I’ve decided to make a post to update the world on my life. Year 10 is over now, I took some painful and difficult exams at the end of the year, I’ve done work experience (which was good) and the summer holidays are in full swing. I’m going back to one of my work experience placements next week for some more work and some money, and then after that I am heading off to Italy for 10 days in Lake Como. I’m in the middle of my Geography coursework, I need to redo my IT as my USB stick broke and I am trying to learn Python and Ruby on Rails. So basically, I’m busy. Hopefully I’ll find some time to blog again soon!

– Tim

As some of you will know, last night George Miller and I went to Apple Store in Regent Street, London for an “iTunes Live in London” gig with Duffy. If you’ve been on the web and watching the news, you will have seen the hype surrounding this newcomer solo songstress. Her first single, Rockferry has been and gone, and her latest single, Mercy, is currently number one on the iTunes Music Store. Her album, entitled “Rockferry” is due to be release on 3rd March. But the question is, is she as good as she is said to be?

We arrived early, and watched some off the setting up and some of the Mac talks at the Apple Store, before heading outside to queue. We met two very nice ladies, who keps us sane in the FREEZING COLD of the queue. At about 9:20pm, we were thankfully let into the store. As we entered, we were handed pass cards with a code for 10 free songs on iTunes on the back.

We got in, and after a talk from an employee, Duffy walked onstage amidst much fanfare. She seemed very quiet - a huge contrast from her voice. She went into Rockferry, which was done perfectly as you’d expect. Next she moved to another song called “Warwick Avenue”. After a few more songs, she finished with her latest track, Mercy, which was amazing. I think the highlight was probably “Stepping Stone” - not just the voice was brilliant, but the emotion was there too.

Overall, I think it was a very good gig. One thing I noticed is that she is in fact better live than on a recording - a rare feat for artists as their vocals are touched up digitally.

She shows one true mark of an amazing artist - she sounds better live than she does recorded. I’ve got both singles, and I plan to get the album. Last night she sounded better than those recording.

Technorati Tags: apple, apple store, duffy, gig, itunes, live from london, london, regent street

I found this on Digg this afternoon, and I just had to post it. It’s a very simple, but also difficult flash game where you play with the help of yourself. At the beginning, you get 10 lives, and then you have to try to use your lives. When you get the next life, the actions of the previous lives happen before your eyes. For example, there is one level where there is a box that has to be clicked 100 times to open the next staircase. It’s impossible to do alone, but with the combined efforts of all of your previous turns, you can nail it. It’s hard to explain really, just give it a go. Look down in the comments for a mirror if the original site is down.

Digg - [GAME] Cursor*10 - Play a flash game with yourself.

I’ve created this concept for the logo using a template seeing as I’m not exactly artistically minded. What do you guys think?

Technorati Tags: concept, design, logo, LOLZ, social network

Apparently, Lauren Cooper aka Catherine Tate can spit lyrics, although all her friends doubt this. She says she’s hot like a Ginster’s (pie) straight out the pan! After all the doubting, a hilarious rap ensues. Funny stuff, sad that Lauren has been killed off.

This video is actually not embeddable, but thanks to the guys at Techno-tips, I know how to embed any YouTube video!

Technorati Tags: aks, bbc, catherine tate, comedy, ginsters, lauren cooper

One part of the project of this new website was to get some SEO done and in the process to try to boost myself in the search rankings for keywords related to me.

Let’s start with my old top keyword, “tim rogers”. On Google, I seem to have held my original place in the index, which is nice to see. It has been indexed as the page title and description has been updated. On Yahoo for the keyword, I am on the first page - however, this hasn’t been indexed yet.

My biggest success is “web development in Essex”. When I started the site less than a week ago, I would not have even appeared in the rankings for the keyword. As you can see, now I am second for the phrase, which is pretty amazing!

I can’t find myself for the other two keywords, so I’m gonna have to work on them unfortunately. Anyway, onwards and upwards!

