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!

ORG - Sesisson one

MP’s need people to talk to.

electronic voting - It’s a bad idea, is it?

Observed e-voting at the last election, v. v. bad.

Lot’s of errors, xss errors in interface, sloppy webservers.

DRM laws passed to ensure that anything with DRM has to say it on he outside.

Internet regulation of YouTube going before commons select commitee. Bad idea to regulate what you can and can’t upload.

ID cards - card not the really bad thing, the database behind it is.

Good talk, I think I’ll try and join the ORG as it fights for lots of things I agree with.

Tags: Barcamplondon3, BarcampLondon, Barcamp

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/