TW Blog :: Entries for Blogging

Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign John Stuart Mill

Back to Blogging

This post does not relate to any other topics

So, back to blogging as normal…? Well not quite. For a start I now have numerous blogs I am maintaining. It seems simpler to keep different fields of interest separate and this allows me to experiment a bit with the different blogging solutions out there so I can make valuable recommendations to clients and colleagues when they are considering a blog of their own.

Currently TWBlog is still powered by my home-grown and hand-rolled solution which was first developed back in 2003 when this weblog came into existence. That PHP solution gradually evolved into a full blown module based content management system and now forms an integral part of most contracts I work on, while it is still more than adequate for maintaining a simple blog as this is.

However some things have changed in the last 2 years and one of those is the never-ending evolution of comment spam. This is where the open-source solutions such as Wordpress come into their own and one reason I chose to use alternative solutions for some of my other blogs. The CMS behind TWBlog is not equipped currently to handle such an infestation and hence there will be no facility to post comments directly on this site.

Anyway, this was just a quick re-introduction to my blogging software - as much for me using it as for anyone still out there reading my entries. All for now.

Posted on Sep 18, 2007 at 13:18:38.

TW Blog is Back…!

This post does not relate to any other topics

Ok, it has now been over 16 months since my last posting on this weblog. At the time I had lost a little faith in where the internet was going and the constant onslaught of misinformation floating around the world wide web. Also my heart was and still is most definitely targeting its emotion elsewhere! Even so I choose to keep the archives of this weblog alive since it delivered a wealth of useful (and sometimes useless!) information from my personal web development spanning my inaugural years as an accessibility developer from 2003 through 2005.

Well a lot has changed over the last 2 years which I will address in forthcoming posts. The focus of this blog will remain the same - web technology and general IT consultancy. Enjoy :)

Posted on Sep 16, 2007 at 18:04:53.

Brief Blogging Update

Also relates to Web Development

Has been very little time to blog in recent months due to other commitments - work, sport and research - so apologies to anyone who may have taken an interest in this weblog and been subscribed to the syndication files. A quick note that I have also decided to close submission of comments on the weblog for the foreseeable future - so to all those mindless spammers out there that keep telling me how great I am simply to steal a link through to their uninteresting and irrelevant site…. Please stop! Apologies to anyone who genuinely wants to post a comment. Since I have also not had time to update the work portfolio this year, until I do, here are a couple more sites which have been completed:

The Forest of Dean Verderers is the comprehensive source of information on their history, their role past and present and the current Verderers for the Forest of Dean.
Club Peugeot UK is the official Peugeot Owners Club for the UK.

Posted on Apr 06, 2006 at 13:55:45.

Trendalicious

Also relates to Apache and PEAR

Trendalicious provides a nice way to keep track of popular links in the del.icio.us database of social bookmarks. Unfortunately trendalicious does not come equiped with syndication, but it only takes a bite of the PEAR to put a simple request page together with HTTP_Request, Cache_Lite and an RSS builder.


// code snippet
$cache = new Cache_Lite($cache_options);

if (! $data = $cache->get(TRENDALICIOUS_URL)) {

    $r = new HTTP_Request(TRENDALICIOUS_URL);
    $r->sendRequest();
    $page = $r->getResponseBody();

    // create rss content from data in $page

    $cache->save($rss_content);

}

header('Content-type: text/xml');
echo $rss_content;

Since I intended on plugging this into Firefox live feeds, I gave the cache file a lifetime of 60 minutes to avoid bombarding the trendalicious page. Also I wanted to keep the feed private (need to keep personal bandwidth down as well), so I set up some basic security measures with mod_rewrite, a subdomain…


RewriteCond   %{HTTP_HOST}       !^subdomain
RewriteCond   %{REMOTE_ADDR}  !^xxx\.xxx\.xxx\.
RewriteRule .* -  [F,L]

… and a directive in robots.txt file.

Posted on Apr 06, 2005 at 00:53:39. [Comments for Trendalicious- 0]

We know where you are

This post does not relate to any other topics

Via Richard Rutter (aka Clagnut) my weblog is now geotagged. Richard has also provided a couple of useful bookmarklets to extract the longitude and latitude and feed them to Multimap. A nice feature, although a little alarming that that red dot is sitting directly over my head. Go aerial and those scenes from Enemy of the State spring to mind! One for the slighly paranoid and conspracy theorists…. Zoom out to 1:50000 and the reason I am always late for the tides on the River Severn are explained ;).

I decided to add a very little tweak to the Show Map boomarklet to allow the scale to be entered and to open the result in a new tab/window. Just drag this Show Map bookmarklet to your toolbar. Or click away now to run the bookmarklet against the geotags in my metadata.

The Nearby Blogs bookmarklet also on Clagnut is worth checking out too. The Forest of Dean appears to be quite a lonely place when it comes to blogging - where are you all!?

Posted on Jan 29, 2005 at 15:41:04. [Comments for We know where you are- 0]