.

[03/01 00:56:51] limewire has free music
[03/01 00:57:05] limewire’s illegal
[03/01 00:57:37] last fm is doing exactly the same as limewire so technically it should b too
[03/01 00:57:54] except that they pay the artists… :)
[03/01 00:58:32] theres 1 positve

To summarise the conversation: It’s a good thing Last.fm pays artists; people like artists, and music, and want them to stick around (shocking!). Last.fm isn’t fluid enough at the moment, and is losing possible users to (loosely defined) piracy because of it. And it’s not obvious that Last.fm is any more legal than Limewire.

The reason this is being dragged up now is because I received an invitation for Spotify from Ernesto this evening. The complaints I’ve heard about Last.fm are that playing a song sometimes takes too long and it simply doesn’t have the catalog required to keep people interested. Spotify, it seems, solves these problems. After doing a couple of searches with people much more into shit popular music than I am, it passes the catalog test. It also passes the speed test, with songs playing instantly – if you put this in front of someone, I’m not sure it would be immediately apparent that it’s an online service.

The best news? At the end of last month, Spotify announced that they support scrobbling to Last.fm directly from the preferences of their application. The two services can play brilliantly together. Whilst I won’t be paying the £10 a month for Spotify’s premium service (hell, the adverts aren’t even intrusive or often), the UK-based scrobbling site should be glad to hear that they won’t be losing the £1.50 I pay them per month, either.

IWF Reverse Wikipedia Ban Decision

8pm, Thursday December 11th, 2008CommentTags: , , , ,

By way of an update to my earlier post, The Guardian reported late on Tuesday that the Internet Watch Foundation has decided to reverse “its ban on a Wikipedia page and image of a record album cover showing a young nude girl”.

This apparently “unprecedented move” (of what, jackasses changing their mind when they’re clearly wrong?) is a brilliant thing. As though it couldn’t get better, they even admitted that it actually had the opposite effect to what they’d intended. In other words, many more people have seen the album cover now.

This whole situation is hilarious. They’ve now admitted that they can, at times, be wrong, which is going to make life a hell of a lot more difficult for them in the future. Enjoy, IWF. Here’s a link to their press release.

The IWF

3pm, Monday December 8th, 20082 CommentsTags: , , , ,

Here’s the deal, if you haven’t heard this blow up in the last couple of days. It first kicked off around midday on the 5th December when it was discovered on Wikipedia that all users in the UK were being passed through a transparent proxy; allowing content to be filtered, in this case the Virgin Killer article and image.

The Internet Watch Foundation is deeming that this image should be blocked in the UK because, after receiving a report from a member of the public, they decided it was child pornography. Whether it is or isn’t is up for debate (though personally I think there’s no way in hell it qualifies), but what really pisses me off is that they don’t even apply their own rules across the board.

The following screenshot was taken from my O2 phone (because thankfully we’re not filtered here at uni):

The Scorpions - Virgin Killer

On this same phone, the Wikipedia article mentioned is blocked – if you’re interested, I get an "HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden" error. I guess the only message I have to share is that censorship does nothing.

There’s a good conversation from BBC Radio 4′s Today programme between David Gerard (a Wikipedia contributor) and Susan Robertson of the IWF included below, originally here. There’s a massive discussion on Wikipedia about it, and Ian Betteridge has one of the better articles.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Digg Abuse

3pm, Sunday December 7th, 2008CommentTags: , ,

You’ll never guess what the email address associated with this account is…

abuse at digg.com

abuse@digg.com

Neat UI Features: Break.com

10pm, Sunday November 30th, 20082 CommentsTags: , ,

Cool little feature that I believe is unique to Break’s video service – in that I haven’t seen it anywhere else yet.

Play this next

Every video has a “play this next” ticker that scrolls through related videos while the current one is playing. On hover, it displays a preview of the related video and once clicked it changes to an “up next” (in a queuing kind of way).

Up next

Innovation in stuff that’s as normal (apply air quotes) as online video streaming is getting more and more rare, so it’s nice to see Break implementing things that aren’t just other sites’ features rehashed.

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