Dan Hilton

As the title says, I’m back being a digital agency technology peep, for MediaClash a consumer publishing and digital agency that also produces a series of city based titles such as Bath Life, Clifton life, etc. I’m really enjoying it - lots to do, including some improvement of development processes, building a new internal knowledge base and getting an internal Mario Kart competition up an running.
In other news I came second in a Channel 4 competition to build a web mash-up based on their RSS feeds for Film 4, which was cool - pushed my knowledge of jQuery further than ever before (good!). Starting to get back in playing with Python - code looks so much cleaner then with PHP. PHP 6 is starting to look a bit Java-like with it’s namespaces and such. Not that that is necessarily a bad thing but I do wonder about trying to be something it’s not. Surely by now everyone understands that large internet applications can be built in PHP, Python, ASP.NET, erlang, etc and that it’s more down to the abstract engineering rather than the particular language. Some languages are easier than others to be fair (Cobol on Coals?) but the theories and algorithms are the same.

I also got engaged to Laura recently. We’re going to get married next August. Very exciting but feel I’m part of something more complex than the d-day landings!

With the eponymous growth of so called “micro”-blogging services like twitter and Jaiku, so everything these days on the web is either getting smaller or bigger. Recently I had to build a site for my girlfriend, a little site that showcased her work as freelance writer and took a feed from her blog. Now I could have built about five html pages, a mini cms using smarty or some other framework. Yet they all seemed overkill for what is basically brochureware with an emphasis on the design rather than anything else.

So I reached for my jquery and set to work building a single page picosite. I used a tabs plugin to create an array of divs that served as the different aspects of the site. I also used the ajax built into jquery to pull a locally cached version of her last blog entry. I could have used a php include but thought it would be interesting to use the ajax.

I started with a photoshop mock-up, taking inspiration from Laura’s many notepads and subbing books she still has from Uni. Working with the tabs made this a natural choice. Having assembled the graphical assets and worked out my basic structure, I started coding the html and css. I mixed a google analytics account so she can see who is viewing her site and also did some basic seo work on making sure the main search engines knew of her new site.

In all I’m quietly pleased with the site, to see for yourself click here: http://www.laurabarnhouse.com/

Having worked at the Welsh Assembly and had to regularly use their website for preparing briefing, I was interested to see the new site

up and live. However, my shock was at the past record of proceedings. Rather than keeping the (bad) html versions, they distilled all the original word docs into pdfs, a inaccessible format (according to Adobe own checker which I checked them with).

Now normally I wouldn’t be as fussed - you see design choices like this across the web, mainly made to save money and to lower scope. I understand that and I also understand that re-formating eight years of proceedings is no fun. However, having endeavoured to help MySociety, I wanted to add the Welsh Assembly to theyworkforyou.com. Now I have to scrap a lot of the code and start again.

Adding support for the Welsh Assembly record of proceedings would mean that all those AM’s who are blogging crazy, could have widgets displaying their last speeches and questions from the Senedd. You could also have an alerts system, like Google alerts and get an email when a particular topic came up. Beats paying crazy money for ‘monitoring’ from lobby firms.

Needless to say I am making headway, having got a list of the current AM’s in an xml format like the house of commons and am working towards integrating the old AM’s.