So - today I had another one of my ideas. How about making use of my favourite domain, LOLZ.co.uk? Sure, I’ll have to get new hosting as the current one is crap (it’s down SO much and it’s very slow), but it’d be nice to have my own social networking site.

I was thinking about what it could have in it on the way back from George’s house this afternoon. I need a defining feature, although I haven’t quite come up with it. I want it to be like the other sites, but also different. To be honest, it’s not gonna be hard to better than MySpace in anything, other than users. MySpace is really bad and it errors so much it’s a joke. It’ll be nigh impossible to get anything like the number of members MySpace has though. Here are some of my feature ideas:

1. Personal Subdomain

I always get annoyed by the fact that for some bizarre reason, Facebook don’t give you a profile page that can be accessed through a URL. It’s all well and good searching, but sometimes you want a custom URL. Why can’t I do this? I suppose you can do it in MySpace, but MySpace is otherwise crap. So I’m thinking, better both of them: offer subdomains. Subdomains (i.e. http://timrogers.lolz.co.uk) have the effect of making it seems more personal than just a different directory (http://www.lolz.co.uk/timrogers). I don’t know why - to me at least it seems a lot more personal and customized. For this reason, I intend to allow each user 1 subdomain. Using MOD_rewrite, you can make the subdomain redirect to the user’s profile page.

2. Feeds and API

One thing that really most of the social networks lack is any proper API. Facebook has good developer tools for it’s applications, but if you want to manage or access your profile remotely, you’re pretty stuck. In LOLZ, I want to make the accessibility on two levels.

Firstly, I want to create an API for developers. A developer should be able to edit a users status (we’ll come onto that later), chat their profile data, extend the profile with new widgets and much more. This could range from a fully fledged profile manager to just a simple PHP script to change your status from a mobile phone’s Internet connection. For example, a developer might want to use an application to get Now Playing data from iTunes or WMP, and then send it to LOLZ and place it in the users profile. Of course, for a system like this, you’d have to have a good security system or people be able to mess around with other people’s profiles. With a good API key system or something similar, this can be achieved.

Secondly, I want to have RSS feeds. These are primarily for the user, but it could also allow a developer to incorporate data without knowing the API. Some possible themes could be latest activity, newest signups in a group, 10 most recent statuses for a user or a status change feed for your whole network. These would have simple URL’s such as http://feeds.lolz.co.uk/10status/TimRogers. This would allow people to monitor the site from within other things. For example, you could add the status feed to Google Reader so you can see what your friends are up to.

3. Anonymous Me

This is just a possible name for my smoking gun feature. Basically, users can make a comment about another user. The person cannot delete these comments - it’s a truthful thing, and the comments are all anonymous. However, the person can report the comment if it truly is offensive, in which case it will be removed and the poster will be revealed. The whole reveal aspect is designed to self-moderate: people aren’t gonna want to be exposed as bad mouthing people.

This really could make things interesting if implemented well. Again, this could be part of the API - you could get a random comment about the person.

4. Groups

Each user has the right to make groups. You could make groups for anything, from a fan club to people who like table tennis. Groups have their own shoutbox, RSS feeds and everything else. Each group can have it’s own Member Icon. These are displayed in an widget on user’s profile pages along with the group name. There can be totally customisable group permissions, so the group owner can control exactly who can do what.

5. Friend Match

Using some database jiggery-pokery, there will be a Friend Finder that will search for friends based on profile information. Unlike Facebook, the emphasis of the community is communicate with people you know already - it’s to find new friends! When you sign up, it will give you the option whether to be included in Friend Finder. This allows you to decide whether you want to be open to friendship or just stay with your real friends. If you select to be included, an additional form appears with the ability to input you information including rating yourself for things, tagging yourself and adding your hobbies. When someone uses Friend Finder, it will look at their data, and then match it with other people’s. Depending on the number of matches, you will be ranked in compatibility from “Abysmal” to “Possible Best Friends”. If you talk to someone and it turns out the ranking wasn’t quite right, you can report this. This will allow for the technology to be refined.

