Development

Over the last year I've been creating a game using just PHP, MySQL and HTML. The inspiration came from reading the Eloquent Javascript site at EloquentJavascript.net, which contains at least one game in its examples, leading me to wonder what sort of game you could make within an HTML construct. Clearly purely HTML would have been a fairly limited series of yes/no questions, so I reasoned PHP and... [read more]

This is a blog I plan to add to as I go along. I've been running using the developer tutorials that Android provide here: http://developer.android.com/training/index.html. As yet they are either due to be brought up to date or they expect anyone trying to learn to program Android to be together enough to deal with the differences between the latest version of Android in Eclipse and what... [read more]

In order to create a mobile app for Review 31, we need an API to allow the application to communicate with the site and pull data from it. There is no user interaction to speak of at Review31: comments are allowed if you sign up but have never really been used and will probably be phased out in the next major revision (Facebook comments are proving more popular, unsurprisingly). I used the... [read more]

Last.FM's a great source of listening statistics but the site and API don't make it easy to really get the important data. For the purposes of the end of year album top 10 I really wanted to get a sense of complete album play equivalent. Last does list your top albums but because it's based purely on plays of tracks, albums with more tracks are disproportionately rated higher compared to those... [read more]

I'm going to presume you read the previous post around this: for the 2011 album comparison things got bigger as we brought our mate Tom Jones (not that Tom Jones, obviously) into the fold, increasing the amount of songs we had to get through and bringing more fun chaos to the proceedings. 2011's podcast, which can be relived on Last.FM journals here, here and here, had some big issues on the... [read more]

Review 31 was started in October 2011, the brainchild of a friend who wanted to produce an online site, similar to the London Review of Books, but with shorter, snappier reviews that would be easier to digest, given people's attention spans for reading online were shorter. Initially it concentrated only on reviewing non-fiction books and had a very crisp black and white design. Early this year... [read more]

London Progressive Journal was started in 2008 by a friend of mine, and although he is no longer involved, I still run and develop the website. It's an independent Left-Wing blog, first conceived to be a weekly publication, so that every Friday a single page went up with just the content from the entire site, split into two columns. It was an interesting concept that ultimately failed to really... [read more]

The Secret Santa robot was created to get around a problem we had with doing a Secret Santa for our friends: namely making it truly a surprise and making sure that no one got their own partner as a possible receiver. I designed it pretty simply in PHP, since it is a fairly straight forward sort of algorithm and then decided to make it a part of this site (here). The in-site version is slightly... [read more]

Pocus Whiteface is the last band I was in. There's a tonne of music links on that site and all the lyrics for our albums. We did some videos that I'm really proud of and Joe (on drums) did some great recordings. The songs were a collaborative process too. I ended up designing the website from scratch since there was no framework for bands I could find that wouldn't be massively over-engineered.... [read more]