Month: March 2007

Dangers of the technological society

Posted on by chris

Last week my wife went shopping at a large supermarket, and mistakenly picked up a box of "kitten" biscuits rather than our usual "adult cat" biscuits for our adult cat. This morning we received in the post a leaflet from said supermarket promoting services and products for kittens. For example:

"You only want the best for your kitten, that’s why we have developed this special all-in-one meal perfectly suited to young cats…"

Technology is a wonderful thing, and I’m fully sold on the idea of the world becoming a more computer-driven place. However this makes doubts cross my mind. What, for example, if I had visited this supermarket on the request of my mother to get a bottle of grey hair cover-up dye? Would I soon be receiving a discount on my next Saga holiday?

I hope this will be a warning to all of you who think you can purchase products from a modern shop without fear of the consequences.

The beat goes on

Posted on by chris

Things are continuing apace with BeatsBase – the online community for DJs and I hope we’ll soon be able to start opening some of the doors (and maybe a window or two) to the crowds waiting outside. But first I wanted to show off a few of the features I’ve been hard at work building.

The Hot ListFirstly is the Hot List, where people can see the tracks, playlists and mixes that have got a lot of positive votes. Let’s face it, I wouldn’t be writing a true Web 2.0 application without voting, would I?

The Hot List will also be RSS-enabled, allowing people to subscribe using an RSS feed reader so they can be notified of the movers and shakers on the site.

BeatsBase votingAnd speaking of voting, we’ve got a really neat and simple way for people to vote for items. Just click to say whether you love it, think it’s OK, or don’t find it so hot. You can also leave an optional comment with your vote, and you can see the difference your vote has made immediately with the Vote Bar (I’ve yet to come up with a snazzy name for these horizontal stacker bar charts).

BeatsBase mixes and playlistsSo you want to put a few tracks together into a playlist and share that with the world? No problem, just click, choose and build your playlist. And what if you’ve created a mix using some tracks in our database? No problem too, you just choose the tracks you’ve mixed and we do the rest.

So now we know what tracks are in what playlists and mixes, we can do some really fun stuff. Like tell you what are the most mixed tracks, the most popular tracks in playlists, and what two tracks nearly always go together. We can also tell you what playlists and mixes any particular track appears in when you view it’s details so you can discover other users that like the same music as you.

Remember, we’ve already got over 30,000 tracks in the database (yes! it’s true! I counted ’em!) in a wide variety of styles, so there’s bound to be a pile of stuff you’ll love. And with our lovely users adding new tracks (hopefully) every day, we’ll be The Place To Be when it comes to track data on the web. The beat is getting louder.

Performer – Unobtrusive Prototype Helper

Posted on by chris

In a recent SitePoint blogs post by the estimable Kevin Yank he talks about Handling JavaScript-disabled Browsers. This is a vital part of making sure that any web application works correctly, and is something I spend a good proportion of my time doing.

Kevin rightly advocates something called progressive enhancement, which is a methodology designed to give a working system to everyone, but an enhanced experience to those that support more advanced technologies. It’s something I’ve talked about before.

In fact I’ll soon be giving away an initial version of my Performer JavaScript helper class (which I’ve talked about briefly before – good grief, was that really over a year ago?). basically it sits on your pages alongside the wonderful Prototype JavaScript library and allows the savvy developer to easily add AJAX-y style goodness to pages in an unobtrusive way. Let me give you a couple of examples:

Loading the content from a remote page when a link is clicked
<a href="ThisPage.php?With=RemotePageCall" class="loader" rel="Remotepage.php" rev="TargetElement">Click me to load the RemotePage.php file into targetElement</a>
Hide an element when the page is loaded
<div id="HiddenElement" class="hider">This element is hidden if the browser supports JavaScript, otherwise it is shown</div>

I plan on supporting several other features with the first release, including togglers, so watch this space.

VistaPrint – business cards for (almost) free

Posted on by chris

Warning: I’ve found out since writing this article that VistaPrint are well known for being involved with dubious charges. I’ve not been stung (yet) but Buyer Beware.

This weekend has been a bit of a washout, what with me having another wave of not-wellness yesterday and the weather turning bad today. Still, every now and again I take a look at by new toys and it brings a smile to my face.

Business cards by VistaprintOn Friday my new business cards arrived from VistaPrint, and they’re great. Not necessarily because they’re well printed, but they are, or because the design is cool, and it is, but because they cost me under £4 for 250. How come, I hear you ask? Well, I just paid for shipping, the actual cost of printing was free.

It seems that VistaPrint are a company that can’t help but give things away, and that’s the sort of company I like. So head over to their website, register with your email address and you’ll soon be getting emails offering you fantastic deals. If you have a business that requires any form of printed literature (business cards, brochures, leaflets, postcards etc) then I would highly recommend them.

I really want to claim my 25 free glossy leaflets, but can’t think of a subject to write a leaflet about. Any suggestions?