6. Tagging

Tagging is very web 2.0. I believe that if implemented properly, it can really improve a site. Particularly for the Friend Match system, it can allow for more accurate matching as it is totally open. Apart from Friend Match, you could also allow for plain searching tags and viewing lists of people with a particular tag. Once again, a good URL structure will help to make tagging useful, easy and indexable by Google. Tags will be formatted as http://tags.lolz.co.uk/tagname. Google likes the use of mod_rewrite as opposed to all the tags.php?tag=tagname.

7. Fluid User Interface

Using some of my beloved Script.aculo.us, I’ll be able to make the user interface nice and fluid and very interactive. For example, you can drag widgets around your page, and then when you click “Apply Changes”, and AJAX request will be sent with all the new coordinates and then it can be saved to the DB for future reference. Temporary information such as friend requests can appear in small boxes (such as on George’s site), which can be hidden. Unlike George’s site, this hiding will be more permanent. Any errors or other notifications will be shown in these standardly sized boxes. Messages (such as friend requests and new “Anonymous Me” submissions) will be displayed in green boxes with a “tick” Silk icon and similarly errors will be displayed in a red box with an exclamation mark icon from the same set. The Silk icons will be used throughout for continuity. It would also be nice to have some visualisations such as the ones Digg use in Digg Labs - although these of course would be opt in.

So, that’s it for my overview of possible features of the upcoming LOLZ social network. As you can see from all the features, this is by no means going to be a quick job. I will start as soon as possible, and once I have planned my design and infrastructure. I would hope to get some sort of beta out relatively soon.

If you’re a web developer and you don’t know about Script.aculo.us, you’re a fool and you should be ashamed of yourself. I want to tell you what Script.aculo.us can do, but it’s hard to know where to start really. It’s an extension to the powerful Javascript library Prototype, which allows you to easily make your web pages more dynamic. Nowadays people are always raving about jQuery and it’s various counterparts, but I still like good old Script.aculo.us. I admit I haven’t really used it on a large scale, but I’ve used it for a few projects - namely ajaxMAIL (my now finished emailer script), George Miller’s new site and the old version of this site. (it’s on Google cache so it won’t last long).

If you look on George’s site, you’ll see a fraction of what it can do. Try dragging the boxes around. That’s not normal for a web page, and I did that with very little Script.aculo.us work - in fact a measly 1 line! Additionally, you can close most of the boxes - that’s done with another line of (very easy to understand) code. Finally, have you noticed how the pages load without the browser physically moving across pages - that’s using the AJAX module of Scriptaculous.

Beyond this, there’s plenty more you can do. Submit forms. Create slideshows without using the evil plugin-based Flash. Extend the drag and drop functionality so you can drop things too. Make more dynamic forms. It’s endless with the power of Scriptaculous and Prototype. If you’re at all into web development, please give it a try!

script.aculo.us - web 2.0 javascript

I just saw this on Digg and found it rather funny. An American shop called Club Libby Lu ran an essay competition where the price was four tickets to the totally sold out concert of tween rolemodel Hannah Montana. The girl in question wrote an essay about how her "Dad died in Iraq", complete with false details galore. On the other hand, it isn’t really lying - as soon as the girl was asked whether it was true, she said that it wasn’t.

I’m not sure what to make of this to tell the truth. On one hand, it was never said in the rules of the competition that you couldn’t make your story up. She hasn’t actually done anything that bad, although it could be said that her parents must have told her to do this - not many six-year olds could get a scheme like this going. On the other hand, it could be very unfair, as someone with a true story of the same magnitude could have been deprived of the tickets.

Girl loses Hannah Montana tickets for lying - USATODAY.com

Just needed to blog this! It’s nice to see that for a change the labels are thinking a little bit more and thinking more about user experience than there own pockets. This can only be good - I mean, once someone starts, everyone has to follow really to stay competitive. Personally, I am a strong advocate of MP3, as it is open and plays on virtually anything. I know some people will hate me for not loving OGG, but you can’t beat the compatibility of MP3.

BBC NEWS | Business | Warner agrees to use MP3 format