Blog (of sorts)

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]

My friend AZ has always done a top 10 of his favourite releases from that year but in 2008 he thought it would be fun if he, me and our mate Raul, all did our own Top 10s, ridiculed each others, and recorded it for posterity. Since I was the guy with all the microphones and recording equipment, we did the whole thing one long, Christmas holidays evening at my flat. The general plan was to each... [